In a short note posted on Patreon last week, Volkerding said: "Once upon a time in the early days of Linux, after months of tinkering with a customised distribution and putting it online for beta testing, I got the crazy idea to call it stable and to post the announcement linked below starting Slackware on the path to where it is today."

Slackware is still used by a sizeable number who like doing things the old way. Other distributions, like Red Hat and Debian, have moved on, but Volkerding is still catering to his loyal band of users.

On one occasion, Volkerding somewhat sarcastically responded to the marketing around version numbers — a tactic used mainly by Red Hat — and released version 7.0, after the previous version was 4.0.

Slackware is not the first distribution to emerge after the Linux kernel was initially released in 1991. That achievement goes to Soft Landing System Linux, which was put out in mid-1992 by a developer named Peter MacDonald.

Volkerding then produced Slackware, which was mostly based on SLS. The first version of S.u.S.E Linux came out in 1994, a German version of Slackware, according to veteran SUSE developer Hubert Mantel.

Back in 2002, when I interviewed Volkerding, he said he liked SLS a great deal. "Initially Slackware was just my own version of SLS where I'd fixed as many bugs as I could in the packages, and especially in the installer," he said.

"I saw some people on the Linux newsgroups running into these same problems, and decided to email them privately and offer to share my fixed version with them. After they had better luck with it that they'd had with SLS, I was encouraged to put it up for FTP, and from there it just took off."

The website Distrowatch maintains a top 100 list of Linux distributions and Slackware is listed at 43rd position right now. The ranking is based on the number of hits a distribution's website gets each day.

Volkerding said, during the interview cited above, that Slackware had been in the black for most of its existence upto that point.

After that interview, I contacted Volkerding in 2012 and again in 2018. He was hit by illness in 2004 and diagnosed with Actinomycosis, a long-term (chronic) bacterial infection that commonly affects the face and neck.

Despite this problem, Slackware has been coming out regularly, a testament to Volkerding's grit and determination.