Created in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distro that's still actively maintained. And more than three decades later... there's a [1]new release ! (And there's also a [2]Slackware Live Edition that can run from a DVD or USB stick...) .

Slackware's latest version was released way back in 2016, [3]notes the blog It's FOSS :

> The major highlight of Slackware 15 is the addition of the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. This is a big jump from Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS that we noticed in the beta release. Interestingly, the Slackware team tested hundreds of Linux Kernel versions before settling on Linux Kernel 5.15.19. The release note mentions... "We finally ended up on kernel version 5.15.19 after Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed that it would get long-term support until at least October 2023 (and quite probably for longer than that)."

>

> In case you are curious, Linux Kernel 5.15 brings in updates like enhanced NTFS driver support and improvements for Intel/AMD processors and Apple's M1 chip. It also adds initial support for Intel 12th gen processors. Overall, with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, you should get a good hardware compatibility result for the oldest active Linux distro.

[4]Slackware's announcement says "The challenge this time around was to adopt as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern."

> And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted privileged access management (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. We still love Sendmail, but have moved it into the /extra directory and made Postfix the default mail handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired and replaced by the much more featureful Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.

"As usual, the kernel is provided in two flavors, generic and huge," [5]according to the release notes . "The huge kernel contains enough built-in drivers that in most cases an initrd is not needed to boot the system."

If you'd like to support Slackware, there's [6]an official Patreon account . And the release announcement ends with this personal note:

> Sadly, we lost a couple of good friends during this development cycle and this release is dedicated to them. Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness... My old friend Brett Person also passed away in 2020. Without Brett, it's possible that there wouldn't be any Slackware as we know it — he's the one who encouraged me to upload it to FTP back in 1993 and served as Slackware's original beta-tester. He was long considered a co-founder of this project. I knew Brett since the days of the Beggar's Banquet BBS in Fargo back in the 1980's... Gonna miss you too, pal.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [7]rastos1 for sharing thre news.



[1] https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-iso/slackware-15.0-iso/

[2] https://download.liveslak.org/

[3] https://itsfoss.com/news/slackware-15-release/

[4] http://www.slackware.com/announce/15.0.php

[5] http://www.slackware.com/releasenotes/15.0.php

[6] https://www.patreon.com/slackwarelinux

[7] https://www.slashdot.org/~rastos1