The Slackware Linux Project today released Slackware 15.0 after six years of development, bringing you a more modern and fresh operating system with some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies.
Powered by latest Long Term Support (LTS) Linux 5.15 kernel series, Slackware 15.0 finally adopts Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) for pure shadow passwords, switches to elogind as default user login and seat manager instead of ConsoleKit2, adopts PipeWire low-level multimedia framework , adds support for Wayland, and adds support for Rust and Python 3 languages.
On the software side, Slackware 15.0 comes with the Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environments, adds Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server to replace old imapd and ipop3d, removes support for Qt4 as Qt5 is now standard, and introduces new scripts to help you easily rebuild the installer and create kernel packages for your needs.
An interesting change in this version is a new “make_world.sh” script which allows the automatic reconstruction of the entire operating system from source. In addition, Slackware’s pkgtools package management utilities have received many improvements and new features, such as file locking to avoid conflicts between installations or parallel upgrades and the ability to limit the amount of data written to storage to avoid additional writes to SSD devices.
“There have been way too many changes to start covering here, but for our dedicated user base, suffice to say you’ll find things modern but also familiar,” the team said. “The challenge this time around was to embrace as many good things as possible without changing the character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern.
If you want to try Slackware, you can download Slackware 15.0 live ISO images with KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon and MATE desktops, as well as the DAW live image for audio work, right now from the official website. In the meantime, check out the full package list and release notes if you’re curious about exactly what landed in this major release.
Slackware is a legend, it is the oldest GNU/Linux distributions that are still maintained today. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993, when the first version (1.00) was released to the general public. It is older than Debian GNU/Linux or Red Hat Linux, and it is a mature, stable and independent operating system for desktops and servers.
Slackware continues to support both 32-bit and 64-bit machines, and with this release there is also support for UEFI installations (64-bit only, of course). However, there is still no official Secure Boot support at the moment (planned for the next release).
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