[7] It makes as few modifications as possible to software packages from upstream and tries not to anticipate use cases or preclude user decisions.

In contrast to most modern Linux distributions, Slackware provides no graphical installation procedure and no automatic dependency resolution of software packages.

Because of its many conservative and simplistic features, Slackware is often considered to be most suitable for advanced and technically inclined Linux users.

While Slackware is mostly[14] free and open-source software, it does not have a formal bug tracking facility or public code repository, with releases periodically announced by Volkerding.

The name "Slackware" stems from the fact that the distribution started as a private side project with no intended commitment.

Certain aspects of Slackware graphics reflect this[16]—the pipe that Tux is smoking, as influenced by the image of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs' head.

A humorous reference to the Church of the SubGenius can be found in many versions of the install.end text files, which indicate the end of a software series to the setup program.

[17][18] Slackware was originally derived from the Softlanding Linux System (SLS),[19] the most popular of the original Linux distributions and the first to offer a comprehensive software collection that comprised more than just the kernel and basic utilities,[20] including an X11 graphical interface, TCP/IP, UUCP networking, and GNU Emacs.

[21] Patrick Volkerding started with SLS after needing a LISP interpreter for a school project at the then named Moorhead State University (MSU).

A few weeks later, Volkerding was asked by his artificial intelligence professor at MSU to show him how to install Linux at home and on some of the computers at school.

After a discussion with the local sysadmin at MSU, Volkerding obtained permission to upload Slackware to the university's FTP server.

[15] This first Slackware release, version 1.00, was distributed on July 17, 1993, at 00:16:36 (UTC),[1] and was supplied as twenty-four 3½" floppy disk images.

[15] The size of Slackware quickly increased with the addition of included software, and by version 2.1, released October 1994, it had more than tripled to comprise seventy-three 1.44M floppy disk images.

Volkerding made the decision to bump the version as a marketing effort to show that Slackware was as up-to-date as other Linux distributions, many of which had release numbers of 6 at the time.

[27] In May 2009, Patrick Volkerding announced the public (development) release of an official x86_64 variant, called Slackware64, maintained in parallel with the IA-32 distribution.

Volkerding tested the port in December 2008, and was impressed when he saw speed increases between 20 and 40 percent for some benchmarks compared to the 32-bit version.

However, on April 21, 2015, Patrick Volkerding apologized on the ChangeLog for the absence of updates and stated that the development team used the time to get "some good work done."

In January 2016, Volkerding announced the reluctant addition of PulseAudio, primarily due to BlueZ dropping direct ALSA support in v5.x.

Many design choices in Slackware can be seen as a heritage of the simplicity of traditional Unix systems and as examples of the KISS principle.

"[38] In his release notes for Slackware 10.0 and 10.1 Volkerding thanks Eric Hameleers for "his work on supporting USB, PCI, and Cardbus wireless cards".

Eric Hameleers gives an insight into the core team with his essay on the "History of Slackware Development", written on October 3–4, 2009 (shortly after the release of version 13.0).

Since SlackBuilds are scripts, they aren't limited to just compiling a program's source; they can also be used to repackage pre-compiled binaries provided by projects or other distributions' repositories into proper Slackware packages.

In comparison to manual compilation and installation of software, SlackBuilds provide cleaner integration to the system by utilizing Slackware's package manager.

The administrators intend for the build process to be nearly identical to the way Slackware's official packages are built, mainly to ensure Volkerding was "sympathetic of our cause".

This allows SlackBuilds that Volkerding deems worthy to be pulled into regular Slackware with minimal changes to the script.

[58] SBo provides templates[59] for SlackBuilds and the additional metadata files and they encourage package maintainers to not deviate unless necessary.

[118] On 28th December 2020 work began on porting Slackware to the 64-bit ARM architecture (known as 'AArch64'), with the initial Hardware Model targets being the PINE64's RockPro64 and Pinebook Pro.

This project also provides ports for Aarch64 (ARM64), Alpha, HPPA (PA-RISC 1.1), LoongArch (64 bit), MIPS (32/64bit), OpenRISC, PowerPC (32/64bit), RISC-V (64bit), S/390x, SH-4, SPARC (32/64bit), and x86 (32bit with 64bit time_t) architectures.

[135] Slackware port for IBM S/390 (EOL: 2009))[136] can be downloaded, and installs from a DOS Partition or from floppy disk.

[137] Slackware port for ARM[138] architecture can be downloaded,[139] and installed via a network, using Das U-Boot and a TFTP boot server[140] or from a mini-root filesystem.