Like I said earlier, this is a short review, more of a cautious sampling of what Slackware can do. I am thinking of perhaps trying it on a "real" laptop, complete with Nvidia graphics and whatnot, to see how it's going to cope with an existing, somewhat complex partition layout and proprietary drivers. After all, if you can't use your hardware, and installing software is a pain, then the rest doesn't matter.

I do like the spartan approach, but it's also not feasible for most people out there. Even if you can get through the installation, the day-to-day usage needs to be simple and elegant. I don't know how accessible Slackware is when it comes to more complex things. I am mulling that endeavor still, and it could be an interesting little exercise. Anyway, so far so good. Not bad, but definitely nerdy and true to its original mission.

Thanks to an anonymous sponsor, I am now operating a physical server in a US data center with a 1 Gbps connection to the Internet.

This server addresses a complaint of many people who are trying to download ISOs of the Slackware Live Edition. My slackware.nl aka download.liveslak.org server is hosted in a Dutch datacenter in Amsterdam, and it looks like people outside Europe, in particular downloaders in Southern Pacific region, are experiencing terribly slow speeds when fetching content from that server.

Slackware Linux is the world's oldest surviving Linux distribution. The distribution is a slow moving project, often with several years between releases. The gap between Slackware 14.2 and the latest 15.0 release was about five and a half years, for example.

Slackware has a well deserved reputation for stability and for having a simple technical design. A design which frequently ignores modern approaches to system management. Slackware still uses a text-based system installer, has 90s-era approaches to package management, and prefers editing text files over graphical tools when it comes time to adjust most configuration settings. The distribution's official media does not offer a live desktop environment, though there is a community branch which provides live media for people who wish to test the distribution on their hardware. The project's official release announcement acknowledges this slow-to-change style, noting Slackware is just now adopting PAM authentication (something most other Linux distributions have used since the 1990s) and continues to use the classic SysV init software instead of systemd: "We adopted 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."

In other words, while Slackware runs a lot of modern software such as KDE Plasma 5.15, version 5.15 of the Linux kernel, and PipeWire the underlying style and approach are still very much the same as they were 25 years ago.

Slackware 15.0 is available for 32-bit and 64-bit builds of the x86 architecture. There is also an ARM branch of the project, though install media for it was not available on release day. The 64-bit (x86_64) build is a 3.6GB download.

The Slackware media boots to a text screen where we can select kernel options. This is followed by a second text screen where we are given the chance to select a keyboard map. The install media then drops us at a console login prompt where we can sign in as root without a password. Above the login prompt is a helpful message letting us know we will need to format the disk and set up at least one partition, then run the setup command in order to get started.

LibreOffice Community Edition 7.3.0 was released last week… on the day we were preparing the Slackware 15.0 release. You’ll forgive me that my focus was elsewhere and that it took until today to upload a new set of packages for Slackware 15.0 and -current.

The main selling point of the 7.3 release cycle is better interoperability with Microsoft’s Office file formats. Note that the Microsoft proprietary file formats are still based on a deprecated standard (since 2008 actually), whereas LibreOffice uses the ISO standard OpenDocument Format.
These improvements center on three areas (text copied partly from the release notes)...