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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."
After all, who wants a desktop with a big smelly foot on it?
KDE 4 EVA SUCKAS!
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against your sister heself, who (although she does usually need to be fixed up and polished beyond the way she ships from upstream more so than, say, Bob's sister or John's sister) is a decent girlfriend choice."
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.
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.
This guy is way out there
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.
Because you can always easily install dropline gnome.
I was looking forward to Gnome 2.10 in Slack. Wanted to see how he'd do it.
Man, that's so screwed up! I just bought my mom the Platinum edition Slackware collection so she could use Gnome. Now that it's going to be removed, I'm gonna switch back to Windows 98 ME.
..supposed to help with this stuff and let Gnome catch up?
Bunch of slackers.
I think this happened a while ago (months?), but that Slackware, which is still a major, well thought out distribution, decides to drop GNOME support just like that is major news. Dropline GNOME and other community support projects for Slack exists, so it's not Slackware users will need to part with GNOME. But still, a slap in the face to the GNOME crew. I wonder what they have to say about it.
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.
you can hear Eugenia yelling "I told you so, Gnome developers!"
This guy is way out there
I don't think slackware needs Gnome. I think (which means i could be wrong) use KDE. Gnome is a little behind with features that allow customization and if a little strange to work with. Slackware is an easy distro but, it's also a small as in not heard of by some. By that i mean that newbies are more likely to use fedora or mandrake, and the rest of use can install Gnome ourselves if we want to... Or use a other distro,based on Slackware with Gnome.
don't use GUIs. I for one won't be terribly hurt by this because I can't seem to get one of these GUI thingies loaded after installing in ultra-secure-you-can't-do-anything-unless-it's-san ctioned-by-the-security-gods
mode.
On the other hand, maybe I've only been trying to install this here difficult-to-package Gnome.
VC++ is a language?
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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Hey... 1998 called, and it wants that troll back.
So you have a faster desktop.
I think your ramifications are wrong, by the way.
1) code reuse in C is also high and 2) any language can be use to skin from XML configuration files.
I don't think the word you want is "mature". C, Fortran and Cobol are the most mature languages there are. Citing VC++ as powerful seems strange to me since it is infinitely easier to write GTK code in C than Win32 code in VC++.
I suspect the main reason behind this is the popularity of Dropline GNOME.
.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."
"Dropline GNOME is a version of the GNOME Desktop that has been tweaked for Slackware Linux systems. It is available in Slackware's standard
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.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Sounds like a way of saying that they aren't terribly happy with the GNOME releases but don't want to start a big fight over it. Read the comments in the ChangeLog; when justifying the decision they hint repeatedly at the problems. I suspect they wanted to say a lot more than they did. ;)
This does open the door for third-parties to tidy up the GNOME releases and provide a drop-in package for the distro though. Perhaps one of them will become strong enough to make it back in the door again.
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.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Gnome, since 2.0 has been based on Glib/GTK+ 2.0, which is a full OO architecture built on C.
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gobject/
...because that's the only reason I can think of to include it. I don't know anyone who runs Gnome or KDE on slackware. I run fluxbox, some people I know run Afterstep, some run Windowmaker, a lot run xfce, but nobody runs KDE. Admittedly, most people keep the kde and gnome library packages installed, so that we can run programs that require them, but as for the UI -- well, I've just never seen it.
I'd be interested to hear anecdotes from Slackware users who run Gnome or KDE. This change just won't affect me much.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
VC++ isn't a language. It's a language, C++, an IDE and a set of libraries including MFC.
1) code reuse is very high so LOC can remain very low
I think you're making generic comments without knowledge of the code. Just because a language is OO doesn't mean there is this magical code reuse that is lacking elsewhere. OO is about abstraction. The code reuse part is really just a myth, since good code in any language has reuse. In the C case, just create a window library that all your widget thingies call. Change the internals of that library without changing the interface specification or the contract and you have the same effect as the OO changes you're talking about.
2) features like skinning become a simple matter of loading an XML config file
Again, this has nothing to do with OO languages. Anything that has GUI and XML support can do sort of thing.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
It's about damn time, it's been pretty clear to me that gnome is a mess, and I feel sorry for anyone trying to package it, It is probably one of the nicest fully free desktops available, but that seems to be all it has going for it, feature wise, app wise, and functionally, KDE has it beat everywhere. gnome needs a major cleanup, to just stop adding new stuff, and do a rewrite from scratch, it has some really solid idea's, but it's just crufty, and microsoft has pretty clearly demonstrated that building new and cool stuff on top of crufty old stuff hits a brick wall and causes serious problems.
