I use Slackware's website quiet a lot because I'm steadily learning how to make a minimal installation, so I look for package info in the package search (and the slackware file tree). I often use my cellphone for that and... well, I just zoom in to use the site. It's not a big deal for me, and I really wish the website didn't change at all - except for the issues that Pat mentioned, which are not even on the visitor's end. I do not deny that some proposals could achieve something more convenient, but I don't think that such convenience is important enough to change most things.

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Just a thought on PayPal.me. It seems that there is s £2 admin fee even on a small donation. This is fine for larger donations but will result in about 20% of a monthly £10 donation going to PayPal and not Pat. As it seems beyond doubt that a regular, automatic payment is the best way to give Pat a reliable funding stream, I’m wondering if there’re are other ways of doing this. Both Eric and some podcasts I support seem to have paypal donations without this overhead.

Phorize: Like me, you are in the UK, I see. It may be the currency exchange, but it is also worth making a donation as a "gift". I know this isn't normally recommended, as it removes a lot of your rights to dispute, but since you aren't expecting any goods in exchange - ie: this really is a gift - that may save the admin fee.

--
Pete

I'm not sure there is a "gift" option in paypal.me. I didn't see it.

Exactly! Well-said!

That sounds bad. If i would live in the US, then I would try to invest in you and slackware. And try to buy the 60%.

Paypal might work but you should also consider bitcoin or something like that. Not everyone
wants to support paypal.

As for KDE5 and Plasma:

> Plasma 5 has been a consideration as well, although frankly it's grown much larger than
> GNOME was back when I decided that should be spun off for third party maintenance.

This is true. I personally use a self-compiled version of mate-desktop. It was surprisingly
easy to compile from source. On my second try, it worked to the point of me being able
to do "startx" and have a functional mate-desktop environment (only part that does not
work for me is that the top-left menu does not show applications, so I think I must have
forgotten some step to populate that ... but since I am lazy, and the rest of mate-desktop
works, in particular mate-terminal, I did not really investigate.)

> If that's going in, we really need to analyze which dependencies would not be used
> outside of Plasma and stick all of those in the KDE series. I'm as tired of the
> pollution of the L series as the rest of you are.

I compiled qt and KDE5 + plasma from source, most of it.

Here comes a self-promotional link, to my shame:

https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/cookbooks/0.3.37#KDE

The cookbooks project is my attempt at gathering which programs can be compiled or
installed. I have the whole KDE5 and plasma stack registered there, for example.

I also managed to compile most of it and KDE konsole works here. \o/

However had, that project is at version 0.3.37 largely because there are many
small things that should become better or are missing ... anyway, I also
use some ruby scripts to automatically download KDE releases. So batch-downloading
new KDE releases is simple for me - I only change the remote URL and then run
the script, and et-voila, things are downloaded. Then I can compile them.

To make this a bit easier to understand, in my opinion KDE5 and plasma is slowly
becoming as easy to compile as it used to be in the kde3 era. Yes, there are a
LOT more programs nowadays, so this is annoying - but I rarely stumble into
big problems. I am confident in making this better in the coming months.

You don't need to use the cookbooks project for getting KDE to work. One
functionality is to generate a .html file for all the KDE programs for
instance and other files such as .csv and so forth, including dependencies
(which currently I add manually, but this could be automated via scripts).

Perhaps this part may make it easier to get the latest KDE and plasma to
work on slackware.

Slackware is a nice project - it should continue if only for its age alone
(and also due to the fact that commercial vendors sort of killed off the
solo-devs).

Last but not least, slackware has a fairly slow release cycle - I would
recommend to make the release cycle a bit more frequent.

Really?! Slackware is stable, robust, secure, and is my operating system of choice. I'm a proud Slacker who started in 2004 with version 10.0. I see no compelling reason to use other distros.

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Hmm the release cycle isn't so bad, is it? Let's look at it since 13.0.

13.0 - 13.1: >1 year
13.1 - 13.37: >1 year
13.37 - 14.0: 18 months
14.0 - 14.1: 13 months
14.1 - 14.2: 2.5 years

Now, it's a given that 14.1 - 14.2 was pretty long, and it's over two years so far for 14.2 - 15.0. But why the urgency in the new release? Security patches are being issued every week.

Or alternatively, PV and the team could rush the releases to fit some arbitrary release schedule which ends up causing problems like in other distros *cough, Ubuntu 17.10*. Yes, it's been a while since 14.2 but, given the present considerations, it's understandable. When 15.0 gets released, it will be a special cause for celebration.

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I don't know where you've been getting your information until today, but Plasma5 for Slackware has been available (through a 3rd party repository) for several years now, and all of it can be compiled using a single SlackBuild script... it is not difficult at all to do.

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Let me preface this by saying I appreciate the stability of Pat's stable releases and I know that it's a fine line to balance upgrading programs for a newer version and getting that rock-solid stability we're so used to with the stable releases. Also, this is not to advocate for shorter release cycles, just simply to provide some reasoning on why some might prefer a quicker release schedule.

One major detractor in having releases so spread out is hardware support. 14.2's installer doesn't support installing to NVMe drives (I think MMC drives as well). It is also missing support for a lot of newer hardware. Yes, some of these can be added by simply upgrading the kernel, but that usually isn't the case with video cards (since it requires newer mesa builds and usually newer X builds, which is a LOT of work... I've done it before).

I was still able to install 14.2 on my NVMe drive by using -current's installer and pointing it to 14.2 sources (and then grabbing -current's eliloconfig script), but many may not be comfortable with that just as many aren't comfortable using -current as their daily driver. Luckily, my video card is plenty old that is works fine with the radeon driver (I really should update that one of these days).

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interesting, I do not want to go offtopic here, but I can not send you a PM sice you have disabled this function, pls check your settings

this
http://shevegen.square7.ch/programs_version.html
seems outdated?
docu mentions this will be regenerated, but the date is from 2017

and where is a homepage, the repo for the recopies and the repo for the sourcecode of this project?
while the docu mentions a lot I do not find those info

Very nice. Simple and yet modern. Works well on my laptop and also on my phone

The story on page one reminds me why it is a horrible idea to think that people suddenly stop becoming assholes just because they're a part of an Open Source project.

I like your design as well, franzen!

Agreed. I'm still happy using 14.1 on my every-day drivers (personal laptop and office workstation are both using 14.1) and 14.2 should be plenty adequate for quite a while.

If the releases are far apart, perhaps part of the reason is that there is little need for them to be more frequent (and, of course, taking the time to make sure each release is excellent).

ETA: On the flipside, bassmadrigal makes a good point about hardware support.

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