[enorbet2]

Hi. I've been following and updating on Slackware Current for many months. I've been using Slackware as my Main Daily Driver since ~1999. I'm enthusastic about Current, and LiveSlak, but overjoyed to report 15.0 is almost here. Keep in mind that Slackware is made by a few developers but with only ONE at the head with ultimate veto power and integration strategy. RC1 is like most distros' Stable. It's a full boat install, nore tools than most even can imagine, all integrated and exceptionally unaltered and vanilla.

Even custom kernels can be easily built with no exterior customizations directly from source code at kernel.org. There is zero wait time for graphics drivers and any other desirable app to finally make it to some repository. It's trivial to build any app to a package from just raw source with whatever config suits you, not somebody else.

You can read about it at Phoronix here - Slackware 15.0 Coming Soon With RC1 Released - Phoronix Forums

or from Distrowatch here - Development Release: Slackware Linux 15.0 RC1 (DistroWatch.com News)

or directly at Slackware.com. You can check out the excellent support community here - Slackware Forum

Hope to see some of you there and here

 

[enorbet2]

LONG OVERDUE UPDATE - My apologies for not keeping up with the message here but today, Slackware 15.0 was upgraded to RC3. As much as I love Slackware for being so powerful, stable and solid, this Release Candidate is the current result of the progression Current (Testing) has been on for over a year. It is the finest Slackware already finer than most final releases have ever been. It has taken time because Patrick is a perfectionist, but the wait is already worth it.

It presently comes with the 5.15.14 kernel and XFce and KDE Plasma versions to match. Naturally as always it comes with a wide array of the lasted dev tools built-in and integrated as well as a lot of modern little niceties like NVME utilities.
I guess you can tell I'm loving it.

 

[enorbet2]

FINAL - Today 15.0 Official was released. It comes with

• 5.15.19 kernel with preemption enabled allowing your booloader to specify preempt, dynamic, or no preemption,,,,
• the very latest GCC (11.2.0) glibc 2.33 and build tools, like Rust 1.5.81

*nvme supported from the jump...

• still has a 32 bit version
• FFmpeg and Lame have been added to the distro and, it includes SDL2, speex, opus, fluidsynth.
• QT5, KDE (with Frameworks 5.90) Plasma 5 and Python3 as well as Xfce 4.16 and Wayland support

PLUS

You can download the Liveslak versions that are full operating systems, not excuses for graphic installers, offering other WMs and DEs. Liveslak can be transferred fully bootable via a single command from USB to any hard drive or SSD.

 

[D-EJ915]

Cool thanks for the heads up, thinking about switching back over to linux I'll check it out.

 

[enorbet2]

Hello D-EJ915
No disrespect implied. Just a word of caution because of triggers from "switching back". Slackware is not considered "user friendly" for new to Linux peeps. It IS extremely flexible and powerful but that, as the cliche goes, comes with great responsibility. If you're used to pushing the "Power" button and with no input from you, the next thing you see after a pretty animated graphic is your Desktop... Slackware might not be for you.

Upon first boot you will land on a Multi-User Command Line Terminal. From there you will arrive at CLI LOgin and you can login as root and use "adduser" to create your user account. You would most likely want to execute "xwmconfig" to select your default Desktop Environment if you hadn't already done so during install. You can "startx" to go to default or "sddm" for the Chooser X Login. At the Chooser you select User and choose from a few WM/DEs and either X11 or Wayland.

I suggest you try LiveSlak on a USB stick first if the above sounds daunting to you.... maybe even in addition to a full install as a really awesome Rescue Environment, basically a full system on a stick. Even the Live version requires Login, but it does default to Graphic. You just login as User = Live and Password = live until you change it. Yes, it does come as persistent even on USB - keeps changes and allows permanent installation of packages....basically a complete portable OpSys.

If you want Easy, this isn't it. If you want Powerful, this will absolutely thrill you.

 

[enorbet2]

I should add there is already a decent YouTube video review and demo out. It starts pretty slowly going over some history but you can skip that and just FFWD to 11:25 and follow a step by step VM install. This one is by OldTechBloke an d can be found here =====>>>

 

[D-EJ915]

Hello D-EJ915
No disrespect implied. Just a word of caution because of triggers from "switching back". Slackware is not considered "user friendly" for new to Linux peeps. It IS extremely flexible and powerful but that, as the cliche goes, comes with great responsibility. If you're used to pushing the "Power" button and with no input from you, the next thing you see after a pretty animated graphic is your Desktop... Slackware might not be for you.

Upon first boot you will land on a Multi-User Command Line Terminal. From there you will arrive at CLI LOgin and you can login as root and use "adduser" to create your user account. You would most likely want to execute "xwmconfig" to select your default Desktop Environment if you hadn't already done so during install. You can "startx" to go to default or "sddm" for the Chooser X Login. At the Chooser you select User and choose from a few WM/DEs and either X11 or Wayland.

