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Just to be clear, I am not second guessing Pat. Just pointless, idle speculation (thinking out loud), on my part. I am happy with the development decisions made in Slackware.
Very happy to wait for the arrival of 15.0. It's a good day to be a Slacker!
Well, historically speaking, the *.0 where the breaking releases, and hearing that 5.0 did away with the block device layer stack makes me wonder - will Pat bite the bullet or lean back on this one?
Who knows. Pat leaned back with the 2.6 kernel for a long time.
Traditionally, advanced users long have avoided any dot-oh software release.
As much as i liked and enjoyed KDE 3 the KDE 4 era made me wish for Slackware become KDE free, I'd rather had MATE per default instead, provided it requires less resources to be maintained - the KDE train is eventually going in a direction where i can't possibly imagine Slackware be going - let it be just me.
There are some really good KDE applications though (like Okular), although I guess the same argument could be made for GNOME. Anyway, I'll be testing out Plasma 5 when/if it lands in -current, I like AwesomeWM a lot, but HiDPI/HDMI output etc are not so easy.
I'm more interested that the OP's presence flickers between Detroit, Michigan and Nagoya, Japan.
Sorry I forgot to mention my 3rd home in Brussels which I'm now in a plane on the way to.
I bounce around between the US/Japan/EU regularly for the last 5 years. This is my last trip however before I return to the greatest country on Earth (U.S.A) for good
Anyway something special is coming soon...
Last edited by tramtrist; 05-06-2019 at 06:21 AM.
Reason: for good
If you look for the kernel version history, last 3.x was 3.19 and (if I'm not wrong) torvalds moved to 4.x only because of "big numbers". No big changes from 3.19 to 4.0 (as usually happened with 2.2->2.4->2.6->3.0).
Also, since 4.x series, the lts versions are 4.4, 4.9, 4.14, 4.19. So, a simple pattern.
Since 4.19 is the last of 4.x series, and 5.0 is just to avoid "big numbers, aka, 4.20", I guess that next lts will be 5.4
Edit: Last 4.x series is 4.20
Last edited by pocker; 05-06-2019 at 11:28 AM.
Reason: Correct information
As Torvalds, Linux's founder, said on his Google+ account: "So, I made noises some time ago about how I don't want another 2.6.39 where the numbers are big enough that you can't really distinguish them. We're slowly getting up there again, with 3.20 being imminent, and I'm once more close to running out of fingers and toes."
Linux fans will be relieved to know that while 2019 should feature a gentler, softer and less sweary Torvalds, the man's ability to make arbitrary decisions remains undiminished. The reason version 4.21 became 5.0 is because "I ran out of fingers and toes to count on."
Author: Patrick J. Volkerding
Date: 10-10-1999 21:43
I've stayed out of this for now, but I do think I should lend a little justification to the version number thing.
First off, I think I forgot to count some time ago. If I'd started on 6.0 and made every release a major version (I think that's how Linux releases are made these days, right? , we would be on Slackware 47 by now. (it would actually be in the 20s somewhere if we'd gone 1, 2, 3...)
I think it's clear that some other distributions inflated their version numbers for marketing purposes, and I've had to field (way too many times) the question "why isn't yours 6.x" or worse "when will you upgrade to Linux 6.0" which really drives home the effectiveness of this simple trick. With the move to glibc and nearly everyone else using 6.x now, it made sense to go to at least 6.0, just to make it clear to people who don't know anything about Linux that Slackware's libraries, compilers, and other stuff are not 3 major versions behind. I thought they'd all be using 7.0 by now, but no matter. We're at least "one better", right?
Sorry if I haven't been enough of a purist about this. I promise I won't inflate the version number again (unless everyone else does again
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Wasn't there a 4.20 series before Mr. Torvalds moved to 5.0?