"I almost wish [Linux] and [Windows] would just combine effort to create the ultimate [OS]. They both have their pluses, but individually they never seem to be better than [MAC OS/X] desktop. Damn it, when will [Apple] have [those new MS] fonts.
why on earth is GNOME so RIDICULOUSLY difficult to compile by hand? yes, it's a big and complicated project. so is kde. kde comes in packages: libraries, base, etc.
last time I tried -- admittedly a VERY long time ago -- compiling gnome without the benefit of something like portage was a days-long dependency hunt. dependencies of FINAL releases were often still in CVS only. ick.
if you think that's what computing should be all about, you have WAY too much time on your hands.
Netcraft confirms it: In Soviet Russia, only old Koreans use GNOME.
I, for one, welcome our new KDE overlords.
1. Remove GNOME from Slackware
2. ???
3. Profit!!
"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.
--
make install -not war
Internet Explorer from Windows. Gates mentions in the -current ChangeLog that IE takes a lot of time to package, so this move should allow more time to be spent on the rest of the system's security. From the changelog: "Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against IE itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished beyond the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, Mozilla or Opera) is a decent web browser choice.
Welcome our new KDE overlords and wish them luck in removing gnome from every other distrobution.
Humor (or lack there of) aside. KDE 3.4 made me return to KDE from XFCE. I had converted from using gnome and kde on various systems to everything XFCE for awhile now. KDE 3.4 is just amazing. I can see why Pat wouldnt have any problem removing gnome and putting in KDE 3.4.
Try MiniSlack
y =20050325224633845
http://minislack.slackplanet.org/article.php?stor
It's pretty neat, 400MB, KDE is optional
I don't use slackware, or gnome, or kde, but I was a hardcore flux/fvwm user, until I found XFCE Just the good parts of a DE, without every single application in the world with a stupid gui and a G/K stuck on the front
Setec Astronomy
Which would you rather have?
1) A distribution that includes everything. Of course this means that the team's resources are spread too far, producing an inferior product.
2) A distribution that provides a subset, but is a solid foundation upon which others can reliably add functionality.
I'll take quality over quantity, thank you!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
i'm glad to see it go. it's always been a big waste of burned disk space when all i want to do is upgrade the latest core packages and recompile everything else that linuxpackages.net doesn't have a binary for.
and while we're on the topic of cutting out unnecessary GNOME fat... GTK developers: please stop depending on GNOME-specific packages!! when i want a cute little program for a slim little purpose to run on my less mainstream enlightenment setup, i *don't* want to install an entire DE that i never use!! please write programs independant of GNOME *and* KDE. both Qt and Gtk are perfectly fine libraries by themselves, without the additional bloat!
There I said it. No I'm not trolling or flamebaiting, it's just the simple truth. Every time I've ever used gnome over the last near decade it's been that way.
It's a shame really because I love C and I like gnome is about, but the bottom line is the results simply aren't there. Going a day with a Segv in a gnome environment is unusual in my experience.
Sigs are awesome huh?
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.
My biggest concern with Gnome was the fact that its widgets weren't all that stable. I was really interested in getting into GTK programming, and had a lot of fun with it until they started messing around with the APIs for some of the core widgets. Some of the jumps between 1.0 to 1.2 were a little tough to handle, and then when I was toying with the idea of just plugging along and accepting the changes, I found out that there were going to be even more changes. And all this before bonobo is announced as the next big thing. It's hard to get committed to long-term projects for a desktop when the goal posts are constantly moving for the dependencies.
In truth, we should have expected trouble when Gnome started shouting about how wonderful Nautilus was. If you're heading into upper versions of your project, and your flagship feature is a file browser that runs slower than hell, it's time to do a little soul-searching.
What sucks is that C is my favourite language, and I really like some of the eye-candy that Gnome offers, and would have preferred to stay with Gnome for general development. But KDE in the end just offers a better all-around experience, both in general use and for development.
And I'm just a hobbyist. I can't imagine what sort of hell dedicated programmers are going through trying to work with Gnome.
I want a decent file browser, useable (system-wide) drag and drop, homogenized toolkits (none of this "three apps, three different looks" bullshit), a friendlier clipboard (I got a powerbook here, this whole THREE BUTTON MOUSE!!!!! thing is killin' me!), a non-shitty default aesthetic that doesn't compell me to change everything out of its sheer ugliness, a useful offline help system, CAREFULLY THOUGHT OUT CONSISTANT AND TESTED CONFIGURATION MENUS and.... (pause for breath) everything else MacOS had in 1994. Which so far only MacOS and OS X seem to have.
:|
Windows still hasn't caught up and freenix "desktops" are still catching up to windows. 32-bit icons and font smoothing are candy things.... and unfortunately, they're a hell of a lot easier to impliment than Basic Functionality.
The "choice" obsessed people would beat them down. They want every OSS effort to be splintered and fragmented, so that I have to install and load two entire desktop environments just to be able to run each other's apps.
