Hi,

That is why we have current and PV will have release candidate (rc) when ready for us to test and provide feedback.

From what I've heard "current" is stable. Looking at the changelog 15 seems ready! Surely some tasks remain which is why we don't have a release candidate yet. But I don't personally see any need for any changes beyond completing such tasks, to release 15.

Any further refinements and needs could be released with 15.1 (ex. LTS Kernel)

Apparently its not just cockroaches that will survive the Apocalypse, its also the when will the next Slackware version come out questions....

=====wait that means Slack survives too. kudos PV.

It's probably at least a bit subjective depending on specific use cases, but in my view Current seems as solid as any full release I've ever used and I started with v7. I also do not see Current as disruptive, certainly not more than some previous releases. I found 14.0 and onward far more disruptive with Pulseaudio than I ever have with Pam and elogind. I felt Pulse and it took a great deal of effort working around it. I've never felt anything from Pam or elogind.

Just around a month or two ago some people were asking why release was being held up by Plasma 5 and suggesting KDE be dropped to get v15 out. In fact from my POV, looong before then, way back with KTown, many months before Patrick essentially signed off on Plasma 5 and it first became Vtown, Plasma 5 was already vastly more solid and usable than when KDE v4 was first adopted even despite the actual fact that Patrick held out unlike almost every other existing distro that jumped the gun even though the devs said it was not yet ready for primetime. Perhaps the bar has been raised by just such events.

Current IS solid for most use cases BUT Patrick has very high standards and I applaud that approach and dedication. After all it isn't just about "does it work without crashing or not" it is about complex interactions that can later bite one in the ass, and the old saying "A stitch in time saves nine" I'm pretty sure everyone has experience in that wisdom. I am really looking forward to final 15, but I have no problem being patient. I applaud the various dev s and of course especially Patrick for insisting on superior quality and not caving to be yet another "also ran".

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I've been using Plasma 5 for awhile outside Slackware, and it is very mature by now. It's been very stable and quite mature for quite a long time.

I think most current effort with Plasma 5 is the kwin/wayland effort and general Wayland stuff. Not that it matters, but I think we're getting fairly close to a Plasma 6 (once most the Wayland efforts are completed). That will probably be unstable and lacking functionality for quite awhile, although KDE people have said they don't want big disruptive/unstable releases.

Current Plasma 5 is excellent though, and I don't expect any (non-Wayland) changes to happen to it before Plasma 6.

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After the pandemic...

Would it help if a plan was verbalized as the goals for the 15.0 release instead of a constantly moving goal post with unknown acceptance criterion? At times feel like Linus with Lucy and the football.

As an engineer I sometimes get frustrated that there is no plan / specifications for a release and it relies on a whim on what feels right -- airplanes do not fly that way -- explains the disasters with Boeing 737 Max 8 / 9

slackbuilds is essentially in no-mans lands waiting for 15.0 so many 3rd party packages are in limbo.

I previously predicted with colleagues that a major rebuild will occur once glibc 2.34 was released -- I told them that would happen when glibc 2.33 was released. Well yesterday glibc 2.34 was released still no 15.0 release candidate. I suspect a major rebuild coming soon.

Now that gcc 11.2 is out there I suspect that will be a new goal and another system-wide rebuild. Nevermind all the 3rd party packages required for a production server.

Add in the praise for Plasma 5.23 as the best ever wrt Wayland and functionality just moves the goal posts even more.

As an engineer, we are trained that there is no perfect solution, we do the best we can with what we have and produce a safe reliable product and map out the next release before one has released the current product.

Can you imagine that the first automobile manufacturers who produced electric vehicles prior to the ICE engines decided to wait for Li-Ion batteries, regenerative breaking, computer controllers, and other technologies to produce a car -- that would be insane. We would have never progressed as much as we had as a civilization.

Just saying -- get on with it. There is always 15.1 to incorporate these new features.

Even better, lay out a a set of goals that people can plan around. We see that with KDE, php, libreoffice, and many other software projectsall have goals with deadlines set out.

Bring on the flack for speaking some logic.

