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.

Comments

Re:Unmasked!

[Deusy]

"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.