Install a modern Linux distribution today and you take the graphical menus, the automatic package managers and the friendly setup wizards completely for granted. In July 1993 none of that existed. Booting Linux meant wrestling with floppy disks, cryptic configuration files and a fair amount of patience. That was the world Slackware 1.0 came from, and more than three decades later it is still actively maintained. It is the oldest living Linux distribution in the world.
The origins: from a university assignment to a distribution
Slackware’s story starts with Patrick Volkerding, a student at Moorhead State University in Minnesota. He needed a LISP interpreter for an artificial intelligence project, and found that CLISP ran on Linux. To get it working he downloaded SLS (Softlanding Linux System), one of the very first complete distributions and a pioneer in shipping far more than the kernel: it came with X11, TCP/IP networking, UUCP and GNU Emacs.
As he used SLS, Volkerding kept a long list of fixes and improvements for the problems he hit. When his AI professor asked for help installing Linux at home and on the faculty’s computers, the two of them applied those notes to a fresh install. Without meaning to, Volkerding had built his own cleaned-up version of SLS.
The release of version 1.0
Volkerding had no plans to publish his work. He figured SLS would soon ship a release with all those improvements baked in. But SLS users had been waiting a long time for an update that never came, so his university friends pushed him to share what he had. He posted a now-legendary message titled “Anyone want an SLS-like 0.99pl11A system?” and got a flood of enthusiastic replies.
With permission from the university’s system administrator, he uploaded his distribution to the campus FTP server. So on July 17, 1993, Slackware 1.00 went out into the world, distributed as twenty-four 3½-inch floppy disk images. One of the most influential distributions in the history of Linux had arrived.
Key versions of the early years
Slackware moved fast in its first years:
- Slackware 2.0 (July 1994): a much-improved release. By version 2.1 that October, the system had tripled in size to 73 floppy disk images.
- Slackware 3.0 (August 1995): built around kernel 1.2.13, it marked the move from the old a.out binary format to the modern ELF format that is still the standard today.
- The jump from 4 to 7 (1999): one of the project’s most talked-about decisions. Other distributions carried higher version numbers, and plenty of users assumed Slackware was outdated even though its software was just as current. Volkerding jumped straight to version 7.0 as a marketing move, sure everyone else would soon reach that figure.
The project kept developing for decades, eventually reaching the long-awaited version 15.0 in 2026.
Trivia few people know
The name “Slackware” has a wonderfully odd origin: it points to the Church of the SubGenius, a parody religion devoted to the pursuit of “Slack” (a kind of sacred, effortless laziness). The joking name reflected how little seriousness Volkerding brought to the project at first.
Another defining trait is Slackware’s minimalist, deeply UNIX-like philosophy: it is the most “BSD” of today’s Linux distributions. It uses a BSD-style init system and a deliberately simple package manager, pkgtools (with tools like installpkg, upgradepkg, removepkg and the classic pkgtool), which does not resolve dependencies on its own because it puts user control ahead of convenience. That simplicity is why people often say “if you learn Slackware, you learn Linux.”
And one fact that makes it genuinely unique: unlike Debian or Ubuntu, which are community-governed, Slackware has always been led by one person, Volkerding, acting as “benevolent dictator.” Its kinship with SLS also places it in the same lineage as the great Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD.
A legacy that lives on
More than thirty years later, Slackware is still standing and still actively maintained, something no other Linux distribution can claim. It is neither the most popular nor the easiest, but its story is the story of Linux itself: a student shared his notes and, almost by accident, founded a project that never dies. If you really want to understand how a Linux system works under the hood, Slackware remains a school that friendlier alternatives like Fedora or Arch cannot match.