Hi guys, one question.

I see the specific of Slackware is that it is very stable, has very long support, and it seamlessly allows application updates without sacrificing the system, like in many other distros. So technically, you could have a five year old Slackware system, and it will have reasonably updated apps? How does exactly Slackware achieve this? Is it just the dependency tracking issue, which then pans out to be a good thing?

Thankful in advance.

You need to use the slackpkg utility which ships with Slackware to apply security updates. Use an editor of your choice and navigate to /etc/slackpkg/mirrors
Uncomment one and only one mirror, that is, remove the # in front of the mirror. Save and exit. Issue the following commands in order to update your system.

If you upgrade your kernel during the patching process remember to run lilo.

Software updates are usually provided for stable releases only to fix security issues.

But you can upgrade applications yourself re-building Slackware packages against recent source tarballs, re-using build material provided in the /source directory of installation media, just putting the new source tarball in the relevant subdirectory and updating the VERSION parameter accordingly in the SlackBuild you'll find there. Your mileage may vary though, i.e. that could fail if the new version of the application requires dependencies more recent than the one shipped in your version of Slackware version. In that case you are on your own to upgrade the dependencies and check that won't break some other stuff.

So all considered, if it's a laptop or desktop and you want recent versions, it will probably be simpler to upgrade the whole distribution. On the other hand, if it's a server you probably often won't need to upgrade applications, but for security issues.

PS information about dependencies is not recorded in Slackware, but it is not very difficult to find out which package should be updated or added. For instance if during compilation you see a message complaining for some missing (or too old) shared library, let's call it <dep>, just issuing following command in case you made a full installation will probably find it:. The Package Browser comes also handy.

It's achieved by installing a recent version of WINE and then installing the current Win32 binary package built from the developer webpage on top of it... just kidding.

Unless a Linux application is specifically built to run on a five years old Slackware release, you will run into issues. The reason for this is that the Linux software ecosystem never got the separation between "operating system", "middle ware" and "self-contained application software" right. Everything is inter-mixed up to the level, where some desktop window manager requires some specific init system and kernel version. There are no distinct layers using standardized interfaces between them. The latter is required to be able to seamlessly update applications without making changes to the operating system (like how it works on Linux-based Android). This is also where the whole dependency hell comes from (which doesn't exist on Android).

There is not much Slackware can do about this, other than providing the most commonly used middle ware via a full install in the most recent stable Slackware release. So most of the available applications (not provided by Slackware) will have their dependencies satisfied without the need of hunting them done separately.