software not included in Slackware that they felt was worth their time to maintain, some packages are used as a testbed for future upgrades to Slackware, most notably, Hameleers provides "Ktown" packages for newer versions of KDE. He also maintains Slackware's "multilib" repository, enabling Slackware64 to run and compile 32-bit packages. Releases Slackware's release policy follows a feature and stability based release cycle, in contrast to the time-bound (e.g., Ubuntu) or rolling release (e.g., Gentoo Linux) schemes of other Linux distributions. This means there is no set time on when to expect a release. Volkerding will release the next version after he feels a suitable number of changes from the previous version have been made and those changes lead to a stable environment. As stated by Patrick Volkerding, "It's usually our policy not to speculate on release dates, since that's what it is — pure speculation. It's not always possible to know how long it will take to make the upgrades needed and tie up all the related loose ends. As things are built for the upcoming release, they'll be uploaded into the -current tree." Throughout Slackware's history, they generally tried to deliver up-to-date software on at least an annual basis. From its inception until 2014, Slackware had at least one release per year. Release activity peaked in 1994, 1995, 1997 and 1999, with three releases each year. Starting with version 7.1 (June 22, 2000) the release progression became more stable and typically occurred once per year. After that point, the only years with two releases were 2003, 2005 and 2008. However, since the release of Slackware 14.1 in 2013, new releases have slowed down drastically. There was a more than 2-year gap between 14.1 and 14.2 and over a 5 year gap to 15.0. Upon the release of 15.0, Volkerding stated that Slackware 15.1 will hopefully have a far shorter development cycle since the "tricky parts" were resolved during the development of 15.0. Slackware's latest 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x86_64 stable releases are at version 15.0 (released on February 2, 2022), which include support for Linux 5.15.19. Volkerding also maintains a testing/developmental version of Slackware called "-current" that can be used for a more bleeding edge configuration. This version will eventually become the next stable release, at which point Volkerding will start a new -current to start developing for the next release of Slackware. While this version is generally