Slackware 15.0

He’s no masochist… until there’s a new Slackware release, when Mayank Sharma puts himself through all kinds of pains to relive the good ol’ days.

- Mayank Sharma

IN BRIEF

Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding and had its first release almost three decades back, in 1993. This makes the distro one of the two oldest Linux distros that are still actively maintained, with the other being Debian. They say, “If you want to learn Debian, use Debian. If you want to learn Fedora, use Fedora. But if you want to learn Linux, use Slackware.” This still holds true.

One of the unique aspects that differentiates Slackware from the other distros is its glacial pace. Even as the distro is actively developed behind the scenes, it doesn’t put out releases as often as some of the current crop.

So while most modern distros, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, release every six months or so, Slackware follows the “release when it’s ready” philosophy. No surprise, then, that Slackware 15 is the distro’s first major release in over a decade. In fact, the distro last had a stable dot release back in 2016 (v14.2, in case you’re wondering).

And what were the devs up to in the meantime? According to the release notes of Slackware 15, they tested over 400 different kernel versions before settling on the 5.15 LTS kernel for this release, which will be supported until at least October 2023, and going by recent trends, most probably for quite a while longer.

In addition to the excellent hardware support brought in courtesy of the 5.15 kernel, including preliminary support for Apple’s M1 chip, the distro can now boot on computers with the UEFI firmware. However, it still doesn’t support running under SecureBoot, but the release notes hint that it might be supported in the next release.