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Given the capacity of contemporary hard drives, I find it difficult to wrap my head around concerns about the size on disk of a desktop environment, when the size on disk of the average movie generally exceeds the size on disk of the average DE.
Two movies can exceed the size on disk of a typical Linux distribution.
It does appear to me as much ado over not much of anything.
Some people that have the "cloudbook" type machines might be concerned. I had a cloudbook that had only 16 GB drive. While I still ran KDE-plasma 5 on it and wasn't pressed for disk space (even with having a 4 GB swap I still had 6 GB free space), if you happen to have a machine like that and need space for things, you might have issues (admittedly I could have trimmed a lot, I had Libreoffice + softmaker FreeOffice, gimp, darktable, blender, vlc, smplayer, a bunch of games, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Konqueror, so a lot of apps that are duplicates or that I rarely use).
When the HALF of the packages, from a Linux distribution, will be related to a particular Desktop Environment, even we like it, or not, there is a very big problem: one could consider that distribution just a compilation of this particular DE. Something like Android.
I for one, I do not want to install 1.2 GB of packages, only to have a some questionable stable and usable DE. I said that also I consider it ugly like hell?
I for one, being Romanian, I am not interested by Chinese Language to be installed by default on KDE, but about stability and usability.
I for one, I am scared only thinking about hundreds of Plasma 5 packages (about to be) dumped on l series, making a nightmare avoiding them.
I for one, I want to run Slackware, not a Plasmaware compilation!
In my humble opinion, the Plasma 5 is simply too big to be included in a Linux distribution like Slackware. Who want it, to feel free to install it from a thirdly party repository, and remember my words:
In the day when Slackware will remove half of its packages and add the Plasma 5 instead, it will become Plasmaware.
And WHAT IF the next Plasma 6 will hard depends on SystemD? After all, Plasma 5 already play with that. We will adopt it too, because it is required?
Seriously? 1.2GB of hdd space deserves a Bold concern? Some people (I'm not one of them) rock Swap Partitions bigger than that and that's BIG to you?
As for "ugly like hell", are you really telling us all that you are unable to configure one of the more configurable DEs in it's myriad possible permutations to be not ugly?
I feel confident that you recall why Gnome was abandoned. Thankfully other WM/DEs employ GTK because afaik the two largest number of dependencies are either on GTK or QT, so to keep Slackware's ease in manual dependency resolution what would you propose to keep up with QT? or is your aversion so great you'd prefer KDE AND QT just disappear?
I'm sorry, Darth, but I find your post to be utterly prejudiced by your own sacred cows and not at all concerned with the Slackware philosophy of not presupposing how everyone will use it. Oh and BTW it's really not difficult to opt out of the KDE language section for whatever that's really worth. Keep tilting at windmills and you may need to consider a new nick... Mr. Quixote.
Half? Maybe you need to check your math a bit. The number of packages for KDE roughly doubled from KDE4 to KDE5 (plasma5, whatever) from 276 to 494. Slackware-current has 1452 packages right now. If we remove all the KDE4 and add the KDE5, it brings us to 1670. If we divide 494 by that new total, it would be less than 30% of the packages. And this doesn't include any libraries that might get removed that were required for KDE4 but not for KDE5.
And Plasma 5 is only 1.14x bigger (146MB) than KDE4 if you include all the language packs. I don't know why kde devs decided to incorporate all the languages into the program files rather than keeping them separate like before, but honestly, hard drive space is cheap nowadays. I even have a 1TB NVMe drive. The old kdei files are less than 400MB. If you have a 256GB SSD, that's only 0.16% of the space if installed.
But, afaik, most programs include l10n and i18n within them and not as separate files, so maybe KDE is working to do the same.
Hundreds? You're great at exaggeration! It's only 62 packages that are considered "deps".
Too big? It's a whopping 146MB bigger on a DVD that contains 2.6GB of packages. We're talking a 5.6% increase. -current is already ~250MB bigger than 14.2, so it would be less than what -current has already grown.
Then they'll tackle that when it arises. They may choose to stop supplying KDE, or find alternative implementations to the required systemd functions. Why are you complaining about a completely non-existent version of KDE when discussing KDE5? KDE5 doesn't require systemd, so who cares if the next version requires it. We're talking about the current version of KDE. Should we also consider not supporting kernel 4.20 because it *might* require systemd? What about apache? They might choose to only support systemd in apache 3.0. Should we stop using it now? See how stupid it sounds when you question what software might require when it isn't even being written yet? Even more, should we drop the software now just because it *might* start using something we don't like in the future?
