 Visitor Reviews |
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Reader supplied reviews for Slax
Average rating
6.6 from 12 review(s)
Version: 12.2.0
Rating: 7
Date: 2025-11-22
Votes: 0
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The Debian version of Slax used to be one of my favorite distros. In my opinion it was one of the easiest distos to make a live usb with persistence. It was a reasonably compact distro but not lacking in features like Tinycore. My only real complaint is I don't think its wise to auto-login to root and personally would rather it not auto-mount usbs and cds, although it's easy enough to umount something when needed. One of the reason's I liked it so much is it was incredibly fast to install (no questions asked) or the option to run a cd entirely in RAM. It is still usable and can be upgraded, despite the last update being from 2 years ago, although it's not the same as it used to be when it was maintained, since the cd used to be up to date, so you could just install what you wanted without too manyu updates. I look forward to the next version, i f there will be one.
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Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2025-11-05
Votes: 0
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The website to download it already kicks off with a poor impression, attempting to get your email address (but there is a tiny link to skip that).
I was always a fan of the aesthetic of this distro but after having finally using it, I'm failing to see the point of it.
There are much more well-featured and similar size portable distros out there, this one really doesn't do a whole lot of anything right out of the box, nor is it extensible in any way really either. They mention modules yet there's no way to prebuild an image that has these present? And why would you manually try to get more modules afterwards, every time?
Very out of date too, no recent blog updates in a year either but it looks like the only maintainer has their time occupied by another child.
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Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2025-09-14
Votes: 2
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so far good ! i downloaded the slackware version a while back [probably used etcher or some such to make it bootable] but gave up in favor of Debian. I have always had problems getting persistence to work on either debian or ubuntu and with this distribution it attempts a better method, /usr/bin/savechanges can be run at anytime, but when i first booted i followed their documentation more precisely adding to boot command line perchsize=16G (half of my usb), and perchdir=resume.
Extracting the files from the archive, and running their bootinst.sh [installing syslinux] rather than using some tool to create the bootable usb from an iso is unusual but works !. They provide the program savechanges as well which seems to work better than expecting shutdown to save the changes [which are probably in one or several of the loop files].
here is a list of packages i installed to get the wifi networks to appear in the starup->network Manager (right clicking on desktop) [which is fluxbox].
4 install iw 2025-09-14 02:55:37 UTC 1 root (0)
5 install wireless-regdb 2025-09-14 02:56:00 UTC 1 root (0)
6 install network-manager 2025-09-14 03:02:18 UTC 14 root (0)
7 install network-manager-gnome 2025-09-14 03:08:11 UTC 11 root (0)
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Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2025-06-04
Votes: 1
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I wanted a small distro to practise kernel compilation on without risking problems to my primary os. Quick to download and easy to install slax (Slackware based) is ideal. Startup and shutdown are quick enough and there was a lot of that every time I built a non working kernel. I am not sure of the " no documentation" comment. The web site has plenty, and the user group is very helpful. Unfortunately, there is a lot of spam on the discord and Google groups, but the answers are there with some searching. In fact, I managed to build a new working kernel for slax and upgrade from 6.1 to 6.6 .
My next project is to attempt a complete rebuild of slax using the live kit scripts.
All in all, I have been very impressed with slax, it has ticked all the boxes for this project.
The reason I have given it 9 not 10 is because cut and paste in a terminal is not available. Control shift C to cut and control shift insert to paste. Not a showstopper.
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Version: 15.0.1
Rating: 4
Date: 2023-06-26
Votes: 11
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The positive - blazingly fast and light. With Wifi connected and terminal open I was at 290 MB of RAM. I installed Chromium browser launched it and was at 283 MB RAM. While watching a YouTube video it was at 491 MB of RAM. Awesome! The file manager is fast, the Wifi easy to configure - great but...
The creators of the distro clearly do not respect privacy -witness the Chromium browser, that you have to give then an e-mail to get a download link. There is no documentation and if you want to join the forum you eventually need to give them a telephone number. You need a Facebook of Google account to view other ways of getting info. It is just sad. Some of us value privacy.
So in the end a great, fast, light system with no documentation ran by a group that clearly wants to know it users.Makes you wonder of the are buddies with the antiX developers.
: (
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Version: 11.3.0
Rating: 6
Date: 2022-07-12
Votes: 5
|
. removing The Chrome Browser was a Great Choice ( by default, no one Wants the Cloud by default.! )
. Loading by DEB packages, might seem like The Cloud ( and it is ) but "Your The One Telling It To Do So."
