Took to long to prepare the list. @Didier Spaier beat me to it.

Switch to Slackware64-current or Slackware-current. Be prepared for constant updates and having to resolve issues with your third party builds. An example of issues was the recent upgrade of python from 3.8 to 3.9. It going to get more intense I think the closer we get to a possible RC.

What I use from your list:
GCC 10 is in testing, so far the only issues I have encountered are this one:
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-10/porting_to.html

I use KeePass with mono and libgdiplus. My own builds.
I use DropBox. Initially installed using Alien Bob's package.

I also have Alien Bob's ktown with Plasma 5 installed and his multilib packages.

If you want to play with other DE's then I suggest using a virtual machine, I use VirtualBox. I don't play much with other DE's or distributions though. I have several VM's for Slackware things though.

I generally build my own third party stuff. I also use a few packages from Alien Bob's repository.

I actually grab the SlackBuild for Vim from -current and compile it myself in a clean 14.2 chroot (plus python3 from SBo) for my 14.2 installation. This is the only stock Slackware package for which I do this. This is very easy to do and takes minimal effort. I already have the clean 14.2 chroot set up for compiling SBo packages.

So you're asking for someone else to compile and package the latest release of software packages you want, but running on Slackware 14.2, and make those packages somehow automatically available to you? I don't think Slackware stable is the distro for you. But feel free to do the work yourself and provide your packages for others to use!

If Firefox was in SBo, you would still have to modify at least the VERISON number in the SBo SlackBuild script and rebuild (run the script) it every time it was updated.

While most of my third party programs are from own SlackBuild's. Most of them are also on SBo. Some of those third party packages are are ready to install packages from Alien Bob's package repository. In the last two days I spent time to rebuild 23 of them against the new python 3.9 upgrade from Oct 25th update to -current. I currently have 111 third party packages installed.

Not accurate. Using sbopkg, it takes exactly one operation to update all SBo packages, just like Arch's `pacman -Syu`.

Yes it was accurate. The package manager sbopkg is not part of Slackware. If you are using what comes with Slackware you have have to download all the files needed from SBo and the source, then build the package. If you are using a different version of the source you will have to either edit the SlackBuild before running it or pass the version this way to the SlackBuild script.
I don't use sbopkg, so I can't say what it does or does not do. That said, I suspect that if the maintainer has not modified the SlackBuild for the new version you will be SOL until they do.

Bottom line, use Arch with fully automatic upgrades[1] and accept occasional instability or use Slackware and accept "old" packages. You can't have your cake and it it (although you can also maintain both in parallel if you want).

[1] although you'd need the AUR for the latest from git but then you are supposed to build the packages yourself. But even then some SLKBUILDs are sometimes outdated and you'll have to git pull anyway

So write a shell script to do all your system update stuff. I have one that does slackpkg updates, and also runs ruario's latest-firefox.sh script (with auto-install), I could add SBo stuff if I felt like it. Configure sudo to run the script for your user (without a password if you want*), alias `sudo yourscript` to something short, and there you go.

*A script like that should be chmod 700, since it's an open door to do anything as root without a password.

1 members found this post helpful.

I understand. Very good suggestion. That is what I will do. Thanks!

Thank you very much to all who replied. I now understand the Slackware Philosophy much better.
I consider the matter closed. I will mark it as [SOLVED].

P.S.
I've decided to give Slackware a chance after this thread.
Thank you all again :-)

3 members found this post helpful.

Good luck! I also recommend taking a look at sbotools for SBo stuff, to me it's much nicer for command line usage (no queue file messing around).

1 members found this post helpful.

BTW, the latest slackbuilds scripts are kept here:
https://github.com/Ponce/slackbuilds

KDE5/Plasma5 packages are here:
https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/
https://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/
https://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/

Welcome to the world of Slackware!

I cant seems to find i3status-rust on SBo. Please advise:-)

Looks like there was some misunderstanding on the specific program. i3status is on SBo, but i3status-rust is not. If i3status will work, you can just use that, but if you need the rust version, you'd either need to build it manually, create a SlackBuild (and possibly submit it to SBo and become the maintainer), or see if someone will create a SlackBuild for it and make it available to you.

1 members found this post helpful.

I will take you up on that challenge! :-)