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Slackware Likely To Drop GNOME Support
An anonymous reader writes "After Hewlett Packard, who jumped off of supporting GNOME, Red Hat has followed by splitting their Desktop Linux out to Fedora which is community driven, and now distributions like Slackware have started to drop GNOME entirely in favor of KDE. Read more about their decision here. It looks like companies as well as distributions start focusing towards one solution." Patrick Volderking's quoted message doesn't announce a final decision to drop GNOME from Slackware, however -- and as the followups in that thread note, it could be interpreted as an endorsement of the good job done by Dropline in packaging GNOME for Slack.
Right now, I think ./configure'ed source, GNOME doesn't build into packages easily with DESTDIR).
removing it would be the best thing for Slackware as it's become a maintainance nightmare (unlike nearly every other
now even i thought slackware's packaging system was sufficient (despite what others say), but if you are building and packaging by relying on DESTDIR, you really do need a change in the packaging system.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
1 - who says that Novell will use Gnome as the default desktop?
Ermmm... Novell. They have made vague statements about continuing to support KDE for consumers, but their business systems are *ALL* GNOME-based.
IBM is sponsoring KDE, so who knows they will use KDE in the end.
No, IBM are trying hard not to alienate anyone, including KDE. I can assure you that their forthcoming desktop will not feature Qt in any central role (althought it will likely be installed)... effectively ruling out KDE.
SUN's corporate desktop... since when did SUN have a significant share in the desktop market?
Sun sold half million GNOME desktops (in the form of JDS) to the Chinese -- with 200 million more lined up. It's also sold half a million to the NHS in Britain... as well as a number of other large contracts. You really should try to keep up with the news, dear boy. Sun has more commercial GNOME deployments than KDE can ever dream of.
2 - on what do you base that Slackware has no user base?
I didn't say it has no user base. I said no-one who matters uses it. Which is true. Slackware is utterly irrelevant in the larger Linux world of 2004.
3 - it's not a bashing story, just a report about a mail in the dropline forum.
No, it's a bashing story. Have you actually *read* it, and noted the wording?
slackware comes with multiuser support and has done so for some time. i have several accounts on my slackware pc.
I'll probably just go back to using fvwm if I ever do another from-scratch reinstall.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"I can see why people are unhappy - Gnome is constantly changing:
They had balsa and gmc, they changed to evolution and nautilus. Abiword was dropped for openoffice.
Even the configuration changes all the time...
This is a pain if you are a distro that tries to actually support it."
Whilst there are many valid complaints you could have about Gnome, these are complete rubbish.
Balsa and GMC were never part of Gnome. They were, and still are, simply Gtk apps that run well in Gnome. As is AbiWord, which was also never a part of the official Gnome tree, and did not stop developing simply because OpenOffice.org came along.
Get your facts straight. An application being Gtk does not make it part of Gnome. And a competitor application does not deprecate or prevent development of the application it competes against. All the applications you mentioned are in active development and, if anything, the competition has inspired the development teams to work harder and produce better applications.
"They have to get it together and stop this "let's start over","let's start over again" nonsense, *soon*."
You're 3 years too late. They already did start over, just the once. And Gnome 2.8 is a damn sight better than Gnome 1.4 - and you're dillusional if you think otherwise. They started over to address some issues in the Gnome1/Gtk1 codebase that simply could not have been resolved by evolving it.
Yes, mistakes were made along the way, people are imperfect and that happens. But the end result is a fluid, intuitive, and (getting) fast desktop that facilitates working with your computer whether you are a novice or an expert. I regard that as somewhat of an achievement. And given the technologies to come, Gnome 2.10 is looking very juicy indeed.
Of course, if you don't like things, go to project GoneME. The fact that they probably won't ever have a release is a testament to the fact that the majority of Gnome users are incredibly satisfied with Gnome2 of late.
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That's compariSON, not comparism. Just a minor nitpick.
toresbe