Don't get me wrong but Slackware is kinda "bloated"
 

It has a lot, A LOT of packages. Why is Slackware shipping multiple email readers, FTP clients, browsers, media players, one million text editors etc? It has 1000+ packages installed and, to be really honest, that is insane. It is a waste on my levels: disk space (irrelevant in most cases), maintenance (this is for the Slackware team, why go through the hassle of managing all of this? And with that many packages many of them go without maintenance), security (less packages/services, less things to patch, less exploits). It would also make it easier to install/run Slackware off a USB disk.

Don't you think it would be nice to drop some packages? If they are really needed people would take care of them (community).

Resume: It would be better for the Slackware team (maintenance) and the users (security, bandwith, space in disk).

PS: I know I can edit the menus but that is not the case, they are there just for illustrative purposes.

It is partly the breadth of packages that make Slackware so useful to so many people in so many different use cases.

We might all say, "Sure, get rid of some of that cruft, but not anything that I use!".

It would be more trouble than worth and very divisive of the Slackware community to try to create the list of removables. Doubly so to try to actually remove things!

Pat decides when and what to remove. Pat is wise. Trust Pat and enjoy the ensuing peace!

... interestin ... Pedro ...

btw: pat IS NOT 'GOD' !!!

Actually, within the Slackware realm, he is pretty damned close... ;)

In many ways Slackware only packages what is going to be multi-system useful for any occasion. This does give it some bloat, but it doesn't overbloat the system. Many of the KDE tools are extremely useful even under Xfce due to the advanced editing they allow, such as kwrite and scripting. However, Slackware does leave a lot out to SBo.

Most of what I see in the menus is from the standard KDE suite. For a distro maintainer to package KDE as a whole make sense to me.

You can remove kdegames, individual KDE applications, or even all of KDE if you don't want them.

As for the others: "which packages would you liked to see dropped in future Slackware versions" might be an interesting thread.

That depends on what do you think is "bloated". In, let's say, Ubuntu's case, bloatness is a lot of runtime dependencies for a lot of packages. Try to install something small and it pulls a mountain of dependencies. Why? Because that small package was compiled with almost everything enabled, and when you start that program, all those libraries from dependency packages are loaded into memory.

Slackware is not like this. Compilation options are carefully chosen, and in most cases you can remove quite a lot of packages without affecting other apps (although in case of some libraries you need to know what you're doing since all dependencies have to be tracked manually). You don't need most of the packages? Don't install them. The installer lets you choose groups of packages (and even individual packages) so you could make the system fit you more or less perfectly.

You can't make everyone happy, so there's a variety of applications for some tasks, like mail reading. Someone likes KMail, someone else might like Thunderbird, other people may prefer mutt or alpine. Slackware doesn't force its apps to you, it lets you choose for yourself. If you don't want to choose during installation, installing everything is a hassle-free way to give you a choice. You can always remove not needed packages later. Or not.

I've been using Slackware for maybe five years and I still keep discovering interesting things about this distribution. My favorite discovery was that Slackware is more or less self-sufficient. You can get a single DVD with its packages and do pretty much everything even if you don't have Internet, like in some far away small towns. It has lots of server and client software to build infrastructure from scratch. Sure, other apps may seem more convenient (for example, not that many people use Sendmail nowadays, but you still can use it to set up a working mail server inside a local network), but Slackware has tools for a lot of tasks.

All in all, I wouldn't call Slackware bloated. More like comprehensive.

P.S.: Sorry if I didn't make much sense.

It also occurs to me that "bloat" is not the right word for "lots of packages".

My own use of "bloat" (and I think shared by some others) describes the minimum level of run-time resource usage being high enough to interfere with user interactions with the system. In english, too many running processes that are of no use to the task at hand.

Slackware does not suffer from that particular problem.

What is described in the OP of this thread is "redundancy" of packages, not bloat. In other words, too many options. In that respect it does represent a somewhat higher base use of storage resources, but never of run-time resources. And as the OP notes, that is of little consequence today.

Runtime is bloat. Storage is choices.

*** fsLeg was faster and more complete with the thought - спасибо!

Pat does drop packages when they become difficult to maintain. GNOME is a famous example; proftpd is a less famous one.

EDIT: as was pointed out later, proftpd wasn't dropped. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that.

Try SLACKEL or SALIX...

www.slackel.gr

http://www.salixos.org/

:hattip:

Yes, this is what I'm thinking as well.

Also, Linux is about choice, and without plenty of software to choose from, there is no choice and no Linux.

I see this thread mostly as a rant, it wasn't fully thought through, and its purpose is ambiguous.

:D :twocents:

Bloated?

My Conky begs to differ.

Out of curiosity, is there a compilation of software that's been dropped? I'd think it's small. Slackware is nothing if not consistent.

This reminds me of comp.os.linux.misc in 1994.