Slackware Release Announcement:
Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did not see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released - another six weeks (or years) of the development treadmill averted.
It’s always a big deal when the oldest Linux distribution — turns 30 years old this year — has a new release. Especially after six years of development. So, what’s new?
We adopted PAM (finally) […] We switched from ConsoleKit2 to elogind […] 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 […] We’ve upgraded to two of the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16 […] and the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 […] This also supports running under Wayland or X11.
These are some huge changes and yet Slackware remains true to its spirit: mostly command-line based, lightweight, without package manager that handles dependencies. For me though this one seems the most exciting and I definitely will need to give it a spin:
For the first time ever we have included a “make_world.sh” script that allows automatically rebuilding the entire operating system from source.
That is indeed a wonderful addition. It reminds me of building FreeBSD from source or rebuilding world on Gentoo. Very neat.
With all that said, I have a hard time finding use case for this distribution these days. It’s been my very first distro that my whole interest in Linux and, much much later, career was bootstrapped with. But I don’t use Linux on desktop since 2014, on servers at work it’s usually Ubuntu and on side projects it would either be FreeBSD, Gentoo or Debian. I’m not even sure I would want to run Slack on a server but I’m not ruling it out. Guess desktop use case would be the best fit here.
Either way, it’s a great joy to see a new Slackware release 🎉