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Slackware 15.0

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421 pointskdtsh178 comments

Poignant remarks. We're not getting any younger:

"Erik "alphageek" Jan Tromp passed away in 2020 after a long illness. He was a long-time member of the Slackware core team doing a ton of stuff behind the scenes and a master of lesser-known programming languages like Tcl. :-) For a long time he lived closer to me geographically than anyone else on the core team, but unfortunately with an international border between us we never did meet in person. But he was there in chat every day and was a good friend to everyone on the team. He is greatly missed. Sorry I didn't get 15.0 out in time for you to see it...

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 80's. When the Slackware Project moved to Walnut Creek CDROM, Brett was hired as well, and we spent many hours on the road and sitting next to each other representing Slackware at various trade shows. Brett seemed to know all kinds of computer luminaries and was an amazing storyteller, always with his smooth radio voice. Gonna miss you too, pal."

I'm glad that Patrick is still around to continue this. Slackware was my second Linux distro (SLS being the first).

(I also used Yggdrasil, but always ran it from CD and never installed it to a hard drive.)

When was the last release?

15 today. 14.2 was 2016

Ah I see.

Slackware was my first Linux too. I remember making the installation floppy disk set. And then it was my first introduction to running a computer others could remotely control. After learning how to dial up AOL from Linux then join an IRC chat room, I was immediately "pwned" by someone in that chat room who guessed my root password and rm -rf /'d my entire hard drive. I was probably 8 or 9 at the time and cried.

That's horrible. I hope that person is working tech support for Comcast now.

A most excellent curse, I must say.

Or is an Oracle DBA

Why would you curse them with money?

Many would argue that money is the curse of the world, I disagree but see their point.

Same with me. One of my friend's dad's when I young held out the RedHat CD in his left hand and the Slackware CD in his right and asked me to choose.

I chose Slackware and he told me I chose well and that I would be strong.

This reads like a scene from The Office.

it's remarkable how dumb kids are (compared to adults). most people understand intuitively when talking to a child that they are going to be dumb and we need to treat them differently (or have a different standard), but the internet's anonymity shields you quite a bit and it's easy to think you're talking to a really dumb adult when really you're being a horrible person. If that person knew you were an 8 or 9 year old child I would guess they would have praised you for your curiosity, tenacity, etc.

The other person could also have been 8 or 9. In fact, I was doing dumb things to strangers on the internet well into my teenage years.

Yeah, much like the person who seems like a dumb adult might just be an inexperienced kid, the jerk might also just be a child who hasn't learned how to get attention other than by being awful. I got bored with _intentionally_ being an asshole on the internet by the time I was 13, but that was after a few years of it.

In a time where you installed Slackware on a floppy to dial up via AOL I'd say the chance that 2 9 year olds meet online on IRC is negligible.

And I'm saying that as someone who barely missed the 90s on IRC as a teenager. (Although I went online with Linux in 98)

I think more precise definition is naive rather than dumb.

Added: 8-9 y.o. who installs Linux is smart, not dumb in my perception.

I would rather say it's remarkable how dumb many adults are despite their age (compared to kids).

Slackware was actually my second distro. My first one came on CD-ROM :). Bought my first ever CD-ROM drive specifically for the purpose. Yggdrasil Linux. As I recall, that was around 0.98 or 0.99, and the support for networking was a bit rough. But it's been damn near 30 years so my memory is hazy.

Slackware was my first Linux distro. There was someone with a Linux box in my college dorm at the time and I looked at his desktop and awesome custom terminals, and I was hooked. I asked him how to get started and he handed me a case with Walnut Creek Slackware CDs.

I love this story only because you must be me. BitchX wasn't the most secure was it?

Ahh, the old /shitlist days. I miss that splash screen!

Slack was my second distro with the first one being the original Red Hat, but i discovered them on IRC, through the glorious mIRC Simpson, if any other Italian is around, back then ^^

Same story for me. First Red Hat 5 and then Slackware 7.

Well done you for not letting that bad experience put you off.

Did you re-install and continue with Slackware after that?

Slackware 9 was my first Linux. I knew next to nothing about computers at the time but discovered the cheapest way to get one was refurbished office machines with no OS. Another student gave me a CD and then things were difficult. Changed my life.

Slax was my introduction both to Slackware and Linux. I miss those days. My parents don't: I think I wiped their computer a half dozen times messing with things (usually killing the MBR IIRC)

Haha, I've done that multiple times to the family computer. Just wrecked the MBR like an idiot trying to set up GRUB or something.

Good old times when you used an undocumented "fdisk /mbr" to restore the destroyed MBR.

Should tell him the host address is 127.0.0.1.

Obligatory UserFriendly: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010523

One of the last entries in the -current changelog before the 15.0 release was the following:

  Wed Feb 2 04:17:39 UTC 2022
  fortune -m "I will be finished tomorrow" fortunes2
  a/kernel-generic-5.15.19-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
  a/kernel-huge-5.15.19-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
  [...]

This gives the following:

  %% (fortunes2)
  A manager asked a programmer how long it would take him to finish the
  program on which he was working.  "I will be finished tomorrow," the
  programmer promptly replied.
      "I think you are being unrealistic," said the manager. "Truthfully,
  how long will it take?"
      The programmer thought for a moment.  "I have some features that I wish
  to add.  This will take at least two weeks," he finally said.
      "Even that is too much to expect," insisted the manager, "I will be
  satisfied if you simply tell me when the program is complete."
      The programmer agreed to this.
      Several years later, the manager retired.  On the way to his
  retirement lunch, he discovered the programmer asleep at his terminal.
  He had been programming all night.
    -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

No matter how practical it is to use Slackware in the current year (works for me!), it makes me very happy that projects like this are still going. Congratulations Patrick on a fantastic release.

I remember staying up all night downloading Slackware 96 (version 3.0) floppy sets over my 28.8kbps modem. I think I used it for my first 6+ months of home Linux use.

