Anyone else find it interesting that an account that hasn't been used for ~8 years springs to life days before another one gets itself banned for doing the same shtick this one is doing in the Slackware forum? How many accounts are there?

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On the software side, the main drawback to 14.2 is browser related. If you want to stick it out there, then that is a pretty big pain point going it on your own.

Everything else, SBo is still pretty up to date for 14.2, so not much to complain about there.

On the hardware side, some people might need to roll their own kernel.

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A piece of advice given to me by a respected former colleague was to always 'sleep on it' before sending an angry-gram. That advice has served me well. Sometimes, I find that just typing it out "scratches the itch," so to speak... So well done!
Yeah. I mean, realistically, we're at the point where sticking with 14.2 is probably less practical than running -current anyhow. Just because you're running -current that doesn't mean that you need to manically apply the updates every day.

I've got a couple of servers running -current. One from June 2019 and one from May 2020. They're both headless, so they've only got the A, AP, K, L, N series installed. In both cases, I made an iso of the current tree and kept it so that I know exactly what's installed.

I've also got -current on my laptop from 6th Nov which I installed because I was keen to get onto kernel 5.15. Before that, it was running the version from January.

I don't see what the big deal is. The day will come when 15.0 is released... and the sun will set on that day just like it has every day for hundreds of millions of years... unless you live in northern Norway... and it's the middle of summer... in which case the sun won't set... Anyhow, you get the point. Right?

To get an up-to-date Firefox on my Slackware 14.2 desktop, I use Ruario's script to download & package the official binaries: https://gist.github.com/ruario/9672798

I choose the latest ESR Firefox because I've had to fiddle with my profile after installing the latest "standard" Firefox.

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Just keep reporting this troll until he's banned.

I mean, the above speaks for itself, but it's also true that at just 72 posts, he's already been responsible for at least two locked threads in the last week. That's a ridiculous ratio.

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My usage is pretty limited and predictable. I've been splitting my usage between Slackware and NetBSD, but I don't think things would be worse for me if I did everything in Slackware 14.2. There were only two times I felt a limitation...

1. I'd written a small Perl script and used a function in, uh, List::Util I think it was, maybe the uniq function. When I brought it to Slackware I had to make a compatibility stub because the Perl version is old. Another way would be to use perlbrew and have a non-system Perl that's more recent, but I don't do enough where I feel that's worth the trouble.

2. Found a couple bugs in calligra sheets. Thought I would make believe I am a C++ programmer again, with hopes of that being a starting point for transitioning from a scripter to a so called real programmer again. Looked like the bug was still in the 5.x version (and that hardly any maintenance is happening?) but the exercise to get and build latest source dragged on. Eventually I remembered a quote from a Lisp programmer and USENET hooligan along the lines of "life is too short to learn C++" (I would add, "particularly if you have humble faculties, particularly if modern companies mostly stopped using it for stuff like CRM or billing systems (C.R.U.D.?) and save it for what it's needed for.") Then I started to notice that no one seems to want my current job. Am now more inclined to try to coast to retirement. Even if I don't make it, much of this whole computer networks crapola is largely backed by half baked Perl and shell script, am I right? Probably could get a position. So possibly if calligra and qt were newer that long thought process might have been interrupted and I might have actually contributed something. Or maybe going from 5.x to 5.y would have posed the same problem.

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I don't understand what you mean. English is not my mother tongue, so there's that...

14.2 still works for me except for one thing: I can't use my address book in protonmail because the javascript it uses is incompatible with the FF68 javascript engine (it works in -current).

For two months now there have been no 14.2 upgrades available. Paradoxically I see that as a good sign.

I, too, use protonmail with 14.2--different browser, though.

If you haven't tried it before, I'd recommend the Palemoon browser. (It works well with protonmail.) Khronosschoty posted a fresh SlackBuild script here a few days ago.

I can confirm that this script works on 14.2, as I am using the latest version (29.4.2.1) to make this post.

Source code available here: http://archive.palemoon.org/source/

Likewise, Firefox has been the only package that's caused me problems and then only on a very few sites. I think wordpress was where I encountered the most problems.

There was one site that couldn't take my money - missing buttons.

Once I upgraded firefox using Ruario's script both problems went away.

I dip into Slackware-Current, just to ensure that it works for me (testing). My only problem at the moment is with sddm-0.19.0 and I can work around that, but I am wary of sddm-0.19.7. same problem, but the SDDM workaround no longer works. There are other Display Managers.

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How do you deal with limitations of 14.2?

This can be a significant problem as 14.2 lacks support for newer hardware - some intel video, for example.

I spent almost 2 years dealing with -current and understand your concern. After trying out BSD, the most expedient solution was switching distributions.

Works fine here, slackware64-14.2, compiled a batch of 4.14 kernels and updated no more than 20 packages from main tree.
And another one 32bit 14.2, it's probably going to work few more years since it's not networked or anything, takes around 3GB in total.
In virtualbox there's -current vmdk, but only command line so far, skipped most of /l and all desktop things, might compile X at some point but not yet.
@Dugan suggested few years ago I should throw away the GPU, that one still works, gigabyte 440GT 1GB VRAM.

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FWIW since hardware support is in the kernel, and 14.2 will run on any modern kernel you desire, I've never experienced hardware support problems for very long. I've rebuilt install isos as far back as Slackware 12.0 with new kernels that support all the hardware on my Z490 box with 10GB/sec eth0 and wifi6, for example. The problem is software which is limited by gcc version. That can be solved by cross-compiling but that's too much work for too little gain for me.

I still have a working 12.2 install, and a 13.37 install, on this box but I don't use them for networking on this machine. For most daily work I have migrated to 15.0-RC2 but my updated 14.2 is still very useful in every way for now. The biggest issue that will soon come, I'm sure, is supported browsers.

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I have been using 14.2 with tweaks here and there fine now.

* The kernel is upgraded to 5.4.134 which resolved a driver issue. I should probably go to something more current, but I have been very happy with 5.4.134's performance and reticent to upgrade.
* With Ruario's script linked to above, my Firefox previously showing as an unsupported browser has been resolved (though I never had any issues with the sites that stated it was unsupported, they still worked as expected/required).
* I have updated some packages beyond what is on SBo by just changing the version number in the Slackbuild script and using a more current source. This includes recently upgrading Emacs to 27.2 and git so I could upgrade my Doom.
* In the case of Virtualbox, I used the Slackbuild from Ponce's UNSUPPORTED -current repository and it compiles and executes without problem.

The one remaining challenge is that I have to leave tor-browser at 10.5.10 due to the Wayland dependency in 11.1. Bottom line, I am patiently waiting for 15.0. For my daily use, 14.2 still works. For me, 14.2 is that good.

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I use 14.2 with a few upgraded packages. I bumped
MESA to 13.0.6 by downloading the slackbuild and recompiling it, and NetSurf was bumped to 3.10
by dl'ing the SBo and patching it by hand.

I don't need neither KDE/KDEi nor Emacs, neither many multimedia pkgs nor XV.

I run Ungoogled Chromium/lynx, Sylpheed/getmail+s-nail,MPV, Mupdf from SBo's and LibreOffice from AlienBOB, among others.

The distro has been extremely stable so far.

If I need a new kernel, I'd just compile a new one by hand and that's it.

On security, I use the infamous Slackware firewall builder to set /etc.rc.d/firewall and that's it.

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