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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."

11 of 761 comments (clear)

  1. KDE 3.4 by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gnome has been dropped and KDE 3.4 added? Wow. That says a lot in itself about the current state of the 2 leading Desktop Environments in Linux...particularly in a conservative --not--bleeding freaking--edge distro like Slack.

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    This guy is way out there
    1. Re:KDE 3.4 by tehcrazybob · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's an interesting idea, but they would still need to keep two distinct styles. In my experience, KDE is rather Windows-like, while GNOME is rather similar to Mac OS. Sure, they can both be customized quite a bit, but it's still something to think about. I'm much more comfortable in KDE. If you tried to combine the two, you would have issues with the way certain things are done and how stuff looks. So, even if they combined to use the same resources, they would need to maintain two completely separate styles to appease all the fans.

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      Computers need to explode more often.
    2. Re:KDE 3.4 by spagetti_code · · Score: 3, Interesting
      I agree with this. One of the problems with Linux is that there is too much choice.

      Let me explain before the flames arrive - with windows during install there is one GUI (with themes), one notepad, one calculator... That means few questions and you are up and running straight away. Sure there are other choices for almost every utility, and once you are up and running you can look at the others.

      With linux you have to select between 3 or 4 GUIs (at least on Fedora) and a gazillion versions of most other tools.

      Here's a test: you are a beginner and you are offered the choice of: Gnome, KDE, XFCE, TWM, ... - which do you choose? What I did the first time was install them all - holy crap what a mess that made. And dont get me started on the 50 different text editors all slightly different. Not to mention picture editors, dev tools... Of course, this is after you have managed to figure out which distro you should run.

      Now, linux-heads love choice and more power to them for that. BUT such up-front confusion with linux is not the way to win over the general public.

      Now lots of people are going to point to their favourite distro and say "but mine makes it **really** simple". Crap. Ubuntu, Novell, Mandrake, PCLinuxOS all say the same thing. In my opinion Linspire or Xandros have the best shot, but they disappear under a sea of confusing and conflicting marketing. Another question: how many distros are there right now? Let me list the ones I know of: Debian, Fedora, RHEL, Gentoo, Knoppix (+ a few variants), Suse/Novell, CentOS, Slackware, Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire, MEPIS, DSL, Yoper, Puppy, Turbo, Devil, Yellowdog... (actually, I just found a site that lists the top 100). what a mess

      People say Linux hasn't forked. Technically that may be true for the kernel. But in the minds of the public it has, and they are the people who create marketshare.

  2. Ironic... by Bytal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How ironic, seeing that Gnome tries to be the simplest and easiest to use full-featured desktop on Linux. I guess easy to use doesn't mean easy to package.

    1. Re:Ironic... by Bytal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Irony - when something happens that is the opposite of what is expected. Gnome is easy to use and so the expectation is that it is also easy to build. The irony here is that it is not actually easy to build. That seems like a correct use of the word ironic.

    2. Re:Ironic... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      KDE's file management is superior, you can split windows, split sub-windows, and split sub-sub-windows and drag and drop with speed and ease, Gnome simply is not as fast or easy. I've never grokked Gnome's way. KDE Knode? It has an 'attach' button that allows me easiily to put something in a post. Pan? No. Again and again, I find it hard to do things in Gnome that KDE makes easy. I won't use Gnome simply because its a big pain in the butt. I wouldn't miss it if it disappeared.
      Its NOT easy. More than once trying it I have sat there scratching my head wondering how to do something it simply made hard. KDE has its own problems but I can use it.

  3. LFS by Bios_Hakr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Before you all go freaking out, let me suggest something.

    Build Linux From Scratch. Then try adding some common desktops. KDE is quite easy to add to LFS. Gnome is an absolute bear to add.

    At one point, I had a printout of all the deps for Gnome. It was a huge spiderweb of tangles that had to be decoded and followed exactly to get Gnome to build.

    Anyway, Gnome is lots of work.

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    I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
  4. Give Me Slack Or Kill Me by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Including GNOME is too hard"? Putting the "slack" in "Slackware".

    Maybe this will pressure GNOME to become more installable. I find it worth the effort, but we'd all be better off if it were easier. Including GNOME, whose user/developer base would expand.

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    make install -not war

  5. Re:Wow... just wow by pavera · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm gonna give an amen to that. I moved to Xfce I think in Fedora Core 2 when it was included as a standard desktop option, and i haven't looked back. It is fast, easy to use, small, powerful, I've got gnome and kde libs on my machines to run kde and gnome apps, but I love Xfce all the power of gnome or kde, loads in less than 5 seconds (as opposed to 30+ for either kde or gnome) and uses much less ram. All in all I really like it.

  6. Re:Wow... just wow by InodoroPereyra · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Anway, i found interesting that Pat mentions XFCE as a "fixed an polished" desktop. It's great, and while i'd hate to see GNOME loose popularity, at this time XFCE 4.2 is a better GNOME than GNOME itself.
    I second this. XFCE is as fast as GNOME used to be, its interface is as simple as GNOME is today, and in general it feels more cleanly designed, and it doesn't seem less powerfull. If you like GNOME and you still haven't done so, give XFCE a try. You may find it pretty useful.
  7. Re:Who cares about fonts? by mshurpik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have news for you, people who know how to make things work go into construction, not programming. People go into programming because they want to dick around.

    I happen to like Gnome, but then again, I also liked Unix windowmanagers circa 1995. They do X and they do multiple desktops, two things that were always a hassle on Windows. Other than that, Gnome is still waiting for a third compelling application. It's just a prettier version of TWM, or FVWM, or whatever you were using way back when the internet was born.