Also, QT6 is said it should be binary compatible with QT5, so KDE wouldn't require a full refresh to use it, but that's still far enough out that any speculation is pointless.
@dugan, I didn't vote since I haven't used Plasma5, but it will most likely be my new default DE once its added to Slackware (unless something is horribly amiss, then I'd go to xfce, but I really don't like xfce, so it'd have to be pretty bad for me to go to it). I've enjoyed all the KDEs from v2 and up. Each version takes a little bit to get used to, but once I do, it ends up being hard to go back to the previous version.
I have used all kde version (1,2,3,4),(i remember having compiled kde1, on Slackware),i use plasma5 actually, since some time, I'm voting for plama5, juste because it's the best, for me
I don't use KDE at all but I use third apps using qt, especially nextcloud-client. With my slow bandwidth, files synchronization with nextcloud-client built against qt4 is a pain. All files more than 20Mb fail to sync. But nextcloud-client built against qt5 (I use Alienbob packages) works like a charm.
So I'll be happy to see qt5 in -current. If not I'll still use Alienbob packages.
I'm sorry, Darth, but I find your post to be utterly prejudiced by your own sacred cows and not at all concerned with the Slackware philosophy of not presupposing how everyone will use it. Oh and BTW it's really not difficult to opt out of the KDE language section for whatever that's really worth. Keep tilting at windmills and you may need to consider a new nick... Mr. Quixote.
This thread asks "Do you prefer KDE 4 or 5". I guess that implies expressing some opinion/justification about the preference too. This particular rejoinder seems to be saying "your opinions are utterly prejudiced by your opinions ..." etc. Darth seems to be a popular target these days.
For the record, I don't care about KDE4/5. I've always found KDE to be a bit clunky (interpret as you will) and have been using xfce since gnome was dropped. If/when KDE5 is included in Slackware, I'll give it a try. If it's not too clunky and looks reasonably good out of the box (I have better things to do than spending lots of my time configuring a desktop) then I'd consider using it. Of course progression to 5 sometime is inevitable but, similar to many others' opinions expressed in this thread so far, I'm not aching for it.
Anyone know how long KDE 4 is going to be supported upstream? It's already a bit long in the tooth, and I can only imagine how it would be a couple years into the next Slackware release cycle. As for the question, I prefer Plasma 5. The design is a bit cleaner and less cluttered than 4, it has some nice new features, and the stability aspect seems to be coming around now.
Anyone know how long KDE 4 is going to be supported upstream? It's already a bit long in the tooth, and I can only imagine how it would be a couple years into the next Slackware release cycle.
This is a good point in favour of KDE5. Already KDE4's long teeth are having some detrimental effects on existing SBo packages. For instance kdenlive is no longer developed for KDE4 so its version at SBo is restricted to 0.9.10. Kdenlive depends on libkface but only tolerates libkface up to version 15.08.3 which, in turn, depends on and limits opencv to version 3.1.0. All these packages have significantly newer versions available which can't be used because we're stuck with KDE4 for now.
Anyone know how long KDE 4 is going to be supported upstream? It's already a bit long in the tooth, and I can only imagine how it would be a couple years into the next Slackware release cycle. As for the question, I prefer Plasma 5. The design is a bit cleaner and less cluttered than 4, it has some nice new features, and the stability aspect seems to be coming around now.
KDE 4 isn't going anywhere even if KDE 5 is added to Current because there will be a couple Slackware releases that will use it still. I just want new applications and those use KDE 5.
Seriously? 1.2GB of hdd space deserves a Bold concern? Some people (I'm not one of them) rock Swap Partitions bigger than that and that's BIG to you?
Those 1.2 GB of package about I talk, are XZ compressed packages. Installed on system, the Plasma 5 goodness claim about 3.4 GB of space.
Meanwhile, a KDE4 installation claim "only" about 1.6 GB, the deps from L series not being counted. Also, not being installed the Languages.
And 3.4 GB of space occupied by some questionable useful Desktop Environment could be too much when your computer(s) have serious storage size constraints, like ones of @Lucky Cyborg.
Quote:
Originally Posted by enorbet
As for "ugly like hell", are you really telling us all that you are unable to configure one of the more configurable DEs in it's myriad possible permutations to be not ugly?
An ugly lady will remain, well... ugly, even she wear hundreds of thousands worth robes.
Plasma 5 fallen on the same booby trap like Windows 8 and beyond: "the mobile like" interface. And that's ugly like hell, in my humble opinion.
Last edited by Darth Vader; 09-28-2017 at 10:17 AM.
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