I suggest you try LiveSlak on a USB stick first if the above sounds daunting to you.... maybe even in addition to a full install as a really awesome Rescue Environment, basically a full system on a stick. Even the Live version requires Login, but it does default to Graphic. You just login as User = Live and Password = live until you change it. Yes, it does come as persistent even on USB - keeps changes and allows permanent installation of packages....basically a complete portable OpSys.

If you want Easy, this isn't it. If you want Powerful, this will absolutely thrill you.

any linux is easy compared to setting up my old unix boxes lol but thanks for the concern. Biggest thing would be systemd and moving from 2.x kernels lol!

 

[enorbet2]

Cool! Closest I ever came to Unix was OS/2 with emx runtimes. So, respect! Thankfully no systemd for Slackware although the community is so active with devs there is a spinoff distro called smt like Slackd. 15.0 has kernel 5.15.19 and is dead-on vanilla, no additions or modifications from true source. Custom kernels from source are a breeze.

Incidentally Slackware Current has come to ARM, and there are 2 versions, Slarm and Aarch-Slackware64. I've built AarchSlackware64 on a RockPro64 and it's just amazing. I don't know if you're into SBCs but the RockPro64 is a 6core CPU w/ either 2GB or 4GB RAM and it handles being a full featured NAS server w/o breaking a sweat.

 

[D-EJ915]

Cool! Closest I ever came to Unix was OS/2 with emx runtimes. So, respect! Thankfully no systemd for Slackware although the community is so active with devs there is a spinoff distro called smt like Slackd. 15.0 has kernel 5.15.19 and is dead-on vanilla, no additions or modifications from true source. Custom kernels from source are a breeze.

Incidentally Slackware Current has come to ARM, and there are 2 versions, Slarm and Aarch-Slackware64. I've built AarchSlackware64 on a RockPro64 and it's just amazing. I don't know if you're into SBCs but the RockPro64 is a 6core CPU w/ either 2GB or 4GB RAM and it handles being a full featured NAS server w/o breaking a sweat.

Cool I'll look at those, I do want to replace my 12 year old 1366 socket windows file server with something else too.

These days is rough for unix workstations, back 10 years ago or so they were like 50-100 on ebay for top spec machines when they were being decom'd so I got quite a lot but I gave away most and only have a select few left I've not booted in ages to be honest.

 

[enorbet2]

Hello again D-EJ915
With your background in Unix and if you want a server instead of a Desktop, although it is possible to combine them in Slackware, if you get something like the RockPro64, you may prefer one of the NetBSD. There are ongoing and rapidly developing versions around. Then again you may like the blend of BSD and SysV init system of AarchSlackware and x86 based Slackware. The RockPro64 is very impressive, especially for being basically ~4 years old. Firefly is based on the Rockchip but is upping the game from 6 to 8 cores and supports up to 32GB RAM where the RockPro64 is maxed out at 4GB.

That said, I recently tried OpenMediaVault NAS RockPro version (I want to re-build the Web Interface to run on Slackware) and with a basic Desktop installed but mostly inactive in Multi-User CLI, RAID 1 polling, mounted, and shared, with my Main machine logged in to the Admin page of the RockPro, htop shows an average of 3% CPU and 167MB RAM usage... not too shabby, eh?

 

[enorbet2]

UPDATE - Turns out I don't (yet?) use my NAS as much as I thought I might but it works flawlessly when I RSYNC (about once a month). Official Release 15.0 is amazing.

I run several PCs, the oldest retro box is based on an ancient Asus A8-NE with AMD FX 57. With an SATA SSD is quite snappy and very usable. My laptop is a very old Thinkpad T61P I bought for the security of being pre Intel MCE but is way maxxed out. BIOS upgrade gave me the hidden/default/disabled features of doubling RAM capacity and upgrading SATA to v3. I also bought an older T60 extremely cheaply for the better, drop in, IPS monitor as well as the Extreme Core 2 Duo CPU. It's pretty amazing actually though I intend at some point to upgrade cooling more.

My Main PC (multiboot) is getting a bit long in the tooth as I'm still using an Asus Maximus XII Hero with the original 10th Gen i5-10600K OCd to 5.0GHz . I'm contemplating getting an 11th Gen CPU to enable PCIe v4. Either that or I'd like to get an NVME drive twice or more capacity so I could drop one drive since the shared bus does slow down drive performance noticeably w/ Gen 3 PCIe.

I recently tried PopOS and Arch (a few versions and offshoots like anARCHy and Manjaro again) but they just don't do it for me. The latest OpenSUSE Leap 15 is rather decent though and I even like the ARM version fairly well. At their most fundamental though, none of them compete with Slackware. Certainly some of that is just 20 years plus of familiarity but a substantial percentage is just that I despise systems that lack control and transparency. Slackware still does exactly what I tell it to, no more and no less, and is so stable and maintenance free it's kinda boring for a tweaker, but performance-wise, 2nd to NONE!.