Alien's new blog (http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/whats-cooking/) mentioned that KDE4.7 is a maintenance burden. So there is a possibility to remove it just like Gnome.

What do you think?

(I don't know how to start a poll here...)

It is up to PV and the team to decide if they want to maintain KDE, I doubt that a poll here would change that.

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Agree with Tobi. What we think doesn't matter.

I'd have no objection to Slackware becoming a XFCE focussed distro though,as I don't use KDE.

Disclaimer: Below I express my opinion, not Pat's !!

Well, the blog post was meant to be confrontational (not just toward KDE) and I believe I succeeded :-)
But to be fair, the KDE developers are still polishing the source release process. And maybe that will be beneficial enough for us that we can just continue packaging it.

However, it really looks like KDE is starting to go down that same slippery road where GNOME went long ago: lots of small source tarballs, broken-up fractal release processes, loss of desktop coherence, in short a general failure. For the next Slackware, we still have the option of sticking with KDE 4.6 which would give us a long time to consider.

Since I am only an enthousiast amateur who tries to improve Slackware in his own free time, there is a point where I no longer have time left for these lenghthy exercises. KDE is nice, but not nice enough that I would drop some of my other activities for it. There is the added suspicion that the bigger distros are trying to expand their foothold and dictate policies and future. Therefore, I am willing to consider alternative Desktop Environments like XFCE or LXDE for my personal use.

GNOME is still out of the question for me. Associating yourself With GNOME means you are gagged and bound, dangling below the asshole of Redhat. The stink that emanates there is bad enough that I say NO WAY. Redhat will have to kick out some of its staff before I start feeling better about this. Re-adopting GNOME would probably be a death blow to Slackware as an independent distro.

Eric

PS: does it show that I am at home feeling sick sporting a giant head-ache... and the coffee and peanutbutter taste like industial waste thanks to the infection in my throat...

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Hmm, yes. I don't want to change PatV or Alien neither. I just want to know what do people think

But I like KDE, especially Konsole and Dolohin. If PatV drop KDE, there will be KSB coming?

Since I'm not using KDE now, I wouldn't miss it if it were removed.

Expanding what I said commenting your blog, I've been using KDE since 0.x releases, I used to download it and compile it on my own. I can't imagine my future without it, well almost

If this is the point, I think it would not be too much difficult to find a group of volunteers, including me, willing to share the burden of working on new slackbuilds, testing, compiling and distributing. Maybe this in form of a KSB project, or whatever form it may assume to sound likely to Pat.

hmm hasn't it always been like this? :-) They don't even need to try, they just do it. We don't give funds to KDE development, or to any other project.

Luckily

Ciao,
Luigi

If you need help, feel free to ask me. Although I should offer help directly without asking you to ask me Along with "light-weight" DE such as XFCE or LXDE, I think there should have "full-featured" DE for desktop use(not servers).

When I say offering help, I'm serious. Because there seems no other distro I want to use(even a try). Ubuntu? The ever changing crap? openSUSE? I have to say I never understand how yast resolve dependency conflicts. Arch? Unusable after an update? Fedora? Debian?... No no no. The only thing I could understand is Slackware. If Slackware is bad, the whole Linux life will be tough. That's why I want to offer help.

P.S. I don't want to start distro war. I just want to say how I personally think and how important slackware is for me. If it offend you, sorry.

When you think about it. Eric's build was kind of a KSB already.


I watched vbatt's slackware talk at the kde conference on youtube the other week. One of the things the audience asked in the questions section towards the end was "What do you like about KDE?" and Vincent answered that "there were only a few packages and it was easy to build". Then a few days later, I see Eric's post saying they're making it more difficult.

Hopefully, either KDE developers will get their act together or inspiration will come from Slackware developers. I do depend a lot on KDE (stuffs like kontact have just become indispensable for me over time). In the mean time, I will download robby’s xfce packages and start playing around with xfce just in case ….

Same here. I use Xfce with no dependence on any kind of KDE applications.

Many of us felt something similar about KDE even before the acquisition of Nokia/QT by Microsoft.

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Ditto. I would be devastated to see XFCE support pulled but not KDE. Gnome and KDE can carry on with their elitist game of "Show me yours and I'll show you mine" while traditional, functional, clean and productive-friendly UIs like XFCE, Openbox, FVWM, LXDE, Fluxbox and of course the shell continue to serve those of us who have no interest in these hideous Windows clones.

Hmm, yes. Modules in official tree is always sort of SB, right?

I used to think GSB is a community-driven project. But I just had a look at the git commits on https://github.com/gnomeslackbuild/g...commits/master , it seems to be an other one man's child. So I am wrong.

Slackware is famous(?) for it's team -- a small talent people who invest their precious time to do the right. One guy takes one part means clear responsibly(if there is any). But if that guy is tired or have no time to catch up, it might mean dropping features.

But all of above is just pure _thoery_ As Alien has already said, there is no drop of KDE right now. It just opened the discussion. Things might be OK when KDE4.7 or KDE4.7.x is out. The earth is still running

Personally I find KDE useful in that it is fairly feature complete - I can use it straight out of the box without having to spend time configuring it, I do have critisisms but they are outweighed by convenience. From a packaging point of view it sounds like a nightmare so I can understand wanting to find an alternative - I think the approach of a KSB would be acceptable to most users - It may also mean that efforts are not duplicated as there will be only one so to speak.