In retrospect it was probably a good thing to learn on because Slackware was so simple but did so little for you. I remember having to read a long HOWTO from the Linux Documentation Project about how to get XFree86 working. Hand crafting /etc/X11/XF86Config, including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor. Learning how to get Apache setup, which was kind of pointless but fun since I was on dialup.

And setting up auto dial up with a PPP session whenever I used anything that needed to get online. That seemed like magic!

Learned a lot there before trying out RedHat (4.x, before Enterprise was a thing) and Debian 1.3 (Bo) and then staying a Debian user for a long time until mostly moving to Ubuntu for server things.

Handcrafting XF86Config is how I spent my summer of 95. I was in engineering school in India and we have these 486s in the lab running Win 3.1. I took permission from the lab dude to install Linux/X Windows on it. Monitor I had with the 486 was some noname OEM. So naturally the frequencies or whatever in the XF86Config didn't match. For many many weeks I would randomly change numbers in a line and restart. I think it was Ctrl+Fn7 to get to X screen or terminal. Still remember the joy when I got the login screen to show up.

I also started with Slack floppies, but never really thought about how much it taught me. Disk partitions, files systems, permissions, networking, drivers, etc. It really did force learning at least a base level of all aspects of the system.

I have been a generalist for most of my career and that may not have happened without Slackware.

> including experimenting to find modelines that worked for my CRT monitor.

I remember having to muck around with modelines in X11 in the 1990s - but not this century; and even last century, Windows (both 3.x/9x and NT lineages) and OS/2 (I only ever ran 2.0) never required any such esoteric configuration (I don’t even know whether either exposed any INI/registry settings for it.) Why was this such a big (and painful) part of the 90s Linux GUI experience but not for its contemporary GUI competitors?

XFree86 gained EDID autodetect support later than Windows and this makes people remember issues with high-res modes longer (Windows used to have them too early on, Mac was full of custom crap, unix workstations tended to have explicit data available),

Windows around win95/nt tended to come with preselected list (and woe on you if you choose wrong!), which meant that you could just select reasonably close defaults - or if you had fancy display, it might come with windows driver (actually a parameter file) telling the available options.

Also remember that significant majority of Windows users didn't have hi-res displays in the days before windows 95, and if you were ok with standard VGA modes, you didn't have to mess much.

Personally I remember crafting custom modelines because I wanted more than standard EDID data could give me, cranking up refresh rate to ~81Hz at 1152x864 resolution or so (typical setting on the display was 1024x768)

I recently had to look into modelines because of one issue related to high frequency refresh rate display and amdgpu causing some blinking due to VRAM reclocking. Really didn't expect that ever to come up.

In the process I discovered that KWin doesn't yet support setting video modes using modelines in the Wayland session at present.

I think monitors were tested by manufacturers on windows. Also you usually had a no name monitor and you either selected something close to what you had or a generic one and then had to play with xvidtune.

Slackware 3.0 in the mid 90's was where I got started too.

I have an nearly 20 year old system that's been upgraded many times from 10.0, 'grep -c "^Subject: Welcome to Linux" $MAIL' indicates 10 times ;) It's been through several hardware replacements, and now exists as a VM guest, since I took the leap some years ago to Slackware64 (its host, of course) with alienbob's multilib support.

Good to see improved multilib, build from scratch/make world, and still a full 32-bit option.

Slackware 96 was also my first distro on an extremely obsolete 386SX/33 with only 16mb of RAM using X11 & TWM.

> in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits

This is in reference to DistroTube's Linux 2022 predictions which included "no Slackware release"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJMm4BXNdX4

Surprisingly I still use Slackware (current) and actually install it on our physics department computer room using packer to generate virtual golden images and then imaging the computers with clonezilla. Slackware performs well even on those 11 years old machines that we have there (combined with some new ones). Currently students access remotely using x2go and Xfce and it works pretty well. Of course there are some problems sometimes but in general is very stable. My first Linux experience with Slackware forced me to learn how to compile the kennel to get sound... oh I had time on those years. Congratulations and thank you, Patrick!

Nature bless you for that.

I've been thinking about Slackware a lot lately. Slackware manuals and the philosophy of the distro taught me how *nix, networking, and computers in general work. Back in the late '90s, that was a great contrast to the voodoo of RedHat, and frankly a humanitarian boon.

In my older enervated state, seeking something that "just works", I keep thinking of Slackware -- the only thing that "just worked" was understanding what was happening from a fairly close approximation to first principles and a software stack that did what it said on the tin. I can't think of a better distro to use in an institution of higher learning.

The irony of Slackware's affinity to the Church of the Subgenious didn't hurt either; Bob Dobbs wants to sell you a bill of goods, but once you see through all of that and achieve a state of Slack, true understanding has begun.

Slackware 2.2 was my first encounter with Linux in 1995. I was already fairly comfortable with Unix having to support a bunch of SCO Unix systems for our customer base.

I gave up a weekend of beer to get it up and running on some random motherboard and pilfering some known good compatible bits from our spares store such as an actual NE2000 NIC :) Within a few days I was doing kernel rebuilds to get a sound card working properly or some such thing. That was a lot of fun.

Due to a career change I ended up running RedHat (then CentOS) mostly, but dipped back into Slackware now and again. It's nice to see what was one of the OG distros still getting releases.

As someone who is from the era of Ubuntu as their first distro, my natural progression towards maintainable OS made me reach Arch. As an OS for your system, it seems like the perfect abstraction layer and does just enough. The next incremental update to my system could be NixOS, Nix package manager in Arch or Nix package manager in FreeBSD. But I am always happy to see old projects like this kicking.

I see many people mention the fact that they won't be coming back to Slackware. Could that be because they are not changing enough according to the times they are in? Is there something the project can do to attract new users? I definitely wouldn't want Slackware project to stall. It makes me really sad when OSS projects die.

Slackware is really a small/bare bones distro, "old schoolers" like it because in it's time (90s era) just having a Unix like system on a PC was amazing and it is considered very stable, now that GNU/Linux is everywhere today's distros are just easier to use.

