Which doesn't matter at all. I would guess none of those FB and G+ posts (or the posts on LQ) are from people that are actually your customers. If your experiences show that most of your customers want XFCE then that is what counts, concentrate on that, not on our opinion. After all, they are the ones that give you money for your work, not some random people on the Internet.

You are running a business, you should make your decisions based on what your customers want and what you can deliver, not on our opinions.

You made my day with this one! I would never have found a better way to say it

From the little I gather, I believe that the key success factor for your enterprise is 'Long Term Support', not whichever desktop you happen to select.

Maybe your local conditions differ, but what I have seen in many places is small and mid-size companies with aging PCs still running Windows XP. "Aging PC" could be here 2GB RAM, 50GB disk - more than enough for most clerical jobs today. With the end of Windows XP support life, a lot of these companies are ripe for migration to linux.

These companies are not technology enthusiasts. For many of them, what matters is stability. No big changes every second year, no throwing away perfectly usable PCs because they don't run Windows 8.x, not having to care about Microsoft license requirements.

These companies do not pay for fancy features. They pay for peace of mind, which means stability and support.

Stability doesn't mean outmoded desktop appearance within 3 years. You may propose fresher theme, backgrounds and icon sets now and then, but fundamentally keeping the same way to work.

This is why I would consider Long Term Support as the single most differentiating feature for your customers. Slackware's image --maybe not sexy but serious and rock-solid-- is a good complement to this Long Term Support commitment.

The desktop itself isn't so much important. I guess Xfce is a good option (solid upstream, already part of Slackware, lightweight enough for ageing PCs, may be made good looking, may be configured to behave like your customers are used to)

Merry Christmas, and all the best for your venture!

Phil

2 members found this post helpful.

I beg to differ, since I do value your opinions, and very highly so. If I was a chef in a restaurant, my customers would actually be... well, my customers. And this forum would constitute no less than the happy few of fellow chefs to which I would submit my recipes, for approval, sharing and mutual inspiration, since they are so much more apt to spot any flaws in the cooking process.

As far as customer feedback goes, I have essentially two types of feedback.

1. Nothing, most of the time. Servers just work, applications do what they're supposed to do, and that's it.
2. Desktop users sometimes give feedback like "I like that green thingy here, but can you make it more blue? Oh, and why did that Gogol thing disappear the other day?" (sic)

The low end here is 512 MB RAM, PIV 1.0 GHz and 40 GB hard disk... all still running. The client thought he'd have to throw this dozen away, and he was happy when I told him he didn't have to replace them immediately.

1 members found this post helpful.

Right, here goes. Just in time for the new year.

Project page, revisited:

http://www.microlinux.fr/mled.php

Installation guide, revisited:

http://www.microlinux.fr/mled_installation.php

New FAQ page:

http://www.microlinux.fr/mled_faq.php

ChangeLog page, revisited:

http://www.microlinux.fr/changelogs.php

File tree:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/

I've spent the last ten days honing and fine-tuning everything, from the scripts to the repository structure. I'll let you appreciate the results, but in its current state, the repo is much easier to maintain in a long-term perspective.

This release has undergone some extensive testing and re-testing. I'd say this is it. No more overhauls, it's here to stay (sorry for the handful of false starts).

Enjoy,

Niki

I've added a "Bugs & known issues" section to the ChangeLogs page:

http://www.microlinux.fr/changelogs.php

Is the repository urls STABLE?

Some day ago I started the repository review in slackpkg+ and I moved
http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/ML*
in
http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/desktop-{base,kde,mate,xfce}*

Today (just for start the New Year) I uploaded the new release, but testing it I found that repository are reverted to previous version.
Now re-uploaded the repository list as the old release.

Do you confirm the current repository tree?

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes, I do, zerouno. Two days ago, I saw you didn't change the original repository URL, so I thought, why not go back to the first version, so at least the URLs will be OK this time in slackpkg+. Looks like we both had the same idea at the same moment.

So I confirm: the URLs are stable now, and it will take at least a meteor strike to change them.

BTW, you have a big honking "thank you" note on the MLED project page, zerouno (http://www.microlinux.fr/mled.php). Thanks again for the nice work on slackpkg+.

Cheers,

Niki