I removepkg'd kde* some years ago (slack 13>14?) and haven't missed it. At that time, it was slow, system resource intensive, too focused on appearance, and inconsistent from release to release. The few apps I did use didn't perform as well as comparable packages in the Slack distribution.

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#Me too

I never install KDE on Slackware and could not care less if it's dropped or not as long as it is easy for me not to install it. The only time I have actually used it was in the days of SuSE 8, somehow it was great there, but not so in any other distribution ever since. I would advocate for the choice however, thus it would be good to have it for people who do like it. Plus it would not be so nice for Slackware to be known for dropping things and choice would not be reduced to XFCE and a bunch of old and useless VM's... Even then it would not matter to me much as I like Mate from MSB very much and for me it's the DE #1 even tough it is not in official Slackware tree.

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I will say, I like KDE a lot, but I tend to use XFCE. I have for years because it is simply more stable. I'm on Slackware because I like getting in my computer and knowing that everything works and will be in its right place. KDE doesn't do it for me, but I really don't think it should be excluded. If anything, it would be nice to have a couple of other WMs included by default, like Mate or LXQt. But that is purely a side note.

Pat is our dear leader and blessed by "Bob", so I will blindly follow him to X Day. Hehehe

KDE5 has been running on this box for the last six days and, as I've said before, it is now mature enough, IMHO, to be used as a daily desktop envirnoment. If one doesn't go looking for the "clutter" they probably won't find it.
OTOH, it does run the CPU and GPU hotter than Xfce. Running the same tasks, as closely as possilbe, kde5 runs the CPU approximately 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than Xfce and the GPU 10 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than Xfce.

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Good to hear! I have the horse power to run KDE-plasma on my main work stations. I am looking forward to that day.

Hmm, for those who use XFCE -- again, I am one, on my tablet, but I like KDE5 much more --- what are you using for desktop search? Or is such functionality not important to you.

On KDE5 (and 4) I hit Alt+F2, start typing a directory, and hit enter when it comes up, and Dolphin appears with that directory open. The process takes less than a second. On XFCE, I hit Alt+F2, type "Thu", Thunar appears from the dropdown, I hit enter, and then manually navigate to the directory I'm looking for.

Though lighter on resources, accomplishing tasks in XFCE takes longer for me than KDE, so for me KDE has the perception of being faster.

I've thought of installing this "catfish" thing for XFCE, but it is written in Python, which makes me sceptical as to its speed and performance, and has several Python-related dependencies I've never felt like installing.

I mostly use KDE, but I've never felt a need to do that. I just almost always have krusader open with multiple tabs to my frequently used locations.

That's one thing I dislike in Plasma 5, the "run" dialog has been replaced with that search based thing. I just want to type a bloody command and I may not have a working pointing device to select something from the drop list and I couldn't ever seem to get that in focus. That Alt+F2 in Plasma 5 actually screwed up recovery for me when, for example, trying to get out of a malfunctioning game. It doesn't matter, as switching TTYs is the better method for that anyway but the point is I used to do that with Alt-F2.

I don't like indexed database searches and I don't allow search indexers (especially that idiotic "Baloo") to run. Not in any OS or environment. No "slocate" for me either, I can't stand those pointless, i/o intensive cron jobs to update the db. When I search for something I'm not doing it blindly, and I prefer to just use the find command. Also, I trust the results of brute force file searches, index databases not so much.

In my Trinity Desktop (KDE 3) the Alt+F2 dialog is straight forward, type a command and hit enter. Too much cleverness these days.

This run/search feature sounds suspiciously like something better done at a shell prompt. Have you considered just keeping a little xterm sticky'd at the bottom of your display? Bash has extremely powerful tab-completion features which go beyond names of files and directories.

Can you please cite an example? I've found just the opposite. Xfce would sometimes revert on me even at simple login where an old or even default Desktop would show up for no reason. I used Xfce as my main for about 2-3 years when KDE 4 first came to Slackware, just every now and then seeing how updates managed to fix KDE 4.

A couple years ago KDE4 got back to good and it's been my main ever since. In comparing those years Xfce screwed up a few times, nothing major, just annoying and puzzling, but in a similar span of time KDE4 never had one hiccup. Managing widgets can be weird but I figure that's just because they were not a high enough priority for me to study so I just followed my nose, not always a smart move. Bottom line though is KDE has always done exactly what I have told it to do with zero issues. For me it has been a polished rock of Gibraltar

What I did was just created my own key bindings for launching my urxvt terminal.

Now I just switch TTYs, kill processes, switch back again. That's the most reliable method in my recent experiences with gaming on Linux. If anything is hurt, I'll go back and kill X. (but this stuff doesn't happen to me on Slackware, I don't do much gaming here. Nothing hinky like wine etc.)

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The sticky bit (no pun intended), no, although I do tend to pop open an xterm and run 'find' commands along with Thunar and xdg-open to pop open files and directories that I've searched for, kind of like a rudimentary desktop search. But it makes the DE somewhat pointless. If I'm not going to have a cohesive experience with a DE, sometimes I just figure I might as well use fvwm, icewm or fluxbox.

I think the only reason I use XFCE is because I like the panel and taskbar quite a bit. Thunar is also a competent FM for when I feel like doing graphical file management.

You could just disable the native run dialog and bind Alt+F2 to something like gmrun instead.

Pfft, find. Extraneous bloat if you ask me. If it can't be found with du -a <name> | grep or for f in $(du -a | cut -f2); do grep thing $f ..., well then it should be left alone. (I tease, but if you look at plan 9 this is the direction they went.)

I haven't cracked it open to look, but I believe all Python is doing for that program is managing the GUI and communicating with the backends. It looks interesting; I think I'll drop it on my 14.2 system.