The consensus of this thread to date seems to be that if KDE does not get it's act together then Slackware can thrive without it. Pat Volkerding and Eric Hameleers have my endorsement to adopt the negotiating position that they have taken. KDE is nothing without the user base that is supplied by distributions. If KDE does not consider distribution maintainers then it will deservedly die.

That said, I would be sorry to see the end of KDE in Slackware. There are some KDE apps (dolphin, k3b, okteta, okular) that I use very regularly. Replacements for these lack some functionality. I am on Woodsman's side of the fence with the statement that XFCE (4.6 as currently supplied in official Slackware) has some deficiencies when compared to KDE. (Two nitpicks that annoy me. Thunar does not allow for browsing of smb shares. Cannot disable multihead in XFCE so that you can use your second monitor for a second X session. These appear to addressed in 4.8 which I have yet to try.)
I appreciate that experienced users of Linux find KDE to be a bloated environment. I have a personal fondness for Windowmaker for the simplicity and effective use of resources as well as using it in Cygwin on my work Windows machine. However KDE does provide a familiar environment for users of Linux coming from the darkside. You can find the tools you commonly use from the menu structure. Slackware users tend to like tinkering and configuring, but often forget that new users need to attain a level of knowledge to do that. The integration within KDE allows for that learning.

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It's a bit sad that there's more posts and more borderline-flaming here on LQ than on the mailing list where Eric started his discussion with the People Who Matter (well, at least the subset of it that's public).

Apparently the KDE developers are being calm, cooperative and constructive (even the ones who still don't quite get it), and that, IMO, is very impressive. The world has lots of bad-tempered projects, but KDE isn't one of them.

If anyone doesn't understand why the proposed trivial solution of shipping a consolidated tarball will work, here's the equation. If upstream ships a tarball that doesn't build, it's upstream's problem, not Eric's. Naturally, the devs think they'll never ship a broken tarball. They might be right... they might be wrong :-)

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No, I don't think so. The effort spent on KDE won't totally go to other things such as XFCE. I mean, for example, if XFCE is OK on slackware, people won't spend much more time on it. We don't patch them too much

It's just my guessing.

Yes, that's true. But The thread here is just for slackers to express their opinion, which might have little impact for the upstream or slack crew. As the release-teamATkde.org is a closed mailing list, we cannot express our ideas there

I read through some posts on the release-teamATkde.org via mail-archive. There are some people want(and can) solve the political issue with a technical method. Even Fedora people said they hate the splitting of packages... So it seems to be a bright future(not much more maintain burden, so no KDE removal) so far.

Agreed, but there would be more time available to spend on something, and that's all I was really getting at.

ruario,

i said

"I do not use KDE4, because I refuse to use a DE which makes my old laptop (1.8 GHz) unusable (slow)."

If you meant that you use a DE but not one that makes your laptop slow, then that comma shouldn't be there.

i accept the grammar correction and apologize for the misunderstanding

let's move on

He probably just misunderstood because of the misplaced comma before 'which'. Unless you actually meant to convey that your refusal to use a DE makes your old laptop slow!

Powerful things commas.

edit:
mtk358 beat me to it. sorry for the duplication.

Several Slackware and pkgsrc projects has been done before.
For instance Draco Linux.

But IMHO something like pkgsrc don't sit well with Pats ideas on packagemanagers...

I respectfully and humbly disagree with

"I am dismayed by those folks who responded that they don't use KDE and stated or implied they could care less what happens. I believe such a cavalier attitude is short-sighted. A decision to drop KDE affects all Slackware users in one way or another."

For example, there are a lot of packages in ubuntu that are supported by the community, but at the end of the day are actually needed for the system to actually work. The thing is, these packages are ready/sync'd to master at the time of release of ubuntu so this issue of "who's supporting what" is transparent to the users.

Last I checked Mr. V's email and internet connection worked, and I'm pretty confident some coordination could take place that a 'community project' to support KDE for Slackware could be achieved at the next release of Slackware.

Remember Slackware is a small team of dev's focusing on a good solid base. The community picks up the extra's. KDE isn't vital to Slackware's existence. It's not a "core" app.

If Slackware were Redhat, I could see this as political. But KDE moving to be user supported doesn't mean it's banned.

Another point of mention is data caps on internet seem to be the big thing now in the US. Not shipping KDE would save some bits for those of us who (a) don't need it and (b) do a full install as we're told as Slacker's to do.

At the end of the day what's going to happen is what's going to happen. But the Slackware community stepping up and helping out the project with a situation like this may be beneficial in the end. Plus I'm sure Mr. V wouldn't mind some time back in his life.

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If KDE were to be removed then one would expect for XFCE to become more complete than it is now. For example the only graphical media burner available in Slackware today is k3b, so its logical that xfburn, brasero or some other one would replace it. Same for koffice, it would probably be replaced with libreoffice.
In that sense a removal of KDE from Slackware would benefit non-KDE users cause more things would be available for them out of the box, most of of which require to get their own hands dirty and spend time building/intergrating to Slackware themselves today.
In that sense i can only agree with Gazl.

KDE removal would prevent me to loose my time with some of the KDE games, which is certainly a good thing.

In fact I already removed kdegames and kdelib, i.e. all that remained of my KDE installation.

Alas, I would probably find another way to loose it, like give useless answers to some threads @ LQ

Another thing to consider: removing KDE would save some space on hard disk Cd and DVD.

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That's helpful to know. I will continue learning about KDE 4 at every opportunity. I have noticed that the help in KDE is getting better with each release and the missing or outdated information has been corrected. I installed 4.6.3 because you made it so easy and it seems to be a very solid KDE release. I like XFCE but I like KDE better so far.

[QUOTE=Erik_FL;4377962I installed 4.6.3 because you made it so easy and it seems to be a very solid KDE release.[/QUOTE]

KDE 4.6.4 packages are ready... and waiting for the official release announcement at http://kde.org/ ... hopefully that'll happen soon.

Eric

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