I think Plasma will be added just before release. And my proposal is to stop thread like this one. It gives unpleasant impression of trying to enforce Pat Volkerding to do something. We know he is working busy. I am waiting - meantime using Devuan and Slackware 14.2.

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No it isn't, because current is not a stable release.

At the time of the last stable release, many others were also shipping KDE4.

Er, and when was the last stable release? Remind me! Oh, yes, 30th June, 2016! Over 4 years ago!

Don't get me wrong. I love Slackware, and I do appreciate the efforts put in by Mr Volkerding, AlienBob and the rest of the crew. In my humble opinion, it is - or was - the best Linux distribution out there. But there must be a limit to how long people are prepared to wait for something that should have been included a long time ago.

Every morning, I check the changelog, holding my breath, hoping to see some sign that Plasma 5 is coming, and I'm sure I'm not alone! Eric has been doing sterling work, and his Plasma 5 offering is stable and works. But I sense that he has many other things on his plate as well, and there must be a limit on how much time he can devote to maintaining something that should be mainstream.

I'm sure when it comes, it will be worth the wait, but in the meantime, the wait is extremely frustrating!

--
Pete

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I built and use right now the KDE Plasma 5.20.0, KDE Frameworks 5.75.0 and KDE Applications 20.08.2 with no issues and no crashes or whatever hiccups.

This build, made in a "dirty" system, is absolutely stable in my daily usage, as seen also in the attached screenshot.

I truly believe that this "when it's ready" is about an ideological "when", maybe a philosophical "when", BUT I am absolutely certain from my own experience, that from a technical, packaging POV, this "when" happened long time ago.

Gentlemen, I look that one month ago was added "autoconf-archive" which is an rather benign package, needed to rebuild DBUS for elogind support. And ONE month passed with no other news. No sign that elogind is near to be adopted. Not even something kicking on /testing.

Considering that a Plasma5 have around 350 packages, and a pace of adding one at over 2 months, we will have to wait over 700 months. This is way over 5 (five) years. At that time, will become EOL not only the Plasma5 but also the Plasma6 and the Plasma7 will be in work.

That makes me conclude that Mr. Volkerding just does NOT want to add Plasma5 to Slackware, plain and simple.

And if this is the case, I believe that he should say clear and loud, for us to know what to expect and what we have to do.

Because Slackware is his distro, he's the boss and we will absolutely respect his decision.

No offense intended, but also us we should know what to expect from Slackware, after 5 years of "when" ...

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As someone who used since years your KTown, now using my own builds of latest Plasma5 and installed it in whatever imaginable boxes, even in mini-netbooks with /usr in a squashfs to accommodate the Slackware in an 8G flash drive, or in an HP DC7800 which has GM3100 graphics and only OpenGL 1.4 and OpenGL ES 2.0, well... permit me to doubt that any reasonable experienced Slackware user will end with a broken system. Because as you know, the today Plasma5 is rock solid.

And if the fear is for the rookies who jumped blindly in slackware-current, and have no clue to fix things, what stops Slackware to invent a new tree for the real development and leave the -current in its super-stable state?

For example: slackware-testing which to be for those who dares to assume a real testing.

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I share your frustration and posted about it in this thread. However, Mr. Volkerding continues to work on KDE5 components; he uploaded a new qt5 today. I must conclude then that Mr. V. does intend to release KDE-plasma.
I've decided that even though I am frustrated with the long wait (I'm an impatient sod) I'm going to keep the faith. I recently made an annual contribution to Slackware. I feel in this way I'm helping in a small way.

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I find this very confusing as well as frustrating. How many here were using Slackware when it first adopted KDE4? You may recall people dropped KDE in droves AND that was after Patrick waited for months to adopt v4 while other distros, that failed to heed the "not ready for release" messages from the KDE dev team, scrambled to bail water to keep afloat! Even with that rightfully cautious approach it took almost a year before KDE4, even in Slackware, was back to being at all solid and rel;atively problem free.

Maybe I'm missing something but Ktown has not only been as good for me as v4 was when it was officially adopted by Slackware but it has been vastly better than V4 when it was included, and many, including your truly, say as good as V4 ever got!

