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Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0 (itsfoss.com) 51

Posted by EditorDavid from the nine-year-waits dept.
Created in 1993, Slackware is considered the oldest Linux distro that's still actively maintained. And more than three decades later... there's a new release! (And there's also a Slackware Live Edition that can run from a DVD or USB stick...) .

Slackware's latest version was released way back in 2016, 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.
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," 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 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 rastos1 for sharing thre news.
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Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0 More

Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0

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  • 2022 (Score:1)

    by yoshac ( 603689 )
    Checks the dateâ¦

    • But it will probably run vim 9.2 so it's news worthy!

    • Both the sources where not checked as the both have dates years ago (both FOSS and "Slackware"). This just seems like "slacker" to wordplay on the story editor here. Hopefully this was a few off mistakes but it seems to be going on awhile for a trend though more common seems to be the double posting (sometimes updates or others sources can be okay) of a story. Probably does not pay what it used to be because the editors and we took on the powers to be (the Alphabet Incorporated a.k.a. Google to name one) to

      • The "editors" obviously do not care. It's not as if their indifference to quality has not been repeatedly pointed out for many years.

        They could and should be replaced by an AI sorting reader submissions. They don't add any value unless flagrant display of indifference has value.

        Slashdot's owners clearly don't care or have any idea what to do with the site.

        • Iâ(TM)ve truly thought that there were missed opportunities to develop social interactions and connections here like Reddit would go on to have (in the past golden days of that site).

          Even though the note about his friends passing is personal, it touched me too. It feels like âoeone of usâ has passed.

          Itâ(TM)s been 33 yearsâ¦..

        • The point of the site is to serve ads. Slashdot shows me some of the trashiest, scammiest ads of all the sites I visit. I frequently see "hint app" which will sell you a "soulmate psychic sketch" and rip you off with rebills if you're foolish enough to sign up; ads for Mad Muscles Tai Chi (another well known scammy rebill), and various far-right coded t-shirts (1776 anyone?). Do you think people who run ads like this care about quality? The only leads who convert on these are patently fools!

  • Old news; editor asleep at the wheel (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lew Pitcher ( 68631 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @01:45PM (#65990534) Homepage

    Come on, now. You can't be that far asleep.
    Slackware released version 15.0 on February 3, 2022.

    This is old news.

    • >"Come on, now. You can't be that far asleep. Slackware released version 15.0 on February 3, 2022."

      Really. What is up with this article? How is this news?? Slackware 15 was released 4 years ago. Not recently, and not in 2016 (10 years ago).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Looking thought the history of edits https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org] it might of been no-one updated the wikipedia page but it shows "Latest release 14.2 / 30 June 2016"; for the wikipedia version that was November 19th 2018. Even March 25th 2019 edits still show the same in a couple of places on the wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind... [wikipedia.org]
        • So yes it does seem like I have heard that having a lack of asleep can be similar to being drunk. But I do not get how one got that figured it was both today and 2016 news at the same time when it was neither. Maybe going though a backstory is like being an auditor looking at past years paperwork and confusing dates?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I was wondering if the 5.15 LTS being valid until 2023 was a typo in the summary, but if it was released in 2022 it does make sense.

        Though these days I would've also questioned why use a 5.x kernel in 2026 when there are newer 6.12 which is LTS I believe.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bjoast ( 1310293 )

      This is old news.

      To be fair, no one comes to slashdot for the freshest news.

    • I was wondering why including a kernel that would have support until 2023 was noteworthy...I thought it was a typo until I read the comments.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gleenie ( 412916 )

      Oh come on, it's only been about 2 weeks ... and 4 years.

    • I thought maybe one of our fellow readers might've had a brain fart and submitted this... but this doesn't appear to have come through the Firehose.

      However... as long as I'm here, I want to give people a head's up - word is Red Hat's gonna pull the rug out from under all us CentOS 8 users and move the EOL up by several years!

    • Agreed, it might be late for most other distros, but it's not late for Slack ware.

  • It can run from a DVD! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @01:54PM (#65990554)
    Can you still get a computer with an optical drive anymore?
    • One can get an external optical drive connected to the computer via USB. Then, as AC above suggested, set that as the first boot device in the BIOS, and one is off to the races

    • A Panasonic ToughBook https://eu.connect.panasonic.c... [panasonic.com]

      • So you need a $7500 laptop to have a DVD drive? That's diametrically opposed to anyone who wants to run Slackware.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          Or an old used laptop which you could probably get for free, and which should still be more than capable of running slackware.

  • Lay off the weed EditorDavid (Score:3)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @02:47PM (#65990620) Homepage

    This happened 4 years ago FFS.

  • I remember my "SlackWare Linux Unleashed" book (Score:4, Interesting)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @03:35PM (#65990690)

    Bought in 1996. At the time, I had 14Kbps @ home, and less at the uni (The uni had a 64K link, shared amongst all the uni, you "cron-ed" your FTPs at night). Just the CD with slackware alone was worth the cost of admision

    Having said that, if this is true:

    " Interestingly, the Slackware team tested hundreds of Linux Kernel versions before settling on Linux Kernel 5.15.19."