In addition, if I dare load up Firefox and OpenOffice, that's two more GUI libraries in memory, so now I get to have four entire GUI libraries all doing the same thing.
And before someone replies with "Microsoft Office does that too," no it doesn't. Those are called owner-drawn controls, where you override a standard Windows control's draw event with your own function. It's still a standard Windows control and not an entire desktop GUI library.
your coding style is atrocious. please don't help ;)
In Soviet Russia, GNOME drops YOU!
The kernel is written in C, and for very good reasons.
Most definitely not a M$-only thing: Apple's OS X has been doing it since the release of 10.3, and a side by side comparison between it and XP puts OS X's implementation well in front aesthetically (I'm a typographer).
you had me at #!
That should read "Slackware was removed from Gnome." Gnome consists of so much memory-hogging bloat, it begins to make sense.
- IP
Clearly, you and Pat don't agree. The article summary clearly states that Pat doesn't think there is anything major wrong with GNOME the desktop, it is the packaging of GNOME that is difficult.
Geez. Not only aren't we reading the articles, we aren't even reading the summaries anymore.
-- KDE user and summary reader.
Well, I'll do my bitching about the moderators first: where the hell are your brains if you considered the parent post insightful ? It's just a brainless statement that doesn't even rely on facts. It's much like saying that "the Windows GUI relies on libraries all written by Microsoft" so GNOME is better because it doesn't.
The truth is that the KDE libraries are not all clumped together into KDE libs. They have never been. In version 1.0 KDE libs might have been larger than the others, but that was five years ago. Things have evolved a little bit and the KDE libraries are actually very modular.
So, Gnome is not more difficult to compile because there are a lot of different people work on it. Hell, there are more people working on KDE and the results are much better. The problem with GNOME is that it's poorly coordinated and it's way too dominated by ideological issues (we have to write it in C comes to mind, even if it was unrelated).
As about your statement that programs that need some KDE feature exclusively are KDE programs: bollocks! You don't have a clue about the structure of KDE or how to link a program. Unless you need to write the program as a DCOP client, you don't need other any part of KDE except for what you link in your program.
As others have pointed out, there's nothing object oriented about your code. And, of course, if that were C++, and pretending that a C++ version of the gtk header exists, you could do this:
// return 0 is implicit from main in C++
void callback(button& b) {
cout << "click\n";
}
int main() {
init();
window my_window(200, 200, "title");
signal_connect(my_window, destroy, main_quit, 0);
button my_button("label");
signal_connect(my_button, click, callback);
container_add(my_window, my_button);
widget_show_all(my_window);
gtk_main();
}
Now look how this C++ version is 10 times easier to understand. Plus it can do many more things. The callback function can be typesafe, for instance, and doesn't need a given signature - it could be a functor, or return a value (which is presumably ignored). This is possible due to templates. C++ is better than C, period.
Four or five years ago??! You can't possibly be serious, thinking an experience you had five years ago with gnome has any relevance today, whatsoever.
Well, he did say he had looked over the packaging structure for Gnome more recently which also says a lot.
Wheel reinventing, like, say, Qt reinventing practically all of the C++ wheel?
Some wheels turn, others do not. When the wheel ceases turning I don't have a problem with reinventing one. And I hate code or effort duplication.
Personally, I think it's good there are two large competing desktops on Linux. But I have to say the whole QT is now GPL argument is pretty compelling on the face of it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've noticed the posts with the highest ratings are either praising or protesting gnome and the decision to not offically package it in slackware.
From what I can tell, dropline Gnome seems to be the best option for Slackware users, so it's not really a big deal that it's being offically dropped. What is a big deal is what's gonna happen to Slackware's maintainer. I've seen other posts about his recent health problems.
Slackware was my first distro. I used 3.6 and up all the way until I had to learn Redhat 7.0 for a job. I used RedHat until 9 and now I'm at Gentoo, however I still am glad my original distro has a maintainer that won't let the project die, even while he struggles with his own health.
Let's give him a hats off for all the work put into maintaining one of the original distros.
with ubuntu i switched to gnome. it looks a bit oldfashioned. but thats much better than having trillions of useless features like in kde. kde seems to become the "marketing driven" equivalent to windows xp and what longhorm will be.
the whole desktop business became "marketing driven". edward tufte once told that in the early days userinterface designers never thought about that they would have to do what marketing guys tell them. an independent linux community should show people how a simple desktop improves the working conditions.
I used to swear by Gnome on slackware, now I just swear at it.
KDE 3.4 was a total cinch to install from source on slackware 10.1 - download about 100meg of packages, extract, make a quick bash script to compile and leave for a few hours - done !
Or you can use Konstruct.
