The makers of Slackware Linux, the oldest Linux distribution, have just released version 15.0 of the Linux distro.
See also: Hunting down the pwnkit vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034) on Linux
Slackware Linux appeared in 1993 and founder Patrick Volderding continues to maintain the distribution to this day, but a new version has not been released since 14.2 in 2016.
As The Register notes, development of version 15 was slow with the stable release coming a year after the beta was revealed.
Volderding says his focus in this release was to modernize Slackware.
“The challenge this time was to adopt as many of the good things in the market as possible, without changing the character of the operating system. To keep it familiar but also modern,” he says in his announcement.
See also: LockBit ransomware: Linux version targets VMware ESXi servers
Before the stable release, Slackware maintainers built over 400 different Linux kernel versions before settling on kernel version 5.15.19, which has long-term support until at least October 2023.
The highlight of Slackware 15 is the addition of the latest Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. This is a big jump from the Linux Kernel 5.10 LTS seen in the beta release. Overall, with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, you should have a good hardware compatibility result for the oldest active Linux distro.
Speaking of KDE, you should find the KDE Plasma packages updated to 5.23 while KDE Frameworks was updated to version 5.88.
Apart from that, Slackware 15 also comes with Xfce 4.16 as one of the desktop environment options. As an alternative to PulseAudio, support for PipeWire was added to Slackware 15.
Other core packages and applications such as Network Manager, OpenSSH, Krita, Falkon browser, and Ocular received upgrades. Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird were updated to their latest available packages.
See also: CWP bugs allow root code execution on Linux servers
Slackware version 15.0 x86_64 supports systems running UEFI firmware.
You can check the official changelog if you want to see all the technical details for this release.
Volderding says of this release: “this time the priority was the software.”.
Information source: zdnet.com
