I'm curious to know how many people are using slackware 14.2 on desktop home pc or workstation, since it is too old - I think - to be usable, unless you install ktown and many thirdy part or self build packages.

Personally I only use -current starting from the first package upgrade after stable release.
Unfortunately I don't have slackware servers.

Are you asking how many people are using kde4?

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I only run Slackware64-current. I've done that for several years.

I've been using 14.2 since it came out. How do you figure it's too old for anything? That's an incredibly ignorant statement.

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I use 14.2 all day every day (without much use for K*)!

Agree, why do you say it is too old? It will be the perfect desktop OS for me until 14.2++ arrives, and then some!

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Also using 14.2 here on my personal laptop. With apologies to Bill Clinton, maybe you need to define "use" and "desktop"? I mean, I use a modified twm as window manager, a bunch of different web browsers, emacs, xterms, mpv and maybe one or two other things I'm forgetting. Occasionally I might run gnumeric or abiword which is more desktoppy. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing, but these old versions work well (and of course the way security updates are done it's not all old is it?).

The one place where I've hit friction was with the age of the Perl interpreter. I got annoyed once because its List::Util didn't yet have uniq. But that is not hard to work around.

It will be cool to get a newer Perl (and all the other stuff in 15 too I suppose, heh).

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I'm happy enough using slackware 14.2...... Actually I'm just content cause everything just works.

Imho, the only time a distro is too old is when it's EOL and can not be ungraded.

Which implies there is a long time to run before slackware 14.2 is too old.

That's a personal choice.

Me I'm, already too much of a slacker, after a mere 12 months, to worry about the installing those newest stuff.

15 will be released when it is considered ready and not before.

I'm using 14.2 as well for my desktop (which also doubles as a server).

I don't feel it is too old for compiling. If you're one to keep up with projects directly and not following SBo, I imagine you'll find some programs that won't compile. However, my experience with maintaining 38 packages on SBo seems to show 14.2 is fine for most cases. I think only 1 of those 38 packages on SBo is limited because of Slackware. It is pitivi and pretty much every new version requires a new version of gstreamer, so it very quickly gets out of date on stable releases of any distro.

In packages that I'm not maintaining, I did find the newer version of kodi wouldn't compile unless you disabled VAAPI decoding (which is why I went with -current for my htpc). I also found I couldn't upgrade handbrake to the latest due to 14.2's libraries.

3 packages of the 600+ 3rd-party packages on my system not compiling because they require newer libs isn't bad at all However, I don't usually branch outside of SBo packages, which have obviously been tested against 14.2. So it's unlikely I'll run into an issue unless I'm building something outside of SBo, which doesn't happen very often.

Used to use it with a P4 Prescott. But, it didn't work after an upgrade to i5-7500. Current became obsessed with KDE. A different distribution worked better.

For Slackware *in general* (not the 14.2 vs -current you asked, sorry: my mistake)
8185 LQ members (atm)

Click on YOUR username (top left in post); select: View Public Profile
On that page, under About Me (if not de-customized), you will see the Distro you put in your Profile (IF any).
Click on that, to get my above link, which is a list of members using that Distro.

Another way I'd say it: about half of active LQ'ers.

IF you want to see a live 15beta, https://slackex.exton.net

p.s. To slightly redeem my embarrassingly erroneous reply,
one can edit the URL to 14.2 (232)
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ll&field5=14.2
or current (tho may match non-slackware) (696)
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...field5=current

So I might guess: 2/3 current; 1/3 14.2

BUT that only applies to members who (meticulously) update their Distro to exact version (not many I'd guess)

Again, my apology for jumping to the false idea that this was just another (anti)Slackware 'attack', by not reading it more carefully.

It's stable enough so I use it, on desktop, notebook, netbook, backup systems, USB recovery systems, both 64bit and 32bit.
I do compile a lot of stuff though, so it's much less effort on my part to use a stable base as opposed to unstable rolling release model.
If I were to move into rolling release, that would mean recompiling all my stuff every other day as opposed to recompiling every few weeks or even months.
Not a KDE user though, I'd figure there's much more benefit for KDE users to move into -current, for the rest of us not so much.

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Hi,
I use Slackware 64 14.2 KDE4 as an server with some daemons to access the internet. The server is not in my office but accessed with X or VcXsrv (Windows). There is a distance of 30 meter between the server and my office.
I need an X interface to the server to maintain the KDE4 system. It uses KDM but KDM has died on Plasma and has lost its function of a real multi user system as in the old days.
14.2 has been upgraded. e.g. with openssl-1.1.1 and other packages have been recompiled. I miss a newer GCC.
Seamonkey 2.53.8 requires gcc 6.x or higher, not gcc-5.5

my ThinkPad x230 is perfectly supported by 14.2. However, I do not use it at the moment, so technically I am not using 14.2 anymore. My PC have video cards that are not supported by 14.2.

Yeah I often see this argument. Got a card right here, not properly supported by 4.4 but works great on 4.14, it's just one of many nouveau bug fixes that's not going to be backported.
You know most of that stuff is fixable, right? There's just a small matter of who does the backporting work, I mean you can't expect P.V. to do it on top of everything else he does.
So I really don't see the issue here, you did invest in that card so I guess it's your responsibility to simply backport the fix from -current to stable if you want to use stable.
Alternatively, opt for rolling never-ending maintenance work instead, because backporting a few packages for your card seems like a lot of work short term..

I did try a new kernel. It made my network adapter to work, which was nice. The video card, however, did not work even with the newer kernel.

Unfortunately, it is not trivial for me to do that. So, I cannot simply backport the fix. My cards are Radeon RX460 and Radeon RX580.

Rolling-release is something that I want to avoid, as I install a lot of stuff from SlackBuilds.org and I do not want to constantly update my system on my work computer.

I also have a NVME hard drive that the installer of 14.2 does not support. Yes, AlienBob has a great and extensive tutorial, so let's say this is not an issue anymore. BTW, some users here suggested an 'intermediate' release, say Slackware 14.3 with updated kernel, NVME support out of the box during install and so on. It did not happen. So be it, I respect Patrick's decision. I understand that many changes have been happening lately in the OSS world, that needed to be accommodated into Slackware and that he had issues with the slackstore. So, we just wait.