Founded in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distribution still actively maintained. And more than three decades later… there is one new edition! (And there is one too Slackware Live Edition which can be run from a DVD or USB stick…).
The latest version of Slackware was released back in 2016, notes the blog It’s FOSS:
The main highlight of Slackware 15 is the addition of the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. This is a big jump from Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS that we noticed in the beta version. Interestingly, the Slackware team tested hundreds of Linux Kernel versions before settling on Linux Kernel 5.15.19. The release note states… “We finally landed on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed it would receive long-term support until at least October 2023 (and very likely longer than that).”
In case you’re curious, Linux Kernel 5.15 brings updates such as improved support for NTFS drivers and improvements for Intel/AMD processors and Apple’s M1 chip. It also adds initial support for Intel 12th generation processors. Overall, with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS you should get a good hardware compatibility result for the oldest active Linux distribution.
Slackware’s announcement says “The challenge this time was to take as many of the good things that are out there without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern.”
And boy, did we have our work cut out for us. We finally adopted privileged access management (PAM) because projects required us to drop support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, which made it much easier to support software that targets that other Init system and brought us up to date with the XDG standards. We’ve added support for PipeWire as an alternative to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Drop Qt4 and move completely to Qt5. Rust and Python 3 introduced. Added many, many new libraries to the system to support all the different additions.
We’ve upgraded to two of the best desktop environments currently available: This also supports running under Wayland or X11. We still love Sendmail, but have moved it to the /extra folder and made Postfix the default email handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired and replaced by the much more functional Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.
“As usual, the kernel comes in two flavors: generic and huge,” according to the release notes. “The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not necessary to boot the system.”
If you want to support Slackware, you can an official Patreon account. And the release announcement ends on this personal note:
Sadly, we’ve lost some good friends during this development cycle and this release is dedicated to them. Erik “alphageek” Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness… My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it’s possible that there would be no Slackware as we know it – he’s the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP in 1993 and served as Slackware’s original beta tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar’s Banquet BBS in Fargo in the 1980s… I’m going to miss you too, buddy.
Thanks to old Slashdot reader found 1 for sharing three news.
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