Slackware 15.0 Officially Released, Powered by Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS

Slackware 15.0

The Slackware Linux Project released today 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 the latest long-term supported (LTS) Linux 5.15 kernel series, Slackware 15.0 finally adopts the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) for pure shadow passwords, switches to elogind as default user login and seat manager instead of ConsoleKit2, adopts the PipeWire low-level multimedia framework, adds Wayland support, and adds support for the Rust and Python 3 languages.

On the software front, Slackware 15.0 ships with the Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environments, adds the Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server to replace the old imapd and ipop3d, drops support for Qt4 as Qt5 is now the norm, and introduces new scripts to help you easily rebuild the installer and to build kernel packages for your needs.

An interesting change in this release is a new “make_world.sh” script that allows automatic rebuilding of the entire operating system from source. Also, Slackware’s pkgtools package management utilities received lots of improvements and new functionality, such as file locking to prevent conflicts between parallel installs or upgrades and the ability to limit the amount of data written to storage to avoid extra writes on SSD devices.

“There have been way too many changes to even begin to cover them here, but for our dedicated user base suffice to say that you’ll find things modern but also familiar,” said the team. “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.”

If you want to give Slackware a try, you can download Slackware 15.0 live ISO images with the KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE desktops, as well as a DAW edition for audio work and a LEAN edition with basic KDE Plasma and Xfce sessions, right now from the official website. Meanwhile, check out the full package list and the release notes if you’re curious to know what exactly landed in this major release.

Slackware is a legend, it’s the oldest GNU/Linux distributions that’s still maintained to this day. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993, when the first version (1.00) was released to the general public. It’s older than Debian GNU/Linux or Red Hat Linux, and it’s a mature, stable and independent operating system for desktop and server.

Slackware continues to support for 32-bit and 64-bit machines, and with this release there’s also support for UEFI installations (64-bit only, of course). However, there’s still no official Secure Boot support at this time (planned for the next release).

Last updated 2 years ago

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