Well, I guess that Pat's style changed a bit during 20 years

I don't care for that, as long as these scripts work as expected. And as far as I can tell, they do.

_I_ use rc.inet1* with huge pleasure for my wired network, and *that* is just a good reason to keep them .. isn't it? :PPP LOL

sbopkg

lshw

dovecot

Virtual beer... No wait. Real beer. Brewed by Pat. One free bottle w/every new subscription HERE

unace

unrar

MToolsFM

src2pkg

I use slackware's stock initscripts, including network ones.

Still, it doesn't mean they can't be improved.

Actually, they mostly work due to my luck, not my clear understanding.

Anyway, systemd is awful and thank god, the Gentoo guys forked the udev utility.

Another vote for Enlightenment. Though it's NBD to compile and install it.

LibreOffice would also make a nice addition. For video editing, Lives. (There is still some dependency chasing to compile this, but it's gotten a lot better. No need to chase down all those GNOME libs like there was in Slack-11.)

And XEMACS: that would also be something I'd like to see.

So far I would have to say, the weakest link in Slackware IMHO, is the Office suite. LibreOffice does appear to be more robust, and plays nice with everything I run. Yes, we have the option to run what we want, but that's not what the question being asked : )

I also would like to see better Multimedia in Slackware without having to install a crap load of dependencies, like running Audacity or anything for audio / video production. Shouldn't ffmpeg be included in the base install?

Anyway, just my 2 cents, I'm still grateful for the work that is already done by Patrick & Company, and I'm equally thankful for those in the community that make it possible to do so much more with Slackware.

Blessings,

For libreoffice to be included there has to be some changes to the way Slackware distributes the programs sources.
Even if the libreoffice package is not that big its sources are huge and wont fix the dvd.

Regarding multimedia theres bound to be some changes sooner or later.
Pat himself has already said right here in this forum that xine is probably going away at some point. Then the phonon xine and mplayer backends are deprecated. That leaves the world with two choices. Gstreamer which is already included but Slackware doesn't include the bad & ugly plugins and the vlc backend which naturally needs vlc.
If the two deprecated backends go away, KDE applications won't be capable of playing many file formats eg. at this point mp3s.

FFmpeg is indeed a must and probably most people install it; even on servers.
But the way Slackware handles multimedia, by not including applications like FFmpeg is in many ways a fine practice cause it leaves choice to install (mostly proprietary) file format support exclusively to the user.
Audacity in particular needs not only additional codec support but also wxgtk so it sounds like a long shot at this point.

The way i see it the biggest headache is with the phonon backends.

So that is probably not going to happen. Options are OpenOffice and pray that Calligra gets better.

Which leads me to believe that Slackware is probably not ever going to be a good production OS, specifically for production of good multimedia.

Which begs the question, if not Slackware, which distribution does Multimedia best?

It may be a headache, but what is a better solution?

Thanks for your insight.

According to these query results, you could try Ubuntu Studio or DreamStudio.

Adding "based on Slackware" to search criteria leads to a void list.

what's the fuss about libreoffice? AlienBOB is kind enough to provide us with a ready package, which is very up-to-date...

IMO xine still does a better job at playing dvds than mplayer does, so if he does get rid of xine then I'll be building it locally for that reason. I also prefer the xine backend over gstreamer for programs that allow the choice. 'gstreamer' has never worked well for me.

IMO, that's the point for KDE to go away, not xine or mplayer.(To be replaced with Enlightenment, EDE or LXDE)
Xine and mplayer are old and carefully written.

I have never actually managed to make gstreamer and friends working.

Nobody said that mplayer will go away, just the Phonon backend for it is deprecated and might stop functioning in the future due to code rot.