Slackware 15.0 Released After Many Years In Development

Slackware 14 released back in 2012 and has finally been succeded by Slackware 15.0 as stable! Slackware remains the oldest, still-maintained Linux distribution that has been around since 1993.

Last year test releases of Slackware 15 emerged and proceeded to the release candidates while kicking off February there is now Slackware 15.0 stable at long last.

Given the time since Slackware 14, there are tons of changes to find. Slackware development continues to be led by project founder Patrick Volkerding and he sums up v15.0 as, "We adopted PAM (finally) as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio, and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the system to help support all the various additions. We've upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland or X11."

Patrick also noted improvements with Slackware 15.0 on the distribution construction side and more easily assembling it, "The Slackware pkgtools (package management utilities) saw quite a bit of development as well. File locking was implemented to prevent parallel installs or upgrades from colliding, and the amount of data written to storage minimized in order to avoid extra writes on SSD devices. For the first time ever we have included a "make_world.sh" script that allows automatically rebuilding the entire operating system from source. We also made it a priority throughout the development cycle to ensure that nothing failed to build. All the sources have been tested and found to build properly. Special thanks to nobodino for spearheading this effort."

Downloads and more details on Slackware 15.0 over on Slackware.com.