Yes all, 14.2 is three years old today [this is going by the changelog, not the official announcement on the website].
Thanks to a fantastic stable distro, a great community, and most of all to PV. Have a great Sunday, all, and raise a glass for Slackware tonight.

Excellent service for 3 years! Not only did it run great as main desktop OS that whole time, but the same installation also has been "replicated" into work desktop and a few laptop computers. And still offer decent libs for modern applications. Cheers!

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It has certainly felt like longer. I moved all my servers to -current a few months ago because some libraries were too old to compile anything anymore. Coincidentally, I just bit the bullet and moved to Slackware -current last week on my main desktop (short of the 3rd anniversary!) to support new hardware. Thank you 14.2 for your service

Well said! I moved all of my Slackware units to -current a year or two ago. Current is running well. Looking forward to 15.0.

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Still running 14.2 on my daily driver. Although, I've seen interesting things in -current Changelog, nothing has stood out as enough to change over to -current yet. When Pat tells us its ready, I will - until then 14.2 just works!! (for me)

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Three years of uninterrupted service with no surprises in /patches. Just everyday quiet and peaceable usage.

I realize some people with newer hardware need newer driver modules. I suspect those of us who don't have newer hardware are content with 14.2. I am. As a side comment, three years is a relatively short cycle, less than 5 and much less than 10.

I wish Pat's methodical pace and thoroughness was copied more upstream. Rapid release is irritating for many users.

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I'm still on 14.2 on my main desktop computer (which doubles as a home server), but I had to move to -current on my HTPC since the hardware is too new for 14.2. I may need to move my desktop over soon since I have a newer video card that I should install, but it needs a newer mesa and amdgpu driver (I'm already running a 4.19.x kernel), and I'm not sure how far the dependency tree will take me (I know on 14.1 it required upgrading all of X as well, and I don't want to go through that again).

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Do it. In my experience, it's much easier to just go with -current and the updated libs than trying to beat 14.2 into submission.

Case in point: I was stuck on Gajim 0.16 for a long time because 1.0 requires a newer GTK3 and some Python 3 stuff. I tried for a bit to write some SlackBuilds but took a look at GTK3 and decided I have better things to do. I upgraded to -current and compiling Gajim was easy: most of the required python packages were already in -current and so was the new GTK3. Same for my RX 580: -current already has mesa 19.1 and drivers are in the kernel. No setup required.

That's the thing. 14.2 has been working fine for my usage except for hardware limitations (and the latest version of kodi needs some tweaking to compile on 14.2 and you can't enable VAAPI decoding since it requires a newer mesa, but that's only on my HTPC and wasn't a factor on my desktop). I prefer to not run -current since I know I won't keep up with updates. My HTPC running -current hasn't been updated since I installed it at the end of May and will likely stay that way unless I see/hear of some major security vulnerability that makes me feel it needs to be updated. Last time I did this (I think it was -current leading to the release of 14.0), I installed -current and didn't update it until the next stable release was announced.

I've always been bad at updating my systems. I'm more of a set it and forget it type of person, even though that mentality isn't great with the current security issues constantly being announced. Plus with the constant changes in libs with -current and the occasional breakage they can cause with ponce's unofficial SBo repo, I just tend to sit at a version until I feel it's worthwhile to dedicate my limited time to manage it. With my current job usually taking up 50-60 hours a week and a house and yard that is in need of some TLC, not to mention spending time with my family, I don't spend nearly as much time working on the computer as I did a few years ago. Spending the time I should with maintaining -current is just unsustainable for me. (I used to install pretty much every CyanogenMod nightly version for my phone for several years, but my time is spent elsewhere now.)

I'd rather just spend a few hours once to go through and try to manually upgrade mesa, libdrm, and hopefully only a few other packages to try and get that card to work on 14.2 and then just wait until 15.0 is released before I finally upgrade.

Happy birthday! Hopefully it will have a little sibling before the next one.

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I've tried moving --Current twice and both times it broke, once after a period of months, the other time after a period of days. I have no animosity, because, if one chooses to run a testing version, stuff may happen--live with it.

But for now I'm sticking to 14.2. It's proven rock-solid stable for me.

As someone posted here when I was very new to LQ, "Slackware--the distro of iron; it always works and it never breaks."

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It's rock solid release 14.2, but obviously I compiled some new things for general features/usability of the system:

Among other things: Thunar-1.6.17 with gtk2, most of xfce4-4.12.x with gtk2 (except the terminal/vte)
Furthermore; qt5-5.9.8, ffmpeg-4.1.3, libvdpau-1.2, libdrm-2.4.98, and mesa-19.0.6

Regarding mesa-19, it's fine with either meson or autotools, but I use the latter because it's part of /d/ standard install.
Tested a meson build too, but as long as autotools work there's noo rush for this addition.

About new drivers etc, in most cases it's only a matter of new kernel and new hwdb rules (I just unpack from current eudev package).
As usual, hardware straight from assembly line probably won't work with old kernel, but FWIW new kernels work fine on 14.2 (I tested 4.14.x, 4.19.x, probably around 50 versions)

Flexible system, easily extended, modular, seams like a rare thing these days.

For what its worth the autotools build is gone now in the mesa git master, moving forward meson will be the only choice.

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Many times you won't even need to get the new hwdb rules (this was the first I'd even heard of it, but thanks for the info!) for that hardware to work. You can also update your PCI ID list using update-pciids to most likely fix any items that don't have proper names in lspci.

While just updating the kernel will provide support for most hardware, video cards can be a little different. To fully benefit from newer graphics hardware, you usually need an updated X driver along with an updated mesa and any dependencies for those that might need to be upgraded (mesa typically requires fairly new libdrm).

I have used 14.2 for years but when I got a new laptop early this year, I had to move over to openSUSE because of the newer hardware, but I have a partition all laid out and ready for the next stable version of Slackware. Now if we can just convince Pat to put it out.