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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."

7 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
  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.

  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.