After many months of development and release candidates the final version of Slackware 12 has been made available to the public. The perhaps biggest, and most obvious, updates since Slackware 11 are that the new version is based on the Linux kernel 2.6, and that the two window managers, XFce and KDE have been updated to version 4.4.1 and 3.5.7 respectively. The developers have also made changes to make Slackware a bit more userfriendly and direct, for example more of a plug and play support for USB memories other peripheral devices, and Slackware emphasizes that v12 really is a distribution for everyone.
Some of the more in-depth updates include switching to the new and modular X11, v7.2. Even though it is a stable and ready build, there is a lot of things happening at X.org regarding this version of X. That is except from the obvious update to kernel v2.6 with Slackware 12.
The package manager has also been updated and given a more userfriendly approach, certainly inspired by Ubuntu’s Synaptic and one-click-to-download-and-install interface. .
As Slackware uses KDE it also comes with K Office instead of OpenOffice. Which one to prefer is a matter of taste, but it’s always possible to install OpenOffice as well. Many of the most wanted applications from Mozilla (Firefox, SeaMonkey, ThunderBird) are available along with Pidgin 2.0, GIMP, XChat and many others popular applications.
:: Get slack!
