Slackware-Based Salix 15.0 Released with Flatpak Support, Xfce 4.16, New Look, and More

Salix 15.0 has been released today more than six years after the previous version as the latest stable release of this Slackware-based Linux distribution for the lazy Slacker.

Salix is one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions based on Slackware, and the new release, Salix 15.0, doesn’t disappoint fans. It comes with the latest and greatest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment that has received a fresh coat of paint with new default GTK, WM, and icon themes, new default wallpaper, and a dark mode.

This release uses the light mode by default, but if you want to go to the dark side, you can now easily switch to the dark version of Salix from the Appearance panel. Another big change is that Salix now uses Whiskermenu as our default application launcher for Xfce.

“There have been extensive discussions in our forums with respect to how the new release will look and everything has been revamped, including a new GTK theme, a new icon theme, a new window manager theme, and a default wallpaper, especially tailored for Salix 15.0,” said the developers.

As mentioned before, Salix 15.0 comes more than six years after Salix 14.2 (the previous stable release announced on August 2016). The devs explain that one of the reasons it took so long to make this release is that they built thousands of packages for their software repositories, which can be easily installed with the Gslapt package manager.

On top of that, Salix 15.0 is the first release to offer out-of-the-box support for Flatpak apps. Flathub support is pre-configured and integrated into the desktop so that you can easily install your favorite Flatpak apps with just a few clicks.

Under the hood, this release is based on Slackware 15.0, which means that it’s powered by the long-term support Linux 5.15 LTS kernel, which features out-of-the-box support for NTFS formatted drives without relying on third-party drivers. Just like Slackware, Salix adopts PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules), and updates to GCC 11 and GNU C Library 2.33.

The installer is unchanged as you will get the same text-based installation experience as Slackware offers, but it’s been translated into several new languages to bring Salix to a wider audience. As usual, a complete development environment is provided with the default Salix installation.

You can download Salix 15.0 right now from the official release announcement for 64-bit and 32-bit systems. Unfortunately, only installation images are currently provided and there’s no word if live ISOs will be released in the near future. As such, check out our Salix installation video below to get started!