I started with version 9.10.0 and Loved It. It was completely experimental and, truly I wish it were Still Available.
. The biggest advantage of SLAX was that IT was Totally "a in memory only Operating System" meaning, should someone deside to send you something that you Never Requested that THAT would be erased when you Shut Down your System.
. . A conversion package builder is about the only thing missing - Everything gets loaded to your slackware via .sb files but there is no-way to create Your Own Unique Software "my_program.sb" option available!
- JW retired A.F.
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Version: 11.3.0
Rating: 1
Date: 2022-04-15
Votes: 1
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This is yet another supposedly portable Linux that does not live up to its claims.
The 'web browser' icon is nothing more than a link for downloading a web browser. And this is where the problems start.
How can one download when there is no internet connection?
WiFi does not work. It's not even recognised.
Mobile Broadband is either not recognised or shown as a false ethernet connection. I tried with 2 different dongles.
In other words, this 'portable' Slax distro works only from a static ethernet connection.
Therefore it is NOT portable.
How is it that a 300MiB 'distro' is little more than a shell with a pretty face?
SliTaz can make a fully functional installable live system that weighs in at under 60MiB. So why is Slax so incapable?
On top of this, the prices demanded to purchase this functionless distro are extortionate.
Where's your head at Tomas?
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Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-12-25
Votes: 21
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The fastest and most responsive distro on my Acer Aspire One 256 with Intel Atom and 1 gb of ram, and I tried a lot of them on this laptop, that hang up even with the newest Puppy (that I like very much). I choose the 64 bit variant, but cannot run Tor Browser anyway. All the other thinks are impressive, you can love this distro, if you have an old machine that freeze frequently. The wifi works very well without interruptions, very useful for listening music from internet radio. I hope that mr. Matejicek will continue this project in the future, debian stretch, on which Slax is based, will expire soon. This distro is really something special: minimalistic, fast and beautifull for my taste. I like the green logo before the start, it promise a lovely session without problems :)
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Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 6
Date: 2021-06-22
Votes: 0
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Tried to make live usb with slax.iso with dd command, didn't boot (my usb stick was not even detected by the bios) tried to execute bootinst.sh and it opens in a text file. Tried to make bootinst.sh executable for the root user and it tries to umount and do fishy stuff with the root partition you're currently booting from. All that i could get was a blinking underscore line when i try to boot that last till i got bored and poweroff the useless darn thing.
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Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-04-26
Votes: 16
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Simple... Lightweight... Portable... its all what i need...
i used it daily... browsing, jitsi meet, google office...
i can use it for my old pc... :)
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Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-01-29
Votes: 16
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I hadn't run Slax since about ver 5, but a whim made me give 9.11 a look, and I am loving it. Running it from a directory on a hard drive, and it is very responsive on my lower powered 6 yearold laptop (w/ 4g ram).
I manually added it to my existing grub setup, so I can easily multi-boot with any of my other installed distros.
My changes so far (using the perch boot-code in my grub.cfg) have been seamlessly saved except for my changes to fstab (which is a pain if I don't manage to get that worked out). Conky shows that at boot, it consumes about 227m of ram, which is higher than my other distros, but I put that down to the systemd init.
When I get it to my liking, I will check out the included tools to put my updated system into a new iso and add it to my Ventoy USB for portable use.
And Fluxbox. So far it seems like a very usable DM (my main DM driver is Openbox), but I've got a lot more to discover under the hood.
So overall - I think Tomas has delivered a Slax that is quite stable, responsive, and just waiting for folks to flesh it out to their heart's desire. That I really like - I get to choose what I want to run, and don't waste time uninstalling scores of programs that are useless to me - especially for a portable distro. It runs well from USB in addition to running from a HD, giving you the options to run with persistant changes, or to drop to a safe boot at boot time. Will be interesting to see how he handles the Debian 10 changes, that have tripped up most every distro I've run recently in one way or another.
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Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 10
Date: 2021-01-01
Votes: 16
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Extremely good as a portable distro for a linux newbie. The balance between userfriendliness, lightweightness and prettiness makes it stable, fast and easy to use. I personally run it on a 4gb flash drive and I didn't encounter any problems.