> There is no formal issue tracking system and no official procedure to become a code contributor or developer. The project does not maintain a public code repository. Bug reports and contributions, while being essential to the project, are managed in an informal way. All the final decisions about what is going to be included in a Slackware release strictly remain with Slackware's benevolent dictator for life, Patrick Volkerding.

This is from Slackware wikipedia page. If this is true, this could be the next logical step to increase some development involvement and noise maybe? Patrick should be also thinking about the future of Slackware right?

Am just an outsider since I don't have skin in the game. But Slackware is not a distro that comes in your conversations more often and I am in a lot of Linux communities. And the comments reflect the same as well. Maybe this could improve the scenario. Again, this is with the best intentions. Please ignore if the comments doesn't sit right with you. :)

---

Also, I don't think Slackware should be like GNU/Linux distros or alter course radically. But I think a small modernization of the project could help everyone who wants to keep the Slackware way of doing it alive.

This is why I abandoned slackware. It was one of the first distros that 'worked'. However, after becoming a developer with source control and some sort of system that let you track things. I did not want to go back.

They have steadfastly refused to move to more 'modern' development practices (they have been arguing about it since the mid 90s). With simple things like issue tracking. That is fine, it works for them. But after a few years I got tired of spinning my own just to have something kind of current (think that has changed). But I bailed out, when they kicked out the dudes who made it into a distro that was easier to update with some simple commands (like apt). That is something OS at the time had but them. I gave up. I just moved onto whatever my employer decided we were going to use (usually redhat or debian based). I enjoyed my time using it, but it became a chore to maintain. So I moved on to things that had automated some of that. They may have even fixed some of the issues I had with them. But I no longer have the time to bother going back.

I have seen this pattern with a few projects. Basically whoever runs the project just does not want to mess with it. That is fine. But it really holds their project back. It works fine when you have 1-2 people working on it. But you add a few dozen with people dipping in and out randomly you need to add some control to the chaos. One project I watched the main dev go kicking and screaming how it would not help. The project is now clicking along pretty good. He now does not feel like he is all alone fighting the world. He has people to help him and can track it easily. He even stated he should have done it sooner.

I considered Slackware but I'm under the impression it has no analogue to apt or dnf/yum.

How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?

As far as I read about it, they don't! Dependency resolution is fully up to the user.

> The package management system does not track or manage dependencies; however, when performing the recommended full install, all dependencies of the stock packages are met. For custom installations or 3rd-party packages, Slackware relies on the user to ensure that the system has all the supporting system libraries and programs required by the program. Since no official lists of dependencies for stock packages are provided, if users decide to install a custom installation or install 3rd-party software, they will need to work through any possible missing dependencies themselves. Since the package manager doesn't manage dependencies, it will install any and all packages, whether or not dependencies are met. A user may find out that dependencies are missing only when attempting to use the software.

Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slackware#Dependency_resolutio...

Oof, that sounds like a lot of work.

Simplicity is a virtue but sometimes the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Yes. I think the question always is where should I stop?. Cos it is a tool to get things done right?

While I think it is difficult to get Arcg going, the whole point of that effort is that I don't have to deal with it much after that. It is a rolling release and get the latest upstream releases which is not meddled with by distro much. Unless you are meddling with it too much, it is very stable IMO.

> How on earth do people running Slackware manage their library dependencies and keep everything up to date?

        slackpkg update
        slackpkg upgrade-all

This is how you get the most recent version of all installed packages. You can run this every morning and you will have more modern tools than using ubuntu.

As for dependencies, as long as a new version does not add a new dependency, you are good. But changing dependencies of a software package is a major change that should not happen automatically. Recursive "dependency resolution" is a disgusting practice that has no place in a sane world. Dependencies are part of the API: changing dependencies is supposed to break your package, unless you do something about it.

In practice, in the rare case when this happens, you will not get any warning when upgrading. But you will get an error when running your program (that has become broken because of a missing dependency). The error message will be very clear, something like:

        "Runtime error: libfoo not found"

And the solution to this problem will be evident evident:

        slackpkg install libfoo

There is no official dependency support, but there are projects out there that add dependency resolution to slackpkg[1][2] and sbopkg[3][4]. A few of the Slackware-based distros have their own method of dealing with it as well.

[1] https://slackpkg.org

[2] https://www.slackwiki.com/Slapt-get

[3] https://sbopkg.org

[4] https://github.com/McDutchie/sbodeps

Keeping everything up to date in not usually required. But then comes a program with "bug fixes and performance improvments" which does not work with libxlst-2.67.45.35.77.so.2 and needs libxlst-2.67.45.35.78.so.4. And this lib needs another one and so on. Only if people would think a bit before releasing something the world would be a better place. That's why i like Patrick. He tries hard to make a stable release even during times when "if compiles, ship it" is the mantra.

Slackware was my first distro, purchased a diskette set by mail from a company in Computer Shopper magazine and installed it on a 386 my parents gave me after buying an IBM PS/1 with a 486DX2 in 1991 (or 1992?).

I used it to get Internet access via SLIP dial-up to a mainframe at the University of Missouri and from there to play MUDs which ended up becoming an obsession for years and resulted in me learning C to modify DikuMUD.

I’m really glad to see that Slackware is still alive and kicking even though I’m now mostly a FreeBSD and MacOS user.

Funny, my first computer was an IBM PS/1 that I got for Christmas of 1992. I couldn't figure out how to install linux on it. Googling now I see someone talking about the hard disk controller being on the mobo and unsupported, and someone saying they had to supply hard disk geometry info. That was beyond me as a pre-teen. Didn't get my first box to install slackware on until I traded two BB guns for a tower PC as a teenager.

To be fair, I don't think the IBM PS/1 ever had Linux installed on it. It ran Windows 3.1 and later Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and we had Trumpet Winsock on it to get Internet connectivity through the local library at some point (originally my parents used Prodigy only, I introduced them to the Internet). The 386 system I put Slackware on was a Tandy of some type (I don't remember the exact model) which had a 20MB hard drive in place of where it typically would have a second 3.5" floppy drive. IIRC, I was never able to get sound working on it, but had no problem getting everything else generally working.