Live Long & Prosper.

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Come on, trust the process! It has worked well so far.

Not everything and everyone needs to be the same. There are plenty of distros that do what you want.

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I have -- I have production servers running on 14.1 -- was going to upgrade to 14.2 but heard Current was leading to a release -- that was 3-4 years ago so held back. 14.3 / 15.0 never came.

WRT other distributions as somebody who had been using Slackware since 1997 this is the first time I am seriously considering it. My colleagues are of the same frame of mind. We all cut our teeth on BSD 4 UNIX on mainframe servers and early versions of Slackware for Linux.

Slackware is losing faith in our eyes. It is fine as a linux you use for surfing / multimedia but is quickly losing it's status as workhorse running scientific apps / engineering applications.

I don't need a hobby OS. Slackware was never that till it became outdated on stable releases.

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I was going to ask why would you use slackware as a production OS? Do you have customer SLA's or have to be transparent with your customers as far as security/OS/package updates? With feels, I doubt that would go over well with customers.

We are the customer -- running a non-profit website that needs to withstand the best the Russian government can throw at it. We withstood many DDoS and still remained running -- thus the need for a stable version we can build on.

We survived the Orange Revolution & EuroMaidan attacks and that continue to this very day.

We need a solid base to build on -- hard to do when the base is either dated or shifting.

Just saying.

I use the same OS for my profession which is engineering. My colleagues for the non-profit are all engineers -- we approach things in a systematic manner.

Slackware met our needs but lately is sliding in our inability to recompile updated 3rd party code to secure levels.

Thus saying slackware as a base os has failed. I have initiated a search of alternative linux-based OS.

I have to say as all of us were early adapters of slackware, have been frustrated by a lack of a stable version since 2016 has opened us to attacks by the Russians. Even worse over the last 25 years had recommended slackware as a secure route for other open source / pro-democracy entities in Ukraine.

My faith is dwindling

Just wanted to point out that http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar..._AND_HINTS.TXT refers to http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackwar...nt/UPGRADE.TXT but UPGRADE.TXT is still the old 14.2 file.
UPGRADE.TXT will need to be updated before slk15 can be released

as a practice, when we do a major upgrade of a server we bring on new hardware and switch things from a firewall.

Thus the replacement servers are new installs with proper re-compiled 3rd party packages and/or replacements -- just saying

we were not born yesterday -- I have been programming since the 70's. where you alive then?

If you are running your servers on 14.1 I'm curious as to why you never upgraded to 14.2 ? If you don't intend to install 15.0 fresh but will choose to upgrade existing, I'd recommend upgrading at least to 14.2 to make the upgrade to 15 easier while enjoying the improvements of 14.2 over 14.1 for however long 15 takes.

Actually depending on the size of your company and if you would experience no major losses from very minor downtime, I think I'd try out a snapshot install of Current. I haven't run servers in almost a decade so I may not have recent experience that would involve server related setups but Current right now, especially as a snapshot system, is extremely solid. The only problems I see are due to frequent upgrades and most of those are PEBKAC.

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Well, I think you know as well as me that is not true and that you're responsible yourself as well. You don't HAVE to move to new releases, you can keep updating old versions of Slackware yourself. Or you can do as many others here, and just use Slackware current.

Well, just for your info, my previous answer was meant as encouragement, not some kind of criticism or answer.

Anyways, I'm not running servers, and I think Slackware 15 looks good for personal use. But in my opinion, it also still looks like one of the best server distroes, and one of the few without systemd (which might or might not be good for servers). In my view less complexity is probably better for a server. SELinux being one of the few exceptions.

I'm looking forward to trying KVM, LXC and Tomoyo on Slackware 15, and alongside bpfilter, I think those technologies (or SELinux/Tomoyo) are highly relevant in the server space. I'm feeling fairly confident these things will work out well on Slackware 15, and with the move to Python 3 I'm going to try to give SELinux another go too (just for testing..).

Just from my point of view (ignorant as it may be), Slackware 15 looks like a good base for all those things and more, and a superb environment to easily build them in.