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Slackware 13.1 Released
Several readers made sure we are aware that Slackware 13.1 release is out. Here's the list of mirrors. "Slackware 13.1 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.6.1, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy-to-use desktop environment, and KDE 4.4.3, a recent stable release of the new 4.4.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment."
Slackware hasn't officially packaged GNOME since 2005. There are various community projects which allow you to use GNOME on Slackware, however.
Lazy may have little to do with it. Between fundamental changes in the way kernel handles various parts of the systems (what the heck is /sys anyway) and the move from actually setting something up to having things automated there are very few underlying fundamental things you can now change yourself when tinkering with a modern user friendly system like Ubuntu.
For one thing try and get Ubuntu to StartX with no screen attached. With older distros some level of xconfig would allow me to run X on a virtual framebuffer, but not Ubuntu. If Ubuntu isn't able to detect it via hotplug it just doesn't exist. Suppose you manually massage your fstab file then the gui filesystem utility in ubuntu breaks. In my case it's able unmount but not remount any file systems.
He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain.
Pat's a great guy, but his dropping GNOME pissed off a lot of people too, though I understand his reasoning. KDE was at the time a lot easier to build, while GNOME was riddled with circular dependencies that made maintaining it a bitch of a job.
Fortunately for GNOME fans, the job was ably taken up by maintainers of the Dropline GNOME distribution. I have the impression they're getting a bit tired of it now, but others are around to fill the gap.