A handful of years later my parents bought a Dell running Windows 98 SE and I built my first custom computer which had an AMD K6-2 and also ran Windows so I could play computer games (which at the time were more interesting to me) and it also had the just released Diamond Monster3D based on the Voodoo2 chipset w/ separate 2D accelerator card via VGA passthru. That was my first foray into proper 3D gaming and got me interested in hardware and overclocking, which dominated most of my interest until my later teen years when I started contributing to open source and got back into Linux.

I’ve already seen countless comments about Slackware being a lot of folks first Linux distro. For someone like me who didn’t get into programming until the last 5 years or so, can you guys explain what was it about Slackware, that was so appealing or inviting to new users?

As a primarily Ubuntu user in my time, was part of it that the Linux landscape was much less mature back then? Was it the principals/ ethos that the project stood behind? The community? All of the above? Haha, I’m very curious. I’ve always knew of the distro, but never had a good reason to use it these days. It still clearly has a cult like following, and I don’t know the history of it honestly.

> what was ... so appealing or inviting to new users?

Back in the early '90s, if you had an "IBM-compatible personal computer" in your home, it almost certainly was running either DOS or Windows as its operating system. And that was fine for most people, but some of us were enthusiasts, geeks, and nerds. We liked technology. We enjoyed fine-tuning our systems, learning all about them, and programming. And sure, you could tinker some with DOS/Windows, but it was fundamentally a closed system.

For me, the appeal of Slackware (and Linux in general) was that it opened a door to a whole universe of software and source code that was previously inaccessible, as well as the feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded enthusiasts and geeks that loved and worked on it. A free, open-source Unix-like operating system that ran on your PC at home -- how cool was that!? (Spoiler: very!) I'd heard things about how 'powerful' Unix was -- and now I had my very own, and it even came with source code. I was also a believer in the nascent free software movement.

So that's a longwinded way to say yes, all of the above. Community, geeking out over cool new technology, and as a programmer, getting access to a completely open, hackable machine.

Also windows was a toy back then. All big programs (CAD, CAE, DTP) ran on UNIX. It was later that those programs were ported to Windows, also due to the fact that Intel convinced everyone that Itanium will ship. The rest is history.

Slackware was themed after the Church of the Subgenius, which is a satirical religion and online movement about "slack" as a cosmic force. It came from a time when software projects could be more whimsical and show some character. It's almost impossible to imagine a software project today expressing any kind of off-topic flair, or really be eccentric in that kind of way. There's hardly anything like it today, but the appeal of something so quirky I think is still easily understood.

Edit: I think at one point there was a Linux distro based on My Little Pony, is that right? It was a different time, you had a new space that had just opened up for creative exploration, and it was accessible mostly to nerds and people on the fringe. There were a lot of weird things coming out back then.

Don't forget RebeccaBlackOS, which apparently somehow managed to actually be somewhat technically interesting by defaulting to Wayland before that was a thing normal distros did.

https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=rebecc...

Praise Bob

Slackware is a no frills distro and arguably the baseline for all linux distros. It’s appealing because of the lack of magic or distro specific customizations. If you want a distro that just lets you do what you need to do without getting in the way, it’s very appealing. If you want a distro that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.

A bonus point is that Slackware does not rely on systemd. it is still a bunch of bash scripts that you can figure out what is going on.

^This!^

Slackware uses a BSD-style init system, where you just have one big shell script for booting the system -- you can read through it and edit it, it's all right there, self-contained.

Additionally, all of the old Unix tomes still largely apply to Slackware. That's increasingly, and distressingly, not true of most other distros.

> that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot, look elsewhere.

I remember having to re-run the installation many times, from selecting the wrong options during installation.

There's the best reason to use Slack: it builds character.

Speaking for myself only, it was my first linux distro in mid to late 1990s. Computer books, large reference type computer books were a thing back then. You could buy books titled something like "Slackware Bible" in very large print on the cover that promised to tell you how to run your own web server and maybe email server. In the back of the book were cd roms that had the Slackware source ready to build. It was immensely attractive to me. The internet was not much a thing back then, mostly AOL for regular Joe's. For academics or adventurous types there were universities and independent isps offering gopher,www and Usenet sites. Downloading distros over 2800k modems was not something you wanted to do. I remember installing Slackware but imo at the time it was horribly primitive and esoteric and promised days of driver and build hell. I remember having to build everything from source and wondering why in the hell was that required and it was not uncommon to o completely wreck your system by installing the wrong library or passing the scripts the wrong flags, etc. But it did get you a web server and other cool stuff. You could for nearly free host a website in your bedroom. But it could break at any time (I mean the whole system, requiring rebuild from scratch). I never enjoyed linux installs until I discovered debian in the early 2000s which was a God send. My apologies if my memories are off and no take slight to Slackware developers intended, it was just the state of the technology at the time. For the time the efforts were amazing.

I only use Linux these days (except when troubleshooting user machines) but I remember my brain was so poisoned by 'the Windows way' back in the 90s I just got frustrated with Slackware. Had I just RTFM or bought a book I could have removed that brainwashing so much sooner.

I think it was SuSE that finally clicked for me.

Slackware was one of the first distros and was Debian before there was a Debian[1] Also, there was a convenient offline CD archive version (Walnut Creek, IIRC) of it you could get for ~$20 which included several CDs worth of software (i.e. a couple/few gigs of files) before inexpensive ISPs were a thing and the world was still largely on dialup. (i.e. download times were on the order of minutes per megabyte) So getting those Slackware CDs was a bargain and orders of magnitude faster than attempting to download software for most.

