slackware-current/ANNOUNCE.15.0

BREAKING NEWS, SEBEKA MINNESOTA 2022-02-02:

Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this
morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did *not* see its
shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released - another six
weeks (or years) of the development treadmill averted.

This has been an interesting development cycle (in the "may you live in
interesting times" sense). Anyone who has followed Linux development over
the years has seen the new technology and a slow but steady drift away from
the more UNIX-like structure. The challenge this time around was to adopt
as much of the good stuff out there as we could without changing the
character of the operating system. Keep it familiar, but make it modern.
And boy did we have our work cut out for us. We adopted PAM (finally)
as projects we needed dropped support for pure shadow passwords. We switched
from ConsoleKit2 to elogind, making it much easier to support software
that targets that Other Init System and bringing us up-to-date with the
XDG standards. We added support for PipeWire as an alternate to PulseAudio,
and for Wayland sessions in addition to X11. Dropped Qt4 and moved entirely
to Qt5. Brought in Rust and Python 3. Added many, many new libraries to the
system to help support all the various additions. We've upgraded to two of
the finest desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.16, a fast and
lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and
the KDE Plasma 5 graphical workspaces environment, version 5.23.5 (the
Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition). This also supports running under Wayland
or X11.

We still love Sendmail, but have moved it into the /extra directory and made
Postfix the default mail handler. The old imapd and ipop3d have been retired
and replaced by the much more featureful Dovecot IMAP and POP3 server.

The Slackware pkgtools (package management utilities) saw quite a bit of
development as well. File locking was implemented to prevent parallel
installs or upgrades from colliding, and the amount of data written to
storage minimized in order to avoid extra writes on SSD devices.

For the first time ever we have included a "make_world.sh" script that allows
automatically rebuilding the entire operating system from source. We also
made it a priority throughout the development cycle to ensure that nothing
failed to build. All the sources have been tested and found to build
properly. Special thanks to nobodino for spearheading this effort.

We have also included new scripts to easily rebuild the installer, and to
build the kernel packages. With the new ease of generating kernel packages,
we went on to build and test nearly every kernel that was released, finally
landing on the 5.15.x LTS series which we've used for this release. There
are also some sample config files to build 5.16 kernels included in the
/testing directory for anyone interested in using those kernels.

There's really just way too many upgrades to list them all here. For a
complete list of included packages, see:

ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT

     
Downloading Slackware 15.0:
---------------------------

The full version of Slackware Linux 15.0 is available for download from the
central Slackware FTP site hosted by our friends at osuosl.org.

If your machine supports x86_64, it is highly recommended that you use the
Slackware64 (64-bit) version for the best possible performance:
   ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/

The 32-bit x86 version may be found here:
   ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-15.0/

The links above are for the Slackware file tree. If you already have Slackware
14.2 installed, you can use these files and follow the instructions in the
UPGRADE.TXT document to upgrade your system to Slackware 15.0. Instructions
for burning the Slackware file tree onto install discs may be found in the
isolinux directory.

If you're looking for a bootable installer, ISO images are available that can
be written to a DVD or (using dd) to a USB stick:

   ftp://ftp.slackware.com:/pub/slackware-iso/slackware64-15.0-iso
   ftp://ftp.slackware.com:/pub/slackware-iso/slackware-15.0-iso

If the sites are busy, see the list of official mirror sites here:

   http://mirrors.slackware.com

We will be setting up BitTorrent downloads for the official ISO images.
Stay tuned to http://slackware.com and the ##slackware IRC channel on
libera.chat for the latest updates.

This time around we've gone completely virtual. There are no CDs or DVDs to
purchase, and no new stickers, hats, pins, or T-shirts. You can still find
a few items like these on CafePress searching for Slackware, and I might even
make a couple of pennies off them depending on which store you end up on.
It's possible that I'll look into some new stuff after I take a bit of a
breather from this long development cycle... but software was the priority
this time, not swag.

Huge thanks to the Slackware community for all the help making this release
possible. If it weren't for your generous support I'd probably be working at
the potato chip factory instead of on Slackware. ;-) My family and I are
grateful for the support, and I hope everyone will enjoy the new release.

If you'd like to help us keep this project going, contributions are gratefully
accepted here:

https://www.patreon.com/slackwarelinux
https://paypal.me/volkerdi

At this time any contributions are not tax deductible.
Thanks for your support in any amount!

Have fun! :-)  I hope you find Slackware to be useful, and thanks
very much for your support of this project over the years.


---
Patrick J. Volkerding    <volkerdi@slackware.com>

Visit us on the web at:  http://slackware.com