Slackware is a free operating system. It is one of the earliest Linux distributions and is the oldest currently being maintained. Slackware was created by Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux, Inc. in 1993. The current stable version is 12.2, released on December 10, 2008.

Slackware aims for design stability and simplicity, and to be the most "Unix-like" Linux distribution, using plain text files for configuration and making as few modifications to software packages as possible from upstream.[2]