[1] It was released a few months before Debian so there was no Debian, no Ubuntu, no RedHat etc... these were all distros that mostly started taking off in the to mid- to late-90's. (Ubuntu of course didn't start until early this century) For the very earliest releases of Linux you had to download boot and root floppy images and then piece together what you needed for a working system. Usually this also included recompiling or at least re-linking the kernel... it was that primitive. Then there was this new concept of a Linux 'distribution' with the likes of Slackware that took the pain out of the process and caught on very quickly.

Got into Linux in 2008 with no knowledge and no help, Slackware was the first distro I successfully installed (after trying Debian).

I tried Slackware after hearing the phrase "If you use RedHat, you learn RedHat. If you use Debian, you learn Debian. If you use Slackware, you learn Linux." Also, I had an old computer and very poor internet, so the all-in-one DVD approach appealed to me. I downloaded the Slackbook and got to it, and it patiently taught me what a filesystem was, how boot works, what X was, how to use the terminal, and so on.

Other operating systems took a lot of that for granted! They assumed I had resources, and Slackware would work with pretty well nothing. If Slackware took more time to use, time was all I had! And if Slackware made me learn things to use it properly, it was well worth it! Even now, 14 years later, lots of skills I learned are still useful - bash, the boot process, compiling software, managing dependencies (I once wanted ffmpeg with all dependencies coming from subversion, so I coded up an updater/build manager in 100% shell! Slackware taught me to do that :)

I used it for many years, distro hopping in the background, before eventually migrating to Debian. Life moved on, and I had less time to deal with "how do I build THIS from source?" and I wanted something that would help me out a bit more.

Slackware has given me an appreciation for stability. There is really something big about lasting decades. I can use those things, and also the things I know today, rather than having half the things I knew two years ago going in the bin.

Bit of a ramble. I suppose I have a lot of affection for the distro, it was a formative environment for me.

The reason for me was Slackware back in the 90s had a run Linux on a DOS partition version. I believe this was Slackware 7.0. It was easier to install for a 12-year-old me than to figure out what fdisk outputs meant. Slackware made it super easy in that it just installed within the FAT32 partition.

I learned a lot, I was on AOL at the time so I couldn't figure out certain things like XFree86 or vim since AOL didn't work on Linux. So whenever I was stuck I would literally restart the machine to Windows, go online, look up how to do something, take notes, and restart back to Linux to try what I was doing. It took a long time... But it made me extremely comfortable with the command line, and figure out where Linux breaks since Slackware was such a simple system.

Though I moved on to FreeBSD, then Gentoo, then Debian, and Ubuntu. I still think Slackware was a solid place to start.

I guess it has led me to my current path of running a DevOps consulting company...

It was one of the very first Linux distributions, so if you already an adult in computing around 1994, it was a natural way to dive into Linux.

On my case, it was offered alongside the Linux Unleashed book series, which on the first edition was shipping Slackware 2.0 with it.

Then as Patrick mentions on the annoucement, they got to be available in Walnut Creek CD-ROM collection, which was the way to get FOSS CDs shipped to your from anywhere in the world.

So you had basically FreeBSD, Slackware, Red-Hat, Debian and Yasdrill (which quickly fade away), Mandrake and SuSE came a bit later.

For me Slackware only lost relevance when Linux distributions adopted the package concept from UNIX clones, thus easing the pain to hunt dependencies with tarballs, or having to use alien to convert them.

I think my first Linux distro was actually Yggdrasil, but right after that I tried Slackware and found it was much more complete and easy to use. You could also order a 4 CD box from Walnut Creek with tons of packages.

I kept subscriptions from Walnut Creek to both FreeBSD and Slackware for about 10 years. They would automatically send me new versions as soon as they were released.

It's a proper linux distro. Everything is in a sensible place. If you want to configure your system, you configure it with.. configuration files. If you break it, you get to keep both bits.

For myself, it was literally _the_ distro. There simply wasn't any other available to me, at the time.

I started using Linux around 2003 when I got into college and when I got my first laptop and at the time the most popular distros were Red Hat (transitioning into Fedora Core which had just come out), Mandrake, Suse, Debian, maybe a few others.

Most of these mainstream distros (except maybe Debian) were starting to go in the direction of trying to become more user friendly. They had graphical installers rather then text based and they had all sorts of new graphical utilities for configuration and made various attempts at trying to automate and sort much of that configuration for you.

Except that they were mostly terrible at that in those early years of these attempts. So the first thing I actually ever tried to install on that laptop was RedHat 9 and I couldn't get my USB DSL modem to work as well as other specific laptop hardware features.

Then some folks I knew were using Slackware and told me to try it and there were guides on how to make that modem work with it so I started using it.

And very quickly I realized that while on Slackware you had to generally do a lot more configuration in text files and through CLI utilities, it generally yielded the results you expected and things didn't magically happen.

Meanwhile in those other distros that were trying to become more user friendly, you had all of these crazy graphical utilities that worked half of the time, sometimes mangled configuration files (the Suse ones were specially amazing at producing completely broken xorg.conf files) or just simply didn't work.

I learned a lot about all of those because as I became more proficient with Linux I kinda became the goto guy in my college for a lot of people who are also new to Linux to help them sort out their Linux setups, specially on laptops.

A few years later Ubuntu came along, kinda trying to do the same thing those other distros were doing but using mostly existing UI utilities (rather than creating new ones) and just made sure they actually worked.

I ended up transitioning to Ubuntu (after a couple of years of Gentoo and Arch) and never looked back until I moved to macs in the early 2010s.

Initially, back in the early 1990's I think it was the only "distribution" of Linux out there. It was either download Slackware to 3.5" floppies, or else hand-roll your own distribution completely from scratch.

I think RedHat came along in the mid to late 90's. I jumped ship and never looked back, because RPM packages were so much more convenient then Slackware's hodgepodge of configure scripts and makefiles. Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM and became less cool, and that's been more or less the state of things ever since because Ubuntu-based distros tend to have better hardware detection and support.

> Ubuntu then came along in the 2000's, around the time that RedHat got bought by IBM

IBM bought Red Hat only three years ago.

