Short answer: No. Somewhat longer answer: Not yet, but we’re getting there. There’s still lot’s of things to do, but there will be an alpha release soon (hopefully). Really long answer: It has been almost two weeks now that Slackware 15.0 has been released (yay!) and there are now regular inquiries on IRC and in the forums concerning the release of Salix 15.0. So, no, Salix 15.0 is not ready yet.

It seems like, finally, the pieces are being put in place for the next Slackware release. It has been a long wait, it will be 5 years since the 14.2 release in a few months. Since Salix releases are tied to Slackware releases, there hasn’t been a Salix release for a long while too. Major changes that the next Slackware release will introduce include a switch to PAM, Linux kernel 5.

A Display Manager is the application that provides a graphic user interface (GUI) that is displayed at the end of the boot process and lets the user authenticate themselves by providing their username and password, before entering their preferred X11 session, for example Xfce, KDE, fluxbox, etc. Up until Salix 14.2, we’ve been using a very old version of GDM as the default display manager. Actually we’ve been using the same major version of GDM, which is 2.

Unfortunately, we’re having a huge problem with spammers in our forums. Most of the users that register are actually spammers. This has been going on for a while too. About a year ago (or maybe more than that? I’m not sure), we moved to using Google’s “I am not a robot” checkbox reCAPTCHA. This is supposed to be the best countermeasure against bots. Before doing that, spammers were also a big problem.

I wanted to do this for a long time. The old blog site at blogspot was always supposed to be something temporary. It lasted five years… I never really liked the look of the old blog site that much. And there weren’t that many options to customize it in the first place. The WYSIWYG editor was ugly and difficult to work with. And it was hard to prepare content and post it later.