    Then the distro mantainers (Volkerig et al) are doing something wrong. You only need to test the LTS releases and the SLTS (supported by the Linux civil infrastructure project) releases.

    For a distro as Small as Slackware, and which also does not depend on any other distro (like ubuntu depends on Debian, and mint depends on Ubuntu), is madness to test anything more kernel-wise.

    PS: LTSs get support for 2~3 years, SLTSs are a subset of LTSs that get support for 10 years (limited support after the LTS period ends)

    • Erm....remember slackware howto

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nick ( 109 )

      1994 I was downloading one of the earlier versions of Slackware over my SLIP dialup on a 28.8k. Downloaded the packages over FTP. This was 1.x versions. Man that was lifetime ago. I also remember transitioning the libraries from a.out to ELF. At some point I got my hands on a CD-ROM for Redhat Linux 2.2 Beta I want to say. It wasn't an official release and isn't listed anywhere as such that I can find today, but I swear it existed.

  • This post frames the slackware update news as new - but it's 4 years old...

    Ah, well.

  • Great! (Score:2)

    by pele ( 151312 )

    Now where do I find 26 empty floppies??

  • I learned Linux on Slackware (Score:3)

    by rickb928 ( 945187 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @06:16PM (#65990890) Homepage Journal

    0.9, way way back, 1994. It actually worked, mostly, and i was hooked. At the time I was keeping 2 SCO systems working, despite the app vendor lock-in so deep you could not change printers without a new license. And, no, we never moved the clients to Linux, they abandoned the app and moved to a NT Server solution.

  • "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)."

    Seems not for 'Long Term Support'

    :p

  • and not that this site is slowly being taken over by the clankers just so they can report on news 4 years late.

  • gone to shit hasn't it? Sad.

  • Yeah, it's another dupe (Score:3)

    by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Sunday February 15, 2026 @09:21PM (#65991112) Journal

    However, the original story was posted a little over 4 years ago. [slashdot.org]

    So ... better?

    • The editors wanted to be sure the original was no longer on the front page, that's why the longer wait before posting the dupe.

      I realise I'm not too early to this party but all things considered, my comment can hardly be considered late.

  • Is Cowboy Neal on his shit again?
  • One of two things, a journalist is taking an exam - can he still write an article. Or is it pickle season when old news is being dug up.

  • My first exposure to Linux and /. (Score:3)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) <treboreel@live.com> on Monday February 16, 2026 @01:11AM (#65991332) Journal

    Slackware was my first distro. I was working with Solaris and NCR/Unix at the time. I had some issues and a friend who has a 3 digit ID (Hi Matt ) recommended Slashdot as a resource. At that time it was a HUGE technical pool with working admins and engineers abundant. I got what I needed and I've been a LinuxHead ever since. I still have Slack running on a Digital Alpha machine that does nothing...

  • Fighting words! (Score:3)

    by storkus ( 179708 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:00AM (#65991534)

    I thought it would be a cool idea to celebrate the âoefarewell to udevâ. With the abandoned ConsoleKit replaced by ConsoleKit2 which is actively maintained by the Slackware-friendly XFCE crew, and Gentooâ(TM)s eudev taking the place of udev, we are well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while. Basically eudev contains the udev code as found in the systemd sources, but then stripped from all standards-violating systemd crap and with a sane build system. Hooray, weâ(TM)re back in business and eudev gained some more traction. Win-win.

    This by Eric Hamleers aka "AlienBOB" in 2015,a major dev and 1 of many reasons I continue to run Slack to this day since the mid-90's (when I could finally afford a PC).

    I run Linux on everything: Slackware on my PC's (unless doing multimedia or security then I use a dedicated distro due to the ridiculous # of dependencies, always a Slackware weakness), Android on my phone (though I've really been thinking of switching to something more open lately), and a Raspberry Pi 400 & (just bought) 500+, which brings up this from the ARMedSlack sub-project:

    Tue Feb 10 08:08:08 UTC 2026
    Making progress with the Raspberry Pi 5 with mainline Linux 6.18 LTS! .....
    The Raspberry Pi 5 can therefore be installed using the generic Slackware Raspberry Pi installer image. Users may optionally switch to the Raspberry Pi vendor kernel package for day-to-day use if required.

    The SlackPi project has better support and I've never read the reason why the projects are separate, but it's good he's making such progress.

    My first UNIX was BSD-4.3 at university on a MicroVAX II, but I've always had problems installing any of them into laptops. Slackware has always been the most BSD of the (current) Linux distros and likely why I continue to be most comfortable with it (though I'm still running Raspbian on the Pi's for now).

  • Huh. (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )

    I'm tempted to do a recompilation of an old MCC distribution, just to mess with people now. :P (MCC was the very very first Linux distro.)

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