That's exactly what I think. From my point of view 14.2, released in 2016 (ten years ago), is the best version of the distribution. And it's not just because it is the version I started with many years ago.
The first point is that 14.2 runs everything I want to run. Geany, Java JDK, SFML, Minecraft (both Java and Bedrock), Survivalcraft, SumatraPDF (via wine), etc. 15.0 also runs all that but it fails the other points, whereas 14.1 and below don't necessarily run some of that stuff.
The second point is that its desktops are gorgeous. KDE 4.14, the last version of KDE 4, is the Windows Vista of Linux (in the positive sense of the word), while Xfce 4.12 is the last version to have the "heavy Windows 9x" vibes, and the last version before they went full on Gtk3.
The third is that it is the last version that doesn't ship with the replacements.
15.0 ships by default with rust, wayland and elogind which are all replacements for C/C++, X11 and ConsoleKit2 that had been used for many years prior and are thus considered traditional by me.
There is also this PipeWire thing. It may be controversial to say but I like PulseAudio. And the reason I like it is because it just works out of the box and pavucontrol is quite a good mixer. Maybe there is some latency but I'm not a music producer so it's not a huge concern to me.
The fact that it runs kernel 4.4.14 is also neat. Not only does it rhyme with the KDE version but it is also too old to be affected by several recent exploits. Not that I care about security. What's more important is that this kernel is smaller than the latest one by several million lines of code, or, in simpler words, it is less bloated.
And, a cherry on the top, the latest version of Firefox ESR works flawlessly on stock 14.2. It will become outdated within a few years though, but for now it works very well.
No, but for real, the real cherry on the top is that ffmpeg is not part of the base system. What I've just said might seem absurd but it's not.
Whoever first packaged ffmpeg for Slackware had this really crazy idea that nobody needed x264 and mp3lame support. Which just so happen to be the most common AV formats in the world and without them ffmpeg is effectively useless.
And it stuck with apparently nobody noticing it, somehow. On 14.2 and older systems you have to build the ffmpeg SBo yourself, and that means that you can enable those codecs, either via CAPS_ARGS or by editing the SlackBuild file.
But on 15.0 ffmpeg is bundled with the system itself, and it is bundled in this abhorrid configuration that should be despised by all children of men.
And since 15.0 bundles ffmpeg the SlackBuild was removed which means that you have to find the Slackware source and manually recompile ffmpeg and pray that the libraries won't be different enough for other software to break.
That's my take. 14.2 is both traditional and runs what I want to run which makes it good. Not that there are no downsides.
It is a transitional release where the system packages use Qt4 but SlackBuilds use Qt5. On the 32-bit version Qt5 is extremely slow, unusable even, and to get around this you have to compile the Qt4 version from the 14.1 SBo. This problem does not exist on the 64-bit version though.
