Distrowatch Almost Got Me, April Fools' Jokes

Yes, Dear Readers, it's that time of the year again, when hard working writers have an early morning mini-heart attack, until they remember it's April Fools' Day. Today's honor of causing my yearly cardiac jolt goes to Distrowatch.com's Ladislav Bodnar. Well, in my defense, his premise sounded perfectly reasonable.

It all started with today's Distrowatch Weekly. Folks have occasionally wondered if Distrowatch's database is getting too large and perhaps we shouldn't count every spin that rolls out of someone's remastersys. But as they are still technically new distributions, perhaps they deserve a spot. Personally, I decided to leave it up the Keeper himself. If it's included, even if still waiting, it's ripe for the reviewing. In fact, that works out better for me and my ilk.

Buuut, it is an awfully large database now. So, it sounded perfectly reasonable when I read Ladislav's words, "This site's database has swollen to a whopping 746 free operating systems and is growing every week! Clearly, this is unsustainable. As a result, we have decided to cut down on the number of distributions tracked in our database - from the current 746 to just 25."

He had me up until I read the "25!" Then I remembered it was April Fools' Day. But even if I hadn't caught on yet the next statement would surely have done it, "All superfluous distributions will be removed and no longer tracked - these include anything below number 25 in our page hit ranking statistics, such as Fuduntu, Kubuntu, Gentoo Linux, PC-BSD or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These distributions are clearly not very popular, so why bother?"

It's been a couple of years since I've thought of a good Linux April Fools' joke, so my hat is off to Ladislav for fooling me. But apparently, I wasn't only one.

Here are a few more April Fools' jokes out there today:

* Mandriva invests in Formula One racing
* LibreOffice prints on Tuesdays (only)!
* Half-Life 2 Single Player Coming (report)
* Canonical Announces Ubuntu for Washing Machines
* GIMP changes name to appease users
* Slashdot to Implement Rot13, (Quick & easy ROT13 for the command line)
* Systemd Ditches GNU C Library for Their Own
* YouTube "shutting down" tonight
* Facebook to access surveillance cameras and more
* waymir: merging Mir and Wayland
* The KMix Volume Slider Compromise
* Ubuntu 13.04 to disable Dash online search by default