A young broke me once spent 3 weeks after school each day in 1994 downloading slackware floppy images from my Dad's AOL account via modem so I could try it on my 386.
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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With dial-up that probably cost more than buying Slackware.
I had a very similar memory. I had an IBM Aptiva 386SX with Windows 3.1 on it. I wanted to try this new thing called Linux and remember wiping everything without know what I was doing.
loved the 90βs slackware era βoops i forgot to burn this with network drivers.. and it was my only machine.β
do u remember when they warned you if you got the dot pitch setting wrong for your CRT it could destroy it? I was like wtf?
Are you sure it was dot pitch and not dot clock?
Dot pitch on a crt might make the image look bad (trying to draw onto the shadow mask) but I doubt it would damage it.
Setting an invalid dot clock could damage some crts. But most of the modern (read from mid 90s on) would just go to the power save mode when they got a clock they couldn't use. The warning did still remain on the xfree86 configuration guides though.
Showing my age perhaps.
That was a plot point in Cryptonomicon. And yeah the XFree86 docs mentioned it too...
I had to hoof it to a friends house with floppies a few times after breaking my system. Good times.
Is Steam off Flathub that complicated on Slackware?
- Download Slackbuild helper (similar to yay for the Arch User Repository)
- Install it
- Read dependency info for Flatpak Slackbuild (you can also do
sqg -afor the entire repository) - Install it
- Add Flathub repo
- Install Steam Flatpak
It's not that complicated.
Services.steam.enable = true;
Works easily on Nixos. It's true that I haven't yet gotten a game to PLAY on Nixos other than Minecraft, but that's beside the point.
You forgot
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfreePredicate = pkg: builtins.elem (lib.getName pkg) [
"steam"
"steam-original"
"steam-unwrapped"
"steam-run"
];
and here I thought running Slackware was a waste of time...
I'm not using unfreePredicate so I didn't think that was necessary.
Maybe I should try it anyway. Games start but even the menus are so slow that I never get to actual play.
You can also use this lil guy, but by default you can't install unfree software (not sure if that is different if you use flakes):
nixpkgs.config.allowUnfree = true;
Plesse, no flatpak TwT
I tried the Slackbuilds version of Steam first, but it didn't launch Skyrim, so my PC was completely useless.
Here is how I install Steam on Debian:
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl
curl -s http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/archive/stable/steam.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg > /dev/null
echo 'deb [arch=amd64,i386 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/steam.gpg] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/ stable steam' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/steam.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install steam -y
Edit: Added a fancy block.
Most of that is setting up third-party apt repos, which I don't believe is necessary. Steam's in the Debian trixie repo.
https://packages.debian.org/stable/steam
EDIT: I'd guess that the following would probably work on a Debian trixie system:
If you have your system set up for only 64-bit packages, you'd need this at some point prior to the install, to let your system use 32-bit packages, since Steam's only available as a 32-bit binary:
$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
I think that deciding whether to use both 64-bit and 32-bit packages or not is an option in the Debian installer, but I might be misremembering.
You can update your list of packages at this point, upgrade, all that, but that goes for any install operation; there's nothing specific to Steam there. If you've just added 32-bit packages for the first time above, then you probably do want to update the list of packages, since your system won't have a list of 32-bit packages yet.
$ sudo apt update
But then it's just like any other installation of software.
$ sudo apt install steam
That actually just contains, as I recall, the Steam installer
enough to pull down and install the current Steam environment for a given user, which happens next time you run the Steam binary.
$ steam
EDIT2: I guess that assumes that you do have "contrib" enabled on the Debian repo, and I don't know whether that's enabled by default by the Debian installer or whether it's an option during install or what. I do distinctly remember one point in time when "non-free-firmware" was not enabled by default, because I always had to turn it on to get support for , but I don't know whether contrib is always enabled or not. I have main, contrib, non-free, and non-free-firmware enabled. From /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources:
Types: deb deb-src
URIs: http://mirror.i3d.net/debian/
Suites: trixie
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpgUsing the official Valve repository is my preferred method because it provides a direct line to the developers, ensuring you get the latest GPG keys and installer updates immediately without waiting for them to make their way through the Debian maintainers. While the Debian repo is convenient, it requires you to enable contrib and non-free components globally across your entire system. The method I suggested adds Steam as a specific source without cluttering your main package list with other non-free software. This also makes the installation more consistent across different versions of Debian. Whether you are on Stable or Testing, you are not at the mercy of Debianβs specific package transitions or library freezes, which can occasionally break the Steam bootstrap process in the community-maintained version. I do not believe either way is better, just different for different types of users.
sudo sboinstall steam
I tried installing it natively, but that requires activating multilib first, and even then, some of my games didn't launch, complaining about missing stuff. Flatpak is just all around less hassle for Steam, but Steam is also the only thing I use it for.
some of my games didn't launch, complaining about missing stuff.
I don't know Slackware, but I know on arch there's the standard steam runtime version, and then there's the unofficial steam-native-runtime, which uses system packages instead of steam's own bundled runtime. And if we're talking native Linux games, which is where the problem is, they tend to not work with steam's runtime, presumably because they weren't properly built to target it, and need to be launched with the native runtime (or switch to running the windows version with proton...)
Never tried Flatpak... I usually avoid Flatpak altogether. Multilib is usually just three commands from here http://www.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ Then I just install my nvidia driver manually using the .run file after a kernel update before I startx (I've done it this way since 2002, never had issues).
Aside from that, I've never once had problems with games on Steam, or with Steam itself.
Flatpak is the demiurge.
Average Linux user: "we could just use the Windows totally-not-an-emulator!".
(They're this close to getting the point while saying it.)
I'm far away. What is the point?