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

Re:Also from the Changelog

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit... GNOME is harder to compile, that's all. All the releases are coordinated carefully. The project is properly modularised so that development is easier and code can be reused by other projects. The only disadvantage is that it's harder for the wannabee l33t types to download the source and type "./configure && make" -- and sit back thinking they are haxx0rs because they built from source.

Compare this with KDE -- which most code is shoehorned into a few *vast* bloated libraries and hardly modularised at all. This is why hardly any KDE code gets reused outside of that project. KDE is a software engineering nightmare. All this slackware/GNOME change proves is that slackware is just a barebones "Linux From Scratch" for those who can't be arsed compiling -- something I think we've really known all along.

It is not our fault if you are using wrong distro.

[jotaeleemeese]

If we were giving you 200 screwdrivers to screw a cross-screw you would choose a hammer.

Use Xandros and stop whining.

Re:Also from the Changelog

[cyclop]

you'll mod down anything you disagree with as a troll.

I mod down people as a troll when they state subtly but utterly false assertions trying to create a flamebait. Isn't it a definition of trolling?

Damn fast... [Slackware] it's no faster than either Fedora or any other distro.

Hahaha. I *tried* before. I tried on this poor old machine Mandrake, Fedora, Debian and Slackware. Slackware is the only one that does not chew up all memory. Sure, it is fairly possible to recompile a vanilla kernel on Fedora, shutting down services, avoid useless desktop managers and so on. But why should I care to install Fedora then? With plain Slack, I simply don't need it., and I didn't have to do any bigger configuration effort than I had with other distros. Don't like plain Slack? Try Vectorlinux. Note that I don't like Slackware at 100% (package management sucks of course), but it best fits my needs on this machine. Oh, but sure you didn't try either one, because they don't have a funky hat painted on the start button, isn't it?

You start with a blatantly false fact (people start with Knoppix, Mandrake or Linspire) and base your entire case on it. What are the size of userbases for those distros BTW... compared to Fedora/RHEL.

You're from USA,isnt'it? Come here in Europe - where Linux penetration in the market is higher. Fedora is just one choice, and RHEL is almost unknown. Mandrake owns the vast majority of Linux desktop users, followed by SuSE, Knoppix and then Fedora. With KDE desktops.

so that's you and your mum, who wouldn't know the difference between KDE and a lampost. So you installed your own personal super-favorite desktop for her.

Hahaha. I recycle old PCs and I sometimes re-sell 'em to friends, students and people with a polished Linux install. People that want to surf the web, write a graduate thesis in Latex and don't have/don't want to waste the money to afford a shiny new PC. In this case -oooh,you'll be surprised- I do not install KDE, because of course a Pentium Pro with 96 Mb RAM can't use KDE. So I tried GNOME, because people kept tell me it's faster and lighter. Good point for you: GNOME apps are surely faster. Bad point: GNOME desktops are a nightmare. For me when I try to configure them and for end users (Nautilus behaves like Win95, no decent configuration app, no decent printer management app, "why the hell the buttons are in such odd places?" etc.etc.etc.). Now I only use XFCE for them. They thank me to have helped them drop "that shitty GNOME thing". I'm sorry, it's a fact.

Another fact. When last year I went to the Italian Webbit - the biggest IT fair of Italy, with a lot of attention on OSS and a bazillion stands by LUGs - ALL people were running KDE or light windowmanagers on their laptops and PCs. I didn't see a single GNOME desktop. Quite odd.

the only KDE program worth mentioning. All the others suck balls compared to their GNOME counterparts

Text editors: where's the counterpart of Kate? Does Eye-of-Gnome compares decently with Kuickshow? Oh, I wrote my graduate thesis with Kile! Where's a GNOME LaTeX environment? O-oh, I'd like to see the GNOME equivalent of KPresenter...
Sure,there are apps that are quite good. I'm not such a KDE fanboy to tell anything KDE does is good and anything GNOME does is bad. AbiWord and Gnumeric for example are nice, Inkscape rocks, Gimp has no competitors, and Gaim is very good (Kopete is not nearly as good IMHO). But they're not real GNOME apps, they're GTK apps that for this reason integrate somehow better with GNOME.

Your grandiloquence betrays your addled zealotry-fuelled opinions better than any amount of factual inaccuracy.

So tell me why should I use Nautilus instead of Konqueror. I'm here to hear you.

*All* the biggest money making distros selling to businesses are GNOME based.

Maybe. Most desktop Linux users use KDE. I hope GNOME adoption by corporations will help GNOME be better, of course. I'd like a tough KDE competitor :).