similar. Volkerding made the decision to bump the version as a marketing effort to show that Slackware was as up-to-date as other Linux distributions, many of which had release numbers of 6 at the time. He chose 7, estimating that most other distributions would soon be at this release number. In April 2004, Patrick Volkerding added X.Org Server packages into the testing/ directory of -current as a replacement for the XFree86 packages currently being used, with a request for comments on what the future of the X Window System in Slackware should be. A month later, he switched from XFree86 to X.Org Server after stating that the opinions were more than 4 to 1 in favor of using the X.org release as the default version of X. He stated the decision was primarily a technical one, as XFree86 was proving to cause compatibility problems. Slackware 10.0 was the first release with X.Org Server. In March 2005, Patrick Volkerding announced the removal of the GNOME desktop environment in the development ChangeLog. He stated this had been under consideration for more than four years and that there were already projects that provided a more complete version of GNOME for Slackware than what Slackware itself provided. Volkerding stated future GNOME support would rely on the community. The community responded and as of October 2016, there are several active GNOME projects for Slackware. These include Cinnamon, Dlackware, Dropline GNOME, MATE, and SlackMATE. The removal was deemed significant by some in the Linux community due to the prevalence of GNOME in many distributions. In May 2009, Patrick Volkerding announced the public (development) release of an official x86_64 variant, called Slackware64, maintained in parallel with the IA-32 distribution. Slackware64 is a pure 64-bit distribution in that it does not support running or compiling 32-bit programs, however, it was designed as "multilib-ready". Eric Hameleers, one of the core Slackware team members, maintains a multilib repository that contains the necessary packages to convert Slackware64 to multilib to enable running of 32-bit software. Hameleers started the 64-bit port as a diversion from the pain of recovering from surgery in September 2008. Volkerding tested the port in December 2008, and was impressed when he saw speed increases between 20 and 40 percent for some benchmarks compared to the 32-bit version. To minimize the extra effort of maintaining both versions in parallel, Slackware's build scripts, called SlackBuilds, were slowly transitioned to