Yes sorry I fixed that I was embarrassed sorry if it offended you not my meaning. Kind of you to bring it up. I am a huge fan of Eric's work.
Thank you for being kind.

i hope you are not being serious...

The way I see it.

Slackware is one giant package of packages. That is my starting point. I add third party packages and rebuild a few Slackware packages to suit. Third party packages are my responsibility NOT Patrick's. There are a few things that make me wince when I see them upgraded in ChangeLog.txt, Python is one of them. When Python 3.9 was upgraded to 3.10, I expected things to break in -current and especially with my third party packages that need Python. I knew I would have rebuild and upgrading to do. That is part of the territory when using -current. At this point I would rather stay with 3.10 than have to go backwards.

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There's a reason it's in unsupported/. It's not even in testing/ or extra/.

And Pat covers why it was added:

As for why this version? Only Pat can answer for sure, but it matches the version that was in -current at the time, so I think that's the easy answer.

Hmm... let's look through the ChangeLog.

• gcc 5.4
• gcc 6.2
• gcc 6.3
• gcc 7.1
• gcc 7.2
• gcc 7.3
• gcc 8.1
• gcc 8.2
• gcc 8.3
• gcc 9.1
• gcc 9.2
• gcc 9.3
• gcc 10.1
• gcc 10.2
• gcc 10.3
• gcc 11.2

Yeah, sure looks like he was sitting around being sooo lazy. /s

I doubt Pat will explain when you're calling him lazy. It's super easy to sit in your computer chair and say that things weren't done right in this development cycle. I really doubt that Pat put out the first update in this cycle on July 3rd 2016 that he said this release won't happen until 2021 or 2022 (hopefully not the latter). But the Linux ecosystem is constantly changing and the beta probably always seemed like it was "a few months away". Then more things happened and delayed things further. If he knew it was going to take this long, I imagine he would've put out at least a 14.3, maybe even a 14.4.

But hindsight is 20/20, yet you seem to think he had forwardsight of 20/20 and intentionally didn't release these versions when he must have known it was going to take this long. That's just ignorance on your part. He had no way of knowing it would be 5+ years until the next release of Slackware in the middle of the development cycle.

If you don't like how Pat develops his distro, find another one.

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That's the point. For me main difference between stable and -current is that my system on stable grows steadily. I need to add a lot of software. Say packages with mathematical software for numeric and symbolic computations. Better support for programming. But point is system became in time really fat. And I can't rebuild all this each time -current is updated. I don't have such powerful computer. This is why I prefer conservative policy about upgrades. One change at bottom and things collapsing like building. Often to find reason of such catastrophe requires so much hard work that only option which remains is to reinstall system and rebuild everything from beginning. Which of course I am not very happy of.

No I am not Slackware 'hobbyist'. I just use Slackware for all work I do on computer. I never had some kind of impression that I need some another system. I am not always happy. Particular nowadays as we witness this very long development period. And we don't know reasons for that. Sure. But for me claim that Slackware is not for 'professionals' but for 'hobbyists' is complete nonsense.

There are two things really annoying about Slackware: people who want to use it, but does not understand it, and complain about it; and people who want to know when the next stable version will be released.

Slackware is provided by Mr. Volkerding "AS IS", and if this distribution does not suits your needs, you are welcome to start looking for another one. No charges. It is not about a "user" or "fan", "professional" or "hobbyists", distinguishment. Is about who is adapted to/satisfied with the features of the system and who is not. Some people can use -current, some people do not. Some people can upgrade a particular package within a stable release, some people do not. Some people can install some software from scratch, some people prefer a Slackbuild, some people just want to run apt-get. That's ok! However, the philosophy behind Slackware does not changed; The head behind the project is the same; Simplicity and stability still the main parameters of the distribution. So, why all this groan and noise? Why people keep complaining? Maybe, Slackware is not what do you expect from a distribution... that's ok! But, please... stop complaining...

