Slackel 7.4

Before he couldn’t work with Arch, he couldn’t work with Slackware, which is why Mayank Sharma jumps at everything that mentions the venerable distro.

- Mayank Sharma

Slackel is one of those few one-man distros that continues to be powered solely by the love and affection of its dedicated community of users. The distro’s Greek developer has just put out version 7.4, six months after the previous release.

Slackel has multiple editions, each with a different desktop environment. However, as usual the first one out of the gate is the Openbox edition, with others to follow in due time. The distro mixes the best of both Slackware and Salix to create an interesting offering. For starters, Slackel is fully compatible with the repositories of both upstream distros, which gives it a far wider choice of programs than you’ll find in pure Slackware.

Second, Slackel is based on Slackware’s development branch (-current), rather than its stable release, which was last released back in 2016. Thanks to this, Slackel 7.4 includes the latest Linux kernel 5.10.4 LTS kernel along with various other recent updates. One of the highlights of this release is its support for 64-bit UEFI systems. Slackel is one of the few projects that still produces both 64- and 32-bit ISO images. Starting with this release, you can now use the 64-bit images to boot on EFI-equipped machines.