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Latest Reviews
Project: Slax
Version: 12.2.0
Rating: 7
Date: 2025-11-22
Votes: 0
|
The Debian version of Slax used to be one of my favorite distros. In my opinion it was one of the easiest distos to make a live usb with persistence. It was a reasonably compact distro but not lacking in features like Tinycore. My only real complaint is I don't think its wise to auto-login to root and personally would rather it not auto-mount usbs and cds, although it's easy enough to umount something when needed. One of the reason's I liked it so much is it was incredibly fast to install (no questions asked) or the option to run a cd entirely in RAM. It is still usable and can be upgraded, despite the last update being from 2 years ago, although it's not the same as it used to be when it was maintained, since the cd used to be up to date, so you could just install what you wanted without too manyu updates. I look forward to the next version, i f there will be one.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 1
Date: 2025-11-05
Votes: 0
|
The website to download it already kicks off with a poor impression, attempting to get your email address (but there is a tiny link to skip that).
I was always a fan of the aesthetic of this distro but after having finally using it, I'm failing to see the point of it.
There are much more well-featured and similar size portable distros out there, this one really doesn't do a whole lot of anything right out of the box, nor is it extensible in any way really either. They mention modules yet there's no way to prebuild an image that has these present? And why would you manually try to get more modules afterwards, every time?
Very out of date too, no recent blog updates in a year either but it looks like the only maintainer has their time occupied by another child.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 8
Date: 2025-09-14
Votes: 2
|
so far good ! i downloaded the slackware version a while back [probably used etcher or some such to make it bootable] but gave up in favor of Debian. I have always had problems getting persistence to work on either debian or ubuntu and with this distribution it attempts a better method, /usr/bin/savechanges can be run at anytime, but when i first booted i followed their documentation more precisely adding to boot command line perchsize=16G (half of my usb), and perchdir=resume.
Extracting the files from the archive, and running their bootinst.sh [installing syslinux] rather than using some tool to create the bootable usb from an iso is unusual but works !. They provide the program savechanges as well which seems to work better than expecting shutdown to save the changes [which are probably in one or several of the loop files].
here is a list of packages i installed to get the wifi networks to appear in the starup->network Manager (right clicking on desktop) [which is fluxbox].
4 install iw 2025-09-14 02:55:37 UTC 1 root (0)
5 install wireless-regdb 2025-09-14 02:56:00 UTC 1 root (0)
6 install network-manager 2025-09-14 03:02:18 UTC 14 root (0)
7 install network-manager-gnome 2025-09-14 03:08:11 UTC 11 root (0)
|
Project: Slax
Version: 15.0.4
Rating: 9
Date: 2025-06-04
Votes: 1
|
I wanted a small distro to practise kernel compilation on without risking problems to my primary os. Quick to download and easy to install slax (Slackware based) is ideal. Startup and shutdown are quick enough and there was a lot of that every time I built a non working kernel. I am not sure of the " no documentation" comment. The web site has plenty, and the user group is very helpful. Unfortunately, there is a lot of spam on the discord and Google groups, but the answers are there with some searching. In fact, I managed to build a new working kernel for slax and upgrade from 6.1 to 6.6 .
My next project is to attempt a complete rebuild of slax using the live kit scripts.
All in all, I have been very impressed with slax, it has ticked all the boxes for this project.
The reason I have given it 9 not 10 is because cut and paste in a terminal is not available. Control shift C to cut and control shift insert to paste. Not a showstopper.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 15.0.1
Rating: 4
Date: 2023-06-26
Votes: 11
|
The positive - blazingly fast and light. With Wifi connected and terminal open I was at 290 MB of RAM. I installed Chromium browser launched it and was at 283 MB RAM. While watching a YouTube video it was at 491 MB of RAM. Awesome! The file manager is fast, the Wifi easy to configure - great but...
The creators of the distro clearly do not respect privacy -witness the Chromium browser, that you have to give then an e-mail to get a download link. There is no documentation and if you want to join the forum you eventually need to give them a telephone number. You need a Facebook of Google account to view other ways of getting info. It is just sad. Some of us value privacy.
So in the end a great, fast, light system with no documentation ran by a group that clearly wants to know it users.Makes you wonder of the are buddies with the antiX developers.
: (
|
Project: Slax
Version: 11.3.0
Rating: 6
Date: 2022-07-12
Votes: 5
|
. removing The Chrome Browser was a Great Choice ( by default, no one Wants the Cloud by default.! )
. Loading by DEB packages, might seem like The Cloud ( and it is ) but "Your The One Telling It To Do So."
