Terrible news have reached us this April 1st and this blog is the first to break it. After long deliberation over at Slackware HQ have decided that support for the 32 bit architecture will be dropped as 64 bit is “the future”. As a second reason it was stated that this also brings the distribution in line with other major Linux distributions and vendors which is important to the developers as they don’t like falling out of line with the wider Linux ecoverse.
Other excerpts from the statement include well known corporate marketing gobbledeegook, with references such as “we need to trim the fat”, “we have to think outside the box to be at the top of our game, focus on the important bits and drop what is no longer viable” and so on. In a further shock to fans of a lean custom set up the founder and main man Peter Volkerding announced that starting with Slackware 15 only the KDE Software Compilation will be included as a desktop and all other window managers are to be stripped from the DVD as “research has shown that in the corporate and office space, the market segment we are now targeting to stay afloat financially, everybody’s using KDE anyway so there’s no point including anything else.”