You're right. I am thinking about when the re-branded the "free as in beer" RedHat as "Fedora", with only a 6-month cycle.

There was SLS before it. By the time I could afford to cobble together a machine capable of running Linux, Slackware had superceded SLS and Red Hat and other distros you may have heard of didn't exist yet. Red Hat became the beginner's Linux very quickly after it was released. All this happened in a pretty short time frame from 1993-1996 or so.

Yggdrasil’s first release was a year before Slackware’s.

Slackware seemed the most mature at the time I started. Also, I really liked the way they split the packages into directories. I could just download the things I needed in one go. When you only have access to dial up, having to download stuff during installation is painful. So, I’d download all I needed over the course of a couple days, then I’d install it with all the needed stuff already in there.

After I got more used to how things worked, I eventually moved towards Redhat until I finally landed on Debian.

Slackware was my first linux distribution, and one that I used continuously before moving to Arch.

As it happens, I think Arch embodies many of the original Slackware principles, but its focus on more modern hardware led to it growing a larger community - one that includes great documentation.

The Arch Wiki is a treasure, I used it when setting up Slackware on a MacBook Pro because it had the most comprehensive description of the caveats and gotchas for the laptop of anywhere on the WWW.

Arch embodied many of the original Slackware principles, once.

These days I don't know what they're doing, but Void is basically Arch without the bullshit (and with runit instead of systemd, thank goodness).

What bullshit are you referring to? Void sure seems like an interesting alternative, but I am happy with Arch atm so I have not tried it yet.

If you are happy with Arch, keep using Arch. My persnickety criteria shouldn't affect others' distro choice. But Arch's maintainers left simplicity on the table a long time ago, with a few annoying symptoms, notably:

1) Arch changes shit in massive ways resulting in huge flag days. Once every few years may be tolerable, but they tended to happen alarmingly often, requiring me to check the wiki and manually recombobulate the system. Arch's policy is pretty much update every day, and unless you hit a very narrow window to update, or even if you do, check the wiki every day and be prepared to manually recombobulate per our instructions. I'm old and cranky and my daily driver distro shouldn't need that much care. Void is designed how Arch used to be, which means I may not need to recombobulate at all, sometimes with a year or two between updates, and if I do it's much easier to do under Void.

2) Systemd. Frickin' systemd. Void is the first distro to switch from systemd to something else (runit).

I hear good things about Void, but last time I tried to install it, the mirror I was pulling from had the download time estimate at a couple of days, and I didn't have time to muck about that day.

Might be time to try it again - or a different mirror

I was enthusiastic about Void, until I learned more about its history.

What history is that and why does it matter today?

https://voidlinux.org/news/2018/05/serious-issues.html

Same problem as any other project with a single owner, or even a small team. It is at risk of disappearing one day, never to be heard from again.

There are a lot of important projects that fall into this category. It certainly isn't unique to Void.

That drama has ended, he was demoted from dictator. Now things are chugging along with multiple contributors like most other projects.

For me Void seems like a very good distro, I think of it as a naked kernel with runnit init and xbps as the package manager, nothing gets in the way. It also has the nice property where the git repo is the distro in every sense.

While the problem wasn’t unique, the hostile takeover of the project was. The honorable and legal course of action would be to fork.

The owner had built the distro single-handed over ten years, and GitHub and Freenode helped to eject him from his own project, over his eventual strenuous objections.

https://www.michaelwashere.net/post/2018-11-28-enobdfl/

Even that link doesn’t give a balanced story. You have to track down the founder’s posts to hear his side and to understand why he had stopped contributing for awhile.

It's amazing to see how many of us had Slackware as our first distro. I remember meeting Patrick when I was in high school, at Linux World Expo. Every just (barely) worked (kinda... except printing...)

I mirrored current religiously for over a decade and used to hand out ISOs to friends. All through my Google years, until I just couldn't hammer it into enough shape to keep the auth working on the corp network any more, I ran it as my only distro.

Congratulations to the Slackware team for releasing another one. I'm always shocked when it happens but happy to see it.

It was my first distro back in 2009, I was 15.

Back then Slack was the most recommended distro "if you really want to learn linux".

This was a pain to find on mobile, so for the convenience of LAMP developers curious about the included packages:

Apache/httpd: 2.4.52

Mysql: 10.5.13

PHP: 7.4.27

Source: ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT

This page has mirrors to get files over HTTPS, including a link to the package browser: https://mirrors.slackware.com/

I started with Slackware in the early 1990s, downloaded it over a 2400 baud modem (I skipped downloading X11 stuff at 2400 baud, and just got enough for text terminals and GNU compilers, Emacs, etc. Good times, even with my family almost killing me for tying up our landline telephone for so long while downloading Slackware.

This might be a better link http://www.slackware.com/announce/15.0.php

Kudos to Patrick!

I'd played with Linux before, but Slackware 7 was my first full-time laptop linux distro. My laptop when I was at uni used to always overheat when trying to boot into Windows; Slackware would easily boot before it overheated and then just idle. Loved Slack, ran it on other machines until v12 when I got lazy and started running Fedora Core. Might try this out.

Daily user for over half my life...

‘Nuff said.

Although that could be 3 years or 35 years. We'll never know :)

I recently reformatted my personal machine from Slack 14.2 to Ubuntu, and did not have a fun time. The second time that Ubuntu randomly bricked my machine with an update, I changed tack. I'm now running Alpine Linux as my desktop, and I have to say it's absolutely a spiritual successor to Slack. Very similar installation process, very simple design, and I've had to re-learn how to set up a desktop, hardware, etc. It's been fun! It's extremely fast too. (and as a bonus: no systemd!)

last time i checked Alpine linux I had the idea that the desktop functionality was barely supported (i think the only DE available was XFCE, which is fine to me, but the install documentation seemed incomplete). I think I'll give it a try also.

Amazing project. My first serious Linux distro. Good for Patrick and the rest of the community.

If someone was choosing a Linux distro today, what would be some reasons to choose Slackware rather than another popular distro like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch?