I started with version 9.10.0 and Loved It. It was completely experimental and, truly I wish it were Still Available.
. The biggest advantage of SLAX was that IT was Totally "a in memory only Operating System" meaning, should someone deside to send you something that you Never Requested that THAT would be erased when you Shut Down your System.
. . A conversion package builder is about the only thing missing - Everything gets loaded to your slackware via .sb files but there is no-way to create Your Own Unique Software "my_program.sb" option available!
- JW retired A.F.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 11.3.0
Rating: 1
Date: 2022-04-15
Votes: 1
|
This is yet another supposedly portable Linux that does not live up to its claims.
The 'web browser' icon is nothing more than a link for downloading a web browser. And this is where the problems start.
How can one download when there is no internet connection?
WiFi does not work. It's not even recognised.
Mobile Broadband is either not recognised or shown as a false ethernet connection. I tried with 2 different dongles.
In other words, this 'portable' Slax distro works only from a static ethernet connection.
Therefore it is NOT portable.
How is it that a 300MiB 'distro' is little more than a shell with a pretty face?
SliTaz can make a fully functional installable live system that weighs in at under 60MiB. So why is Slax so incapable?
On top of this, the prices demanded to purchase this functionless distro are extortionate.
Where's your head at Tomas?
|
Project: Slax
Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-12-25
Votes: 21
|
The fastest and most responsive distro on my Acer Aspire One 256 with Intel Atom and 1 gb of ram, and I tried a lot of them on this laptop, that hang up even with the newest Puppy (that I like very much). I choose the 64 bit variant, but cannot run Tor Browser anyway. All the other thinks are impressive, you can love this distro, if you have an old machine that freeze frequently. The wifi works very well without interruptions, very useful for listening music from internet radio. I hope that mr. Matejicek will continue this project in the future, debian stretch, on which Slax is based, will expire soon. This distro is really something special: minimalistic, fast and beautifull for my taste. I like the green logo before the start, it promise a lovely session without problems :)
|
Project: Slax
Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 6
Date: 2021-06-22
Votes: 0
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Tried to make live usb with slax.iso with dd command, didn't boot (my usb stick was not even detected by the bios) tried to execute bootinst.sh and it opens in a text file. Tried to make bootinst.sh executable for the root user and it tries to umount and do fishy stuff with the root partition you're currently booting from. All that i could get was a blinking underscore line when i try to boot that last till i got bored and poweroff the useless darn thing.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-04-26
Votes: 16
|
Simple... Lightweight... Portable... its all what i need...
i used it daily... browsing, jitsi meet, google office...
i can use it for my old pc... :)
|
Project: Slax
Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 9
Date: 2021-01-29
Votes: 16
|
I hadn't run Slax since about ver 5, but a whim made me give 9.11 a look, and I am loving it. Running it from a directory on a hard drive, and it is very responsive on my lower powered 6 yearold laptop (w/ 4g ram).
I manually added it to my existing grub setup, so I can easily multi-boot with any of my other installed distros.
My changes so far (using the perch boot-code in my grub.cfg) have been seamlessly saved except for my changes to fstab (which is a pain if I don't manage to get that worked out). Conky shows that at boot, it consumes about 227m of ram, which is higher than my other distros, but I put that down to the systemd init.
When I get it to my liking, I will check out the included tools to put my updated system into a new iso and add it to my Ventoy USB for portable use.
And Fluxbox. So far it seems like a very usable DM (my main DM driver is Openbox), but I've got a lot more to discover under the hood.
So overall - I think Tomas has delivered a Slax that is quite stable, responsive, and just waiting for folks to flesh it out to their heart's desire. That I really like - I get to choose what I want to run, and don't waste time uninstalling scores of programs that are useless to me - especially for a portable distro. It runs well from USB in addition to running from a HD, giving you the options to run with persistant changes, or to drop to a safe boot at boot time. Will be interesting to see how he handles the Debian 10 changes, that have tripped up most every distro I've run recently in one way or another.
|
Project: Slax
Version: 9.11.0
Rating: 10
Date: 2021-01-01
Votes: 16
|
Extremely good as a portable distro for a linux newbie. The balance between userfriendliness, lightweightness and prettiness makes it stable, fast and easy to use. I personally run it on a 4gb flash drive and I didn't encounter any problems.
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