Slackware 15.0 On Approach With An Early Alpha Build Available

While Slackware carries the badge of being the oldest still maintained Linux distribution, it doesn't see new releases too often and doesn't carry the popularity it once did. In any case, Slackware 15.0 is being prepared as the next release.

Slackware 14.0 debuted all the way back in 2012 while the current point release as Slackware 14.2 came out in mid-2016. Thus it's long overdue for seeing a new major release, which fortunately is on the way.

Following a mass package rebuild, the latest build is considered to be effectively Slackware 15.0 "Alpha1" with coming up short of calling it a beta.

The announcement on Slackware.com explains:

Here we go again... upgraded to glibc-2.33 and one last mass rebuild for Slackware 15.0. The only packages upgraded in this batch are glibc and the kernels - everything else is just a rebuild against the new glibc. Not rebuilt in this batch: devs (best to just leave this alone), glibc-zoneinfo, kernel-firmware, rust, linux-faqs, linux-howtos, aspell-en, mozilla-firefox, mozilla-thunderbird, and seamonkey. There's a new Rust compiler but Firefox and Thunderbird will need to be patched to use it, so we'll hold off on those until they're ready for the new Rust either with patches or new upstream releases. Until we have that and a few more scheduled upgrades I'm not quite ready to call this beta yet, but you can call it 15.0-alpha1. :-)

Thus this year we will hopefully see Slackware 15.0 stable along the likes of Debian 11, Ubuntu 21.04/21.10, Fedora 34/35, and more. It's good to see Slackware still moving forward in 2021.