The biggest one for me is that the mental model for maintaining your system is tiny. As a system it is easy to inspect how it works - you can trace the entire boot process along with a finger, the init system is excruciatingly simple, the package database is a directory with files each containing a brief description the output of a un-tar command, SlackBuild packages are easy to make and modify. The community is also very nice and has a lot of highly experienced users in it.

Most software I want is also already installed and ready to go. Some people like to craft their OS from a minimal base, and I absolutely respect that and understand that it gives them a system which is perfectly catered to their needs - but I’m very lazy, and am perfectly happy letting someone with over 30 years experience do all that for me :-)

That being said, I use Fedora at work and wouldn’t consider using Slackware. This is because I don’t want to know anything about my underlying system as long as it works and gives me the tools I need to do my work, and because GNOME is a boon to my workflow.

Also, how do you patch your system?

Upgradepkg. You need to download the files first, of course.

slackpkg :-) the OS is considered stable so you don’t generally get new major versions of software, but security and bug fixes are delivered regularly.

Over the years I've gone from Ubuntu to Debian to Slackware and back to Debian. I took a chance on Slackware for a few years precisely so that I could force myself to understand *nix from the bottom up. Unfortunately I didn't have nearly as much free time (or patience) as I needed to get the most out of the experience, and having to deal with missing dependencies turned out to be too much overhead for just getting anything else done. I'd definitely recommend it for folks who enjoy (and have the time for) getting their hands dirty.

Slackware is more bare bones, so its good for learning linux.

It is also stable, people set up slackware servers and let it run for years.

But to be honest, modern distros are much more convenient esp for workstations. These days Slackware wouldn't be my first choice, but it brings up memories, had a lot of fun tinkering with it.

It is very old-school. A more extreme choice in the same vein might be Linux From Scratch.

Actually, there’s nothing “extreme” about Slackware, in fact, I find it easier to use, and more reliable than Ubuntu, for example. It is one of those things that you would say about: it’s perfect just the way it is.

"Extreme" just means farther out on the same radius. I could have said "distal", instead, and not been understood.

Running Linux on a desktop already makes you an outlier.

Past threads:

Slackware Linux 15.0 RC3 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29928343 - Jan 2022 (43 comments)

Slackware 15.0 release candidate one - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28201197 - Aug 2021 (56 comments)

Slackware was the 2nd distro i tried, almost ~22years ago. For 2 weeks I would schedule my dialup modem to connect to the internet for 2-3h every night when everyone was sleeping and the phone was not used to download the cd1 iso with the common packagesets (a/ k/ x/ etc).

Thank you Patrick :)

I'm a Slackware user (as a "pet" testing machine) and one of the things that bothers me about this distribution is that I don't know which packages I'm supposed to install. For example, by default it wants me to install both lilo and grub, but only one of them seems to be necessary. Is that alright? Do I need to select my packages manually from the long list?

Besides that initial confusion, once it is up and working, it is remarkably minimal, clean, elegant, and with very up-to date packages (if you use "-current"). I love that package management does not install recursive dependencies. It is my smaller testing VM and feels just as fast as the others, and never gives me any trouble.

Slackware will work when you install everything, and this is the recommended approach - select all package sets during installation. Beyond that, it’s what you make of it. In your case, you could probably make do without lilo/elilo if you use grub - but that assertion comes without warranty :-)

The previous release was 14.2 and it happened on 2016-06-30. It was on 4.4 kernel.

And kernel 4.4's upstream EOL was two days ago. Talk about timing.

I suspect that might have been a driving factor because of course they knew the date was fast approaching. However it isn't that hard to build a new kernel in slackware anyway, it sticks pretty close to Vanilla kernel the way it's built.

Slackware taught me a lot about Linux. Eventually I got lazy and moved on (things were just easier to install on Mint/Ubuntu) but I owe Patrick big time.

I think I'm going to give this a whirl for old times sake.

My first Linux install was a Slackware 3.5 from a cdrom magazine, but I’ve dropped Slackware in 2006 when they ditched gnome in favor of KDE.

I still remember the emotion when I managed to get the system to boot and startx

I had the same joy after installing it from a stack of floppy disks in the late '90s. It took so long but it was so satisfying when it worked!

I bought the Slackware CD from a local MicroCenter and used it as the email server for my ISP (running qmail) in 1996.

I'll be trying this when I get a chance. I coincidentally checked the Slackware website this morning and was disappointed that the last release was 6 years ago. I thought for sure it was dead.

I used Slackware for years in the 90's before moving to FreeBSD. I honestly thought the project was dead and moved to Arch. Sadly, I'm not coming back, but I keep fond memories.

I have tried Arch and found it more cumbersome to install. (And systemd, eww..)

Wow, that is a name that brings back memories.

Now I'm curious, anyone knows how good is the package management in modern Slackware? I ask because back in the late 90s it was quite far behind Debian.

Same package manager as before, but you can use slpkg for modern features: https://dslackw.gitlab.io/slpkg/

A lovely release note. I wish the Slackware team all the best with this release, it looks very solid. The only thing I would wish for would be a bridge to be able to use Arch packages. And maybe also a complete copy of how the arch Linux project managers it's Wiki, which is world class for Arch users and useful for other distros too. Since Slackware require some knowledge in order to get it right, a world class knowledge base wiki would be welcome.

Cheers and congrats to Pat and team

I still have a Slackware install that runs some really old stuff I have. I remember working at AN ISP in the 90s and slack was are secure distro. All the important stuff (authentication, configs, etc.) were stored and served from our 'slack pool'.

Funny part is now I do a very basic Slackware install that setup pkgsrc (https://pkgsrc.org) on it so I can really experience the best and worst of times!

Nice to see Slackware still going strong.

Like many around these parts, Slackware was my second Linux distribution, after I decided that Red Hat 5.2 was too mainstream for me.

One of my favourite things about Slackware was the installer that showed a couple of paragraphs of trivia about what packages were getting installed. I learned so much about the people that made these amazing things possible. (Larry Wall! John Ousterhout! Roland McGrath! Ulrich Drepper!)