I tried compiling the latest version of gnome, gave up and tried dropline. Dropline runs like an absolute dog on my hardware setup, whereas KDE 3.4 runs smooth. It also took almost as long to install dropline as it did to compile KDE 3.4
I can't blame Pat for deciding to Gnome - it's much better for a distribution to focus on a single core desktop. After all, if you want to install Gnome, you can.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
It's a shame that KDE and Gnome do not both use Qt. It would eliminate almost all of the compatibility issues, save memory on hybrid desktops, and allow them to compete on things that really matter like UI design."
It would also eliminate the option of creating closed source applications without paying thousands of euros for Qt licenses (or at least apps that fit the general UI look and feel).
Not in million years. Companies don't want to be that dependent on Trolltech.
This comes from a KDE user (KDE 3.4 is a gem). But I'm also a developer, and I don't see Qt as *strategically* viable route to bring Linux desktop forward.
(For those that don't know, Gtk is LGPL which is more free than GPL, which is the license Qt uses).
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
GNOME's been slipping for some time now, really. They've always been more bloated than KDE, and they've even admitted so. For instance, a gconsole tab uses 300K, while a konsole tab uses 50K. The user experience has also been slipping. Their usability engineers, if they have any, aren't doing any usability studies. Mind you, KDE aren't either, but their usability seems better.
The drawback to eliminating GNOME is not the loss of the GNOME UI, but the loss of the GNOME libraries, which allow one to run GNOME apps under KDE. But it IS a huge reduction in what has to be built and packaged, a huge reduction in disk usage, and a huge reduction in memory bloat.
GNOME people need to get on the stick, cut the fat, improve the quality of the user experience, and make their system easlier to use.
I think part of their problem is over-dependence on RPC. Too many things are done by launching another process, and then calling a procedure in the other process. I suppose the RPC interface itself isn't that bloated (or is it?), but just think about the overhead!
I see lack of choice (i.e, Windows, MacOS) as lack of progress.
I see freedom to choose amongst many alternative as progress.
The original poster was right. You don;t like what you see then get what you need or contribute towards what you would like to see (whining does not count as a contribution, hunting bugs, participating in development forums, adopting one application and helping to steer it in the correct direction, etc is what is needed. People whining for Windows or MacOS like functionality just don't understand the philosophy of Linux and GPLed software...).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Really? Last time I checked, end users didn't often try to build GNOME from scratch, much less maintain all of the buildscripts required to produce Slackware packages of it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
And the sad thing is it gets this with 100x the footprint of libraries. I'm assuming that's why gnome's logo is, in fact, a footprint. Because it is huge.
Your entire argument is based on the opinion that winning over the general public is somehow the "goal" of Linux.
Think about it for a second.
Now think about it for another.
Personally, I don't want it to become mainstream, or the OS of the general public. The general public is a bunch of morons who destroy the fun and life in everything it collectively touches. Disney is what the public wants. NASCAR is what the public wants. Windows is what the public wants.
Now I have known people, that I respect, that like each of these things. But as a whole, these things cater to the lowest common denominator. In my opinion, Linux is above that. And you can't say it is elitest, because *it* isn't a thing with someone behind the wheel steering it in any one direction. It is more like evolution than a lab experiment. In all honesty, I think it is a beautiful thing, and I don't want it to be degraded to the point where it is on the public desktop. If someone or a company can put it there, so be it. But hopefully if that happens it won't drag "Linux" down with it.
One of the problems with Linux is that there is too much choice.
I know I quoted you out of sequence, so forgive me. But choice is EXACTLY what got Linux where it is today. I can agree that it is daunting, even for me, to choose. But I would rather have the choice. I was on the same distro for about 5 years, which is like millenia in distro time. By the time I decided to upgrade, the choices were staggering! I tried one, then another, then settled on my third choice. There are still things that I don't like about the one I chose (or should I say that I like better about the ones I didn't), but I made a good choice. Linux is evolving, constantly, and is improving. I have been using it since RedHat5.1, and Unix before that. There are some tools that I use today that I used the first day I logged in. And I still learn about new tools today - some brand new, some that have been there since day 1. It is awesome, and I love it. There are 50 ways to do the same thing, some more elegant than others, some brute force. I write scripts all the time that perform actions like taking photos, resizing them to 3 standard sizes, making thumbnails, and creating HTML around them so people can view them on a web page. There are packages that can do this, there are hundreds of ways via shell scripts, different languages, etc. But I did it my way. Is my way the best way? There is no best way. My way works, and it is mine. THAT is why I like Linux. I think it is better to offer choice. Everyone can choose, but everyone doesn't have to choose the same thing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
All together now:
Ahh, a 4x4 grid of them. Make mine half white, half green . .
hawk