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:
I've been using OpenBSD a little. The only bad thing is, the computer I have, doesn't exactly enjoy 100% solid OpenBSD support. However, OpenBSD has caused me to appreciate Slackware in ways I never have before. Okay, maybe that is not 100% true. I have always appreciated the Slackware pkgtools. However, when I was trying to remove packages from OpenBSD I ran into some snags that caused me to appreciate pkgtools even more. I have to say, however, there is a huge ton of things about OpenBSD that I really like. OpenBSD is actually easy and very clean. I dislike the systemD creep I'm seeing in Slackware. The simplicity of Slackware is genius, imo. There have been a few things I really dislike take place, however, in current. Consolekit2 being replaced with elogin, loss of pure alsa option, and maybe a few other things, that admittedly must not be that important to me, or I would recall them. Even tho, I really admire and like OpenBSD, there is still a level of abstraction, that Slackware manages to escape from, that causes me issues on OpenBSD. Perhaps if I were to stick with it, I would get used to it, but regardless Slackware manages to be helpful while also staying out of the way.

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@khronosschoty: thanks for you input. I only tried GhostBSD so far, which I like, but trying OpenBSD (and also FreeBSD) is on my TODO list. I will also check their respective hardware support.

The way OpenBSD handles wireless connections, is by far the simplest, cleanest, sanest approach I have seen. The OpenBSD bootloader is not exactly a swiss army knife... in fact it makes lilo look like a swiss army knife, all the same, however, its very nice. I love the way full disk encryption is handled in OpenBSD. I really love how faithful OpenBSD is to the old Unix way. Instead of throwing out programs, so we can have the newest feature. They just add the occasional feature to existing tools. For example. Instead of curl or wget OTB, they have a ftp program that also fuctions much the same way wget does. Instead of tools devoted to just wireless, they added wireless handling support to their ifconfig. It took me a second to get used to the way the OpenBSD fdisk works, but its a nice simple tool.

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Yes. OpenBSD has a lot of nice touches. I also really like their OpenSMTPd, which I use on slackware in place of postfix (well, technically I replaced sendmail with it, postfix came later). I like OpenBSD a lot, but I could never use it for my day to day workstation: there always seems to be an issue that prevents that.

P.S. I think 4.3 was the last FreeBSD I tried. I should probably give it another chance after all these years.

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yes and even better a release every 6 months would be better but for that you need more developers, are you going to hire them? complaining is easy, instead of complain you can try to see in what you can help, i started learning Slackbuilds, i did some packages for me that are not available in the Slackware repositories, perhaps you can help in something instead of doing nothing for the distro.

is anyone forcing you to update in current?

just be patient version 15 is going to be released soon.

the problem would be that averyone would have a different opinion on what should Slackware become.

About Bsd, yes they are nice, but dont expect widevine to work, no flatpak, no docker (broken now), no steam, a lot of hardware doesnt have support.

FreeBSD + Wifi Drivers =

FreeBSD is nice. I briefly set it up for a relative to try out a few years ago. Wifi took some research to get working since I'm completely unfamiliar with the operating system. A newbie is going to have a very hard time figuring out how to setup their wifi with FreeBSD. I had to edit scripts to get it to work.

I never got far doing anything on FreeBSD, but OpenBSD is the exact opposite. WiFi is the easiest to use ever.

However, when I was digging around third party packages aka ports, I noticed netbsd and FreeBSD have way more packages at their fingertips.

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No issue at all setting wifi with networkmgr here. It may not have all features of NetworkManager but I didn't have to edit any script. I can't say which cards are supported, but mine is. As an aside, all my Linux partitions were auto-mounted when starting Mate. I don't know if other Linux file systems are supported, at least ext is. And I had zero issue adding KDE, XFCE, LXQt and GNOME to Mate, as well as lightdm and gdm and some other software.

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Good for you! I successfully installed KDE 4 and the NVIDIA driver for them. It was easy. Their Intel wifi was a pain in the butt for me. I had to do something like this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...n-freebsd-12-0