I don't remember the first time I used Slackware. I do remember the first time I used a non-slackware distribution. It was Debian. The first thing I tried to do was install a missing piece of software with `make && make install`. I couldn't believe anyone would ship something as useless as an operating system without a compiler. It was a very long time before I gave anything but Slackware another chance.

I had to go back and check, the first version I installed was 3.0. I'm guessing a lot of us started our Linux journey on early Slackware floppy installs.

Slackware was one of the first distros I used seriously. Five plus years between releases is an awfully long time. Glad to see it's still alive.

Does Slackware live up to it's goals? I remember that a long time ago Slackware was supposed to simplify the chaos of the early Linux ecosystem, allowing nerds to have a solid stable Linux distro that gets out of the way and lets them do what they need to get done.

But the Linux world has gotten a lot more complex in the last few decades. Does it still have a distinct advantage?

My very first linux distro :)

Me too, I keep one installed in a VM for nostalgia. I've moved on to Arch since but that VM still handles my local rsync backup and languagetool install.

Also my first. Feel like it was included with some book/magazine, but then started buying copies from Walnut Creek software.

Can’t tell you how exhilarating it was to build a new kernel by hand, or how horrifying it was to f-up libc or some other mission critical library.

I spent hours, no, days recompiling the kernel of my slack installation, on a AMD K6-2, 1999 IIRC. I really had a lot of free time those days in high school...

I used slackware while in university for quite a while. Not my first distro, that was Suse (and I still use it today), but there is something about slackware I still love. Maybe if IT would still be only a hobby for me and not my day job I would use it. But when I'm off from work I don't wanna mess much. Tumbleweed is enough for me on my old laptop.

I read HN regularly since a couple of years, but registered just for this comment. My first GNU/Linux distro, but in early 2000. I have great memories from that time, it was "harder" but very rewarding. The best example of less is more. Today I'm using Devuan to escape from systemd, and I think I'll give Slackware 15 a try <3

I've been using Slackware on a laptop since around 2014, the 14.1 release days. The default (i.e full) install contains almost everything I need. I just add LibreOffice and R/RStudio and Octave and a few bits and pieces - nearly all available pre-compiled.

As another post has pointed out, if you decide to try Slackware 15.0 your previous knowledge will be mostly reusable (but slackpkg makes updating the base easier).

When I was buying my first PC back in mid 90's I had only one requirement: it had to be abele to run Linux. I was picking out the components for which I was sure that they will work with Linux. My first distribution was Slackware. I've moved away from sys admin jobs some 15 years ago but it is nice to see that Slackware is still around.

The first distribution I downloaded to floppies at work and installed on a beater 386 at home. I am pretty sure the first one I installed still used a pre-1.0 kernel that I immediately upgraded to 1.0, so it must have been spring or summer 1994 and Slackware 1.1. I turned into a computer bum for the next five years or so, but I got over it.

Time to kill another Windows in my household.

first linux. slackware 3.6 for me. felt like such an achievement once it booted

./configure; make; make install everything

My first linux distro. I’m almost crying remembering the emotions of gcc a ircd server or eggdrop on it

I got into Slackware in high school in the late 90s because it was associated with the l33t crowd that I looked up to at the time. Now there’s a nostalgia associated with it.

At a utility level, if I want a simple performant Linux that’s not doing any unpredictable automagic it’s my go-to.

Their website is glorious in a retro kind of way. Installed lynx just to enjoy the text experience.

Pat always gives it a personal touch:

Wed Feb 2 22:22:22 UTC 2022 Slackware 15.0 x86_64 stable is released!

I remember ordering the CD Rom from the States and the nights spent configuring /etc/X11/XF86Config for a Matrox Millennium on a 486DX.

I may be wrong but if I recall correctly, Slackware, was the "De facto" standard at the time.

I used Slackware for about 15 years before switching to Debian/Ubuntu; I knew a lot more about day-to-day Linux internals during the Slackware period and kind of miss it, and it may be worth trying 15 out.

The main FTP ISO mirrors are a bit slow - thankfully there are torrents available here https://seedbox.slackware.uk/

Congratulations Slackware!

Congratulations to Pat!

I used and loved Slackware for many years. I moved away because of the slow 15.0 release cycle and the near absence of communication from the BDFL, but I do miss it.

Daily Slackware user for many years. So excited to see Pat hit another one out of the park. Contrats sir and to all the folks who support Slackware!

Ah the good ole days up late dual booting Slackware, hanging out on BitchX, browsing Usenet on Enlightenment while watching Duckman on TV.

The oldest surviving Linux distro is still kicking.

ZipSlack took forever to download, but opened my eyes to a whole new world.

Glad to see Slackware is still going. Thanks for your pioneering work.

I love it when there's a Slackware post on HN... it brings out cool stories about people's first discovery into Linux.

<3 Slackware!

Upgrade weekend for me :)

Congratulations to the Slackware team

I've been using Linux for ~25 and have never tried Slack. I'm now on Slack/Manjaro, should I try it?

what do you have to lose?

Slack is easy to pick up and easy to maintain. You may want to consider trying sbopkg or similar if you find the package manager lacking, but it's worth noting that Slackware comes with a ton of great software in the base system (libraries and daemons)

YESSSS

I'll be downloading this when I get home from work! The time I've spent on 14.2 has been too d&mn long.

I recently upgraded my home PC to Slackware-current, 14.2 being decidedly too long in the tooth :)

Unreadable on mobile. Unreadable in reader mode on mobile. That takes talent. But not the kind of talent we can celebrate. They wrapped the whole wall of text in a PRE tag, which is user hostile and a poor way to use HTML. We solved this back in the early 1990s.

> We solved this back in the early 1990s.

I would not call it "solved". Slackware home page is usable. The modern web is a usability disaster.

Finally!

How is Patrick doing nowadays? Thank you for my favorite distro of all times.

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