I realized the other day that I have tried pretty much every Linux distro but Slackware. I understand that it lacks automated package management. That sounds like a pain in the neck. How does that work, anyway? When you want to install something or upgrade your system, do you download each package in a web browser or is there a command line tool of some sort?
I understand the appeal of minimal distros (I use Arch currently) but I don’t think I could live without pacman/apt/portage or something like that.
There’s slackpkg which will update the packages on the system, but adding to the (extensive) installed software normally means compiling from source code. Slackbuilds.org has a command line tool to automate that a bit, sbopkg. There’s also slapt-get, which I believe comes from Salix, a Slackware derivative but completely compatible.
You’d have to install and configure slapt-get, though, which I’ve never done. Sbopkg expects you to manually resolve dependencies and also compiles from source (except with a few packages, like flashplugin and libreoffice), so slow. slackpkg only upgrades the standard packages, and installs a few others like wicd, bash-completion and recordmydesktop. You can always make your own packages and use installpkg or upgradepkg.