Solely out of curiosity, I decided to check up on the status of Slackware, my favorite Linux distribution, and see how far it has gotten. Went to the website and was quite disappointed to see the last news item. “Slackware 10.2 is released!”, dated 14th September 2005, almost a whole year ago. I wanted to find out if any development is still going on or if the project has frozen altogether so I opened a mirror site and was somewhat relieved to see that the “current” branch was last updated only a day ago.
I’m still disappointed that the default kernel is still 2.4 (makes sense from a stability point of view, but 2.6 has been out for very long now) and Apache is still 1.3 (again, I’m running 2.2 on this server). The good thing is, a lot of other packages (like vim, x11, SeaMonkey) are newer than what is available for Ubuntu.
A search on Distrowatch revealed that release candidate 3 (RC3) for Slackware 11.0 was just released on the 25th August and there have been recent updates. I’m now hoping the final will be out by the time I receive a new laptop (which will be any day now). Sorry Ubuntu fans, but I just don’t get the same feel with Ubuntu that Slackware provides. The latter is just more stable and efficient and since all my servers are also running it, having it on my main work system makes sense.