Didier's advice to newbies: don't run -current if you are not already at ease with Slackware. The dissemination of “Slackware-current” fastens and helps to finalize the development of the future stable version, allowing those who wish to test the work in progress and report problems. It should neither be used in production nor considered as a proper way of updating a stable release. At least that's my opinion. Personally, I only run it for testing purposes. Additionally, the SlackBuilds provided by http://slackbuilds.org can or not run as is on -current, so if you need something that fail you'll need to roll your sleeves to make it work (which could help to update it, but that's another story).

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Still, running slackware-current is NOT recommended for production systems, unless it is your own single-user computer and you are knowledgeable enough both with Slackware and with Linux in general to fix stuff that breaks or does not work because it needs patches.

Don't come yelling at us when things break on your slackware-current box unless you can show that you applied that knowledge of yours to try and find the fix yourself first.

Slackware newbies should steer clear of slackware-current. That can not be repeated too often.

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I reinstall Slackware a lot, mostly because I am constantly testing my bootstrap configuration scripts (https://github.com/ryanpcmcquen/config-o-matic).

I have been running -current since the 14.0 days and find that it is quite stable. The Slackware team is AMAZING.

Thanks for that, Eric. Indeed. If you FUBAR your -current box you are expected to do some trouble shooting on your own. I should have mentioned that.

You can increase the size of most file systems without reinstalling! Even using gparted its pretty easy...

I upgraded to slackware current within my first few days of using slackware with only a little experience from debian sid. The only thing it really required on my part was some reading and messing around. I don't think its that slackware newbies shouldn't use current, its that anyone not willing to show a little initiative and learn something new shouldn't use it. Its not much harder and lot of packages have made large improvements since 14.1.

I installed 13.0 from DVD in the fall of 2009. I've been running -current since then. I usually keep a DVD of the latest -stable as a backup/rescue disk if I mess things up.

Mats

I reinstall my Slackware64 Current every month because i like install fresh install with new packages recompiled from zero.

I happily use -current almost from the beginning. Oldest package date in /var/log/packages is 2009-Jun-30 because i moved to slackware64. Everything works perfectly all the time. I even have kdelibs3-3.5.10-x86_64-opt1 still installed for some ancient kde3 progs i use

KDE 3.5.10 was a sweet ride; I remember running that on a PIII 800 IBM box. These days I'm very happy with XFCE 4.12 on -current.

~$ ls -ltr /var/log/packages/ | head -2 | grep -v '^total'
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13903 Nov 17 2013 wicd-1.7.2.4-x86_64-4
~$ ls -ltr /var/log/packages/ | tail -1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1555 Jun 13 22:00 openssl-solibs-1.0.1o-x86_64-1

Since Nov 17 2013...

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Dec 20, 2012.

I've been running Slackware64-current since its inception. About two years ago, I went multilib and did a fresh install. I have had a few problems, but managed to fix 'em - some easily, some not so easy. I keep good backups though just in case............

has linux got that far that it now suffers the "needs reinstall every now and then" syndrome? i only knew this from windows.

ran current since since 10.2 this old 80 gig harddrive is still alive and has been moved from machine to machine. when 13.0 came out I started a 64 bit with multi-lib wrote a script for my system keep it updated and have used that ever since. At no time have I used current as my main O/S there is a reason why Pat says it is not wise. One is security the other is it can break at times and has. My secret to running current is always do a slackpkg install-new before upgrade-all. and with 64 multilib
well it runs the multilib updater also. on my work machine I keep a snapshot of the system a backup. That's in case I do something stupid.