In my experience, it's possible, but you better know exactly what you are doing, and even if you do you will still make mistakes.
But ofcourse, for some people they can do it easily if they don't need X and KDE, just removing those and xap and xfce.

I've also got some experience with removing stuff in KDE in a distro that resolve dependencies, and the results are quite surprising sometimes. All KDE want to uninstall just because I want to remove that wee tiny bit, huh?

As do I. I'm glad that Slackware installer does allow customization. That said, I sometimes think it shouldn't based on issues frequently reported on this forum... just saying. Runs for cover...

Just updated my beta and everything went smoothly. So now I have 15-RC1! Everything seems to be working smoothly, though there's quite a lot that I haven't installed yet and am not going to until release: multilib and slackpkg+ for a start.

@Zeebra: This kind of weird behaviour in distros like Debian happens because
1) Their package managers distinguish between packages installed explicitly and those that come over as dependencies.
2) Packages like KDE are metapackages. They are actually empty but have all the desktop applications and libraries as dependencies.
3) When you remove a dependency, the package that depends on it is removed too, and then any of its dependencies which were installed automatically are also removed. At least synaptic does this; I don't think apt does.

So you remove a KDE app that you don't want. The KDE metapackage depends on it, so that gets removed. The rest of KDE was loaded only as dependencies of that metapackage, so...

Yes, it's horrible. A friend of mine lost the whole of Xorg that way. In theory the way to prevent this is to explicitly reinstall everything you want to keep and then delete what you don't want, but who has the time for that? Thank God Slackware doesn't mess us around like that.

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I went down that Debian highway once (a very long time ago). I am sooooo glad for Slackware.

That's right. In my experience Mageia is better than Debian in that regards. It distignuishes between 1) and 2) leaving "orphans" (and with orphans), dependencies of dependencies. I think that's the approach of arch too.
That might the reason they have a metapackage "kde-minimal" and another "kde". But even with that minimal metapackage I can remove certain components without getting dependency warnings (mostly I do this with kconnect and pim/akonadi). I'm not exactly sure how Mageia/urpmi resolve dependencies, but it seems pretty fine grained to be frank. But they are now in the progress of moving to "DNF", but I don't know the details about how it works.

From what I remember of Debian, my experience in the same situation was pretty bad, and I remember being frustrated about it. But I think that was more in regards to installing packages that drew so incredibly many dependencies. So I could be wrong, that could be due to debian being even more fine grained. But it's been so long since I've used debian, so I don't frankly remember that well.

Actually, right now I'm trying to build a package from Mageia for Slackware 15rc1, and it's quite some work. I'm probably not doing it in a smart way, and building this package is a bit overoptimistic, but I'm having to manually resolve alot of dependencies and build those packages as well. I'm hoping this cycle is soon over so I can test a working package

It's at least partially due to how they split upstream software into lots of different packages. This is supposed to allow Debian-based distros to save disk space. Of course, storage is cheaper than it's ever been, and that kind of packaging can make finding the correct packages for building stuff a real headache.

It's one of the reasons why I became cheesed off with Debian, which I used to like very much. I hate unnecessary complications. Imagine: they even separate find and locate!

On a slightly different subject, what do people think of the new FF? I hadn't used it before and the tab bar looks quite weird to me.

Well, I disagree about this argument actually.

Just because everyone has more storage space and more RAM than ever, don't mean developers should be more sloppy and liberal with resources than ever. That would lead us down the Mozilla path of "you have free ram, so we must use it, even though we don't need to, because unused ram is bad".
I really like Firefox, but I had to stop using it due to that policy. The result of that policy for me in practice is that Firefox consumes way more resources than it need to, and it causes Firefox tabs and Firefox in general to freeze and crash, and even dragging with it the whole DE, causing crashes in Plasma as well. It's often sluggish in various ways (maybe due to GTK..). I've tried everything to tame Firefox, but so far with limited success.

The "antithesis" to the Mozilla path is the Playstation path as I like to call it. It creates a situation where you work with limited resources for a decade, and to improve "the result" (a game), you have to optimize the code and use clever approaches to do things. The results of that are some rather "impossible" games released on very limited hardware, yet running as well or better than comparable "software" (games) on much more powerful hardware.

I'm currently using Konqueror actually. And doing the same things I generally did with Firefox it consumes 1/3 or 1/2 the resources, it's fast and it basically never crashes. The GUI never "lags" either. And yes, Konqueror got their act together, so give it a try! They're using QT WebEngine (stripped chromium engine), and the result is the browser is usuable again, and even quite good.

I've got epiphany (gnome web with webkit) as well just in case, but I hardly ever use it. And ofcourse, Lynx

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Oh, I agree. I just don't think Debian's particular trade-off is worth it (an inconvenient number of packages for a little saved space).

I dunno. Debian is quite popular for embedded devices (and mobile test platforms) and such as well, so it could be useful.

Haha! Yes. A full install works out of the box with all dependencies met. As always the Slackware installer will not hold your hand and it gives you permission to shoot yourself in the foot. Therefore it is recommended that you do a full install. If you know what you're doing you can choose a customized install.

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In practical use, Slackware is customizable at the series level. Any of the E, F, K, KDE, T, XFCE, and Y series can be omitted without undue effects.

In general, removing packages is dangerous with or without dependency resolution.
Ed

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I use Falkon myself, and Lynx too. Birds of a feather.

As regards the "Mozilla effect" or as I call it "software-as-fluid" (software is a fluid as it expands to fill its container), this is a very real problem. The systemic laziness of the industry is creating real-world problems that are not contained to our wallets. I wrote about this on my website, but to make it short this nature of software drives obsolescence of hardware without adding significant new capabilities for the average user. The waste generated by this systemic laziness is generating such a large amount of physical waste (enough to fill hundreds of the largest cruise liners per year) that it is literally killing people, animals, and plants. The same laziness is also driving more energy consumption which is currently primarily made from the burning of coal, oil, and gas. Writing crap software in slow crappy languages is bad for the Earth and for the health of humans on the Earth. Don't be a murderous polluter, write better software.

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This works well for me.

Great! Good for you
Nevertheless, it is never a good sign to apply what others have done.
The current is now installed for more than 3 years on my laptops, and I have, with time, taken the part to keep only what I need
I don't have any problems (at least, that I'm not able to debug) either on my Lenovo laptop or on the Dell
In any case, it is strongly recommended to do a full install