Gnome Removed From Slackware

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."

Comments

I thought this was decided a long time ago

[inflex]

I can think of this piece of news being bought up at least 6 months ago and everyone moving over to using replacements like Dropline GNOME etc.

Re:I thought this was decided a long time ago

[Tarcastil]

Just make sure you know what you're doing when installing Dropline GNOME. When I tried to uninstall it, it killed my system. I ended up reinstalling Slackware.

Re:I thought this was decided a long time ago

[kv9]

FTCL:

There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same sort of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's _your_ system, so I will also mention their project: http://www.dropline.net/gnome/

he recommends these two

Re:Weren't Sun and HP..

[AKAImBatman]

Weren't Sun and HP supposed to help with this stuff and let Gnome catch up?

Technically speaking, they have been. However, the scuttlebutt out of the Sun team is that the GNOME developers are not entirely appreciative of the help and tend to shove back. While this may or may not be true, I'm afraid that the whole "Spatial Natilus" debacle didn't do much for the GNOME team's reputation.

slow your roll fools

[Stalyn]

I suspect the main reason behind this is the popularity of Dropline GNOME.

"Dropline GNOME is a version of the GNOME Desktop that has been tweaked for Slackware Linux systems. It is available in Slackware's standard .tgz package format, in addition to the usual source code. The current release is based off of the latest GNOME 2 distribution from the GNOME Project."

Why not let Dropline do all the work... so don't fret slackware users you still have GNOME. Just not being packaged by Slackware officially.

Re:The Gnome way

[donscarletti]

What a dumb troll. The giveaway is "more mature languages like VC++ and Java", since VC++ is not a language, it's an IDE/compiler and Java is a lot newer, fast changing and generally less mature than C.

Anyway. Gnome and GTK+ are very object oriented, they use classes, virtual member functions and polymorphism right to their cores. Also, skinning in GTK+ is a simple matter of loading a config file.

Re:Sometimes I think Pat runs KDE

[bersl2]

Have you ever tried to build GNOME?! Just take a look at the build scripts for the two in Slackware. KDE has a unified build script. GNOME is a dependency nightmare.

Re:KDE 3.4

[Fnord]

Do a google search for xorg and sub-pixel rendering. Cleartype is not a microsoft exclusive thing.

Re:Ironic...

[0racle]

Oh yes they do, at least the 2.10 ones do.

make -e install DESTDIR=/tmp/[gnomepkgname]

Yes I am makeing packages.

for crying out loud!!

[xutopia]

This doesn't mean the end of Gnome on Slackware! Dropline Gnome is so popular on Slack that Pat doesn't see the need to support gnome anymore. Anyways if you look at other now very popular distros you'll see that many only support just one Desktop Environment. Why should Pat bother because his Gnome version was always overwritten by something more current anyways (see dropline-gnome).

I don't see what the big deal is. If other distros can become so popular without supporting everything and build a very strong community around that streamlining concept I don't see what is wrong with Slack doing the same thing. Pat is making the right decision in only supporting one DE.

PS: yes I know some religious Gnome fan boy will come and try to comment on my post and say that I'm just a KDE fan spewing his views. Except I'm a gnome fan too.