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Gnome Removed From Slackware

Posted by Zonk on from the quite-large dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "After long consideration, Pat Volkerding has removed GNOME from Slackware. Pat mentions in the -current ChangeLog that GNOME takes a lot of time to package, so this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of Slackware." From the changelog: "Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent desktop choice."

1 of 761 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wow... just wow by mercuryresearch · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    "at this time XFCE 4.2 is a better GNOME than GNOME itself."

    This comment is dead on.

    Gnome seems to have an awful case of the Ahab from Moby Dick syndrome: they seem hell-bent on copying a certain whale of an OS company; duplicating good features is fine, but they seem to be trying too hard to duplicate much of the bad stuff as well. After Gnome 1.4 things seemed to move very much in this direction. Unfortunately one of my favorite Gnome apps, Gnumeric, seems headed this way as well, tacitly endorsing VBA as a scripting language (though kudos for supporting other bindings such as python.) You can see this influence in related projects such as Evolution as well. Presumably there's some sort of pressure to do this in the name of easy transitions, but I still think it's the wrong thing to do.

    XFCE definitely seems to be more about a philosophy (use the unix small programs together model, and keeping it simple) than copying, and if they're copying anything it's closer to the Mac feel. In any case, it's not so bent on bloat and copying something with many features many don't want to begin with.

    Hopefully we'll still be able to use a lot of the gnome apps under XFCE on future versions of slackware without too much additional work.