Slackware 15
Mayank Sharma has a childhood flashback to seeing his dad in the same predicament as he finds himself after all these decades.
Mayank Sharma has a childhood flashback to seeing his Dad in the same predicament as he finds himself after all these decades.
The beta release of Slackware 15 came out in April, and there’s a good chance that the final release will make landfall in time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Linux.
There isn’t much of an age difference between Slackware and Linux. True, Slackware wasn’t the first Linux distro; however, it didn’t arrive much later and has the honour of being the oldest Linux distro that’s still actively developed.
Slackware Linux started as a personal project of the then-university student Patrick
Volkerding, as a more functional out-of-the-box instance of SLS Linux, and only ever saw the day of the light due to the constant pestering of his peers at the university to release his changes as a distro in itself.
Slackware 1.0 was released on 17 July, 1993. It was built on top of Linux 0.99pl11-alpha and shipped as a set of 24 floppy disks. The distro would go on to become a working base for many Linux distros back in the day, such as the initial SUSE Linux.
The distro is popular for its glacial pace. The last major release of the distro, Slackware 14.0, was released in 2012 and even its last stable release, 14.2, is over half a decade old. Slackware’s release-when-it’s-ready philosophy seems out of place among the fixed and short release cycles of many of its peers.
Yet the lethargic release pace isn’t a reflection of the distro’s pace of behind-the-scenes development. Volkerding and a small team of contributors maintain the tree in a rolling release called “-current” and publish a release when it meets their stability goals.
The changelog for the current development version, which will become 15.0, shows a flurry of activity. For instance, while the 15.0-beta image shipped with a 5.10-series kernel, this has already been upgraded to a 5.13-series kernel in the -current branch.
The other notable presence is that of the Wayland display server. While the display server has been added to -current, the venerable X hasn’t been dropped and given the distro’s preference for stable, well-tested software, X could still be the default display server in Slackware 15. The one thing you can be sure wouldn’t be part of Slackware 15 is the systemd service manager, with the distro seeing no reason to replace the SysV init system, which has served it well through the years.
Kiss the frog
Everything about Slackware feels drab and dull, especially compared to its peers that are always keen to toot their shiny new bells and whistles. For instance, while modern distributions are tripping over each other trying to sing praises about their installers, Slackware still proudly carries an ncurses-based one from the last century.
Another characteristic of the distro is its lack of graphical administration wizards and tools to handhold users through administration and setup tasks. Oh, and its package management system doesn’t resolve dependencies, either.
And all this is a deliberate design decision, and perhaps the main reason behind Slackware’s popularity. Slackware takes pride in helping users exercise complete control over their installation. The distro’s philosophy is that interacting with it will give users an insight into Linux that you can’t get anywhere else. In the same vein, the distro’s approach to package management – which essentially involves compiling them from source – is a reflection of its ethos of technical simplicity.
All things considered, while there are still quite a lot of fans of Slackware’s philosophy of simplicity, the fact is that setting up and maintaining the distro requires a lot of time and effort, which isn’t a luxury everyone can afford, either on the desktop or on the server.