Slackware Approaches 28th Birthday With New Beta Release

Slashdot reader LeeLynx shares news from The Register about a Slackware 15 beta release (following the debut of February's alpha), 'nearly five years after the distribution last saw a major update.' (And nearly 28 years after its initial release back in 1993...)

Created by Patrick Volkerding (who still lays claim to the title Benevolent Dictator For Life), the current release version arrived in the form of 2016's 14.2... The Linux kernel has been updated to 5.10.30 (at time of writing) with 5.11.14 available for testing. Desktop fans may be pleased to see, among the many updates, KDE Plasma hitting 5.21.4 as well as updates for old faithfuls, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.

The beta itself dropped on 12 April (with the 5.10.29 kernel) and Volkerding noted: 'I'm going to go ahead and call this a beta even though there's still no fix for the illegal instruction issue with 32-bit mariadb. But there should be soon.'

Tinkering has continued since, judging by the change log, although the beta tag brings hope there will be a release before long.

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