Pam and elogind are major changes that require some concern and caution but apparently those have become fairly easy choice options now that ConsoleKit has been improved and less of an obstacle. I really don't see why Plasma5 can't become mainstream very soon, if not right now, even if it means having to choose Pam/elogind or CoinsoleKit in the installer just as we now choose between WM/DEs .

BTW, the KDE4's KInfoCenter crashes even today, when you visit the OpenGL page - on stock slackware-current...

In other hands, I do not seen a crash on X11/Plasma5 since ages.

And with Plasma 5.20 even Wayland/Plasma5 works absolutely fine, with AMD or Intel graphics, of course - the blob based NVidia graphics I do not tested, but probably they are a special snowflake in Wayland, how was always.

ConsoleKit2 is as much alive like is the Tutankhamen's favorite cat.

It's dead, man! And looks like everybody else jumped from this sinking ship. I guess we are the last ones who still use this ancient technology.

Please note also that there is no way to have both ConsoleKit2 and elogind working in a system - they are mutually exclusive. Like in movies: there must be only one!

And elogind is not that scarry as you think.

The slackware-current's stock shipped KDE4 and XFCE works fine with elogind, with no patches or whatsoever - as you probably observed in your own adventures on upgrading to Plasma5, where the stock XFCE had no issues after elogind replacing ConsoleKit2.

Hiya LuckyCyborg - Yeah I know Console Kit and elogind are mutually exclusive, which is why I removed ConsoleKit as instructed before I even attempted installing Latest KTown and then mentioned here that it would be possible, and maybe desirable at least for a time, to have the choice between ConsoleKit installs and elogind installs. Frankly I wouldn't care if they were separate isos like Live is for various WM/DE options, or if merely a checkbox on the installer.

I know you see ConsoleKit as dead but not everyone agrees. FWIW I'm not among them. I'm fine with Pam and elogind,... maybe a big deal to code in the transition, but not a big deal for most users. Most will barely notice any change. I don't see elogind as scary at all. I don't know why you assumed I failed to RTFM in my latest Current/Ktown adventure. If anything I am overly cautious. It wasn't me or my doing. It was apparently a hardware or driver issue with "MinimumVT=7". Changing that one default number in one .conf file solved everything.

I don't like things because they are new or because they are old. I like them because they work for me. Age has nothing to do with it, much like The Wheel and Loudspeakers.

KDE Plasma 5.20.0, KDE Frameworks 5.75.0 and KDE Applications 20.08.2, all work fine also here, on current

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So? Windows 10 just turned 5 years old. Do you have conniptions about that too?
Yes, I empathize and agree, but that's no reason to spout nonsense.

We'll see what Slackware 'ships' when the next version is released. Until then, nothing is being 'shipped.'

This is not a fair argument considering that every current program for Windows is pretty much guaranteed to run on whatever the latest release from Microsoft is. They could wait 10 years between releases and as an end user I doubt you'd feel it at all. On the other hand, a 10 year old Linux distribution that doesn't update its libraries is quite a different story.

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Part of the issue, it was not till recently that only recent Kernels had LTS support increased to six years. LTS support for Plasma 5 I believe is 1.5 years. Maybe the issue to address is how core components of an OS has X many years of LTS support, thus 4 years of Slackware 14.2 would not even be as big an issue. Unfortunately major components of the 14.2 release have been run out for LTS support such as the KDE, and some other things.

I have a major workhorse that is still running Slackware64 14.1 of which now the Kernel, KDE, FireFox, gcc, etc etc have run out LTS support and thus are showing their age.

None of this is the fault of Patrick Volkerderling and his circle of supporting developers -- it is how many major components of the Open Source world have been sunset thus driving pressure to get the latest software.

In some ways this needs to be addressed in the overall Open Source Community independent of Slackware.

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Windows also has major updates unlike anything you would see in a stable Slackware release (not just security updates). So it's not a fair comparison in that sense either.

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I actually saw an image on reddit today that echoed this sentiment and I had a good laugh at it.

It's a text picture and it said:

My work computer came to a crawl yesterday because someone had some crazy formulas going in the background that slowed everything as soon as you switched to a new cell.

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