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+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