From experience, I can certainly echo the bold part above.

Indeed.

Who did that? That was aimed at businesses choosing RHEL over Freenix, and the herd of mediocrity that follows itself to hell: fools.

The desktop user of someone who doesn't have anything to hide can enjoy the full functionality of their hardware out of the box with Slackware, and thus is its appeal--that was what got me in my distro-hopping days: Slackware got my hardware working better than the others I tried. This group of desktop slackers are exempt from these comments, because this thread is all about business use.

A business with data to protect shouldn't run blobs, because there's no accountability or auditing of the blob's code to know whether or not it respects the businesses privacy.

When it comes to desktop slackware, I prefer privacy as an individual, and also prefer deblobbed desktop environment... but that would be a different thread; and if igadoter got banned, that thread probably won't get started.

Depends what you want to do.

Slack 14.2 is great for servers running mature hardware.

Current is unstable and requires a lot of attention. Some of the L series may not be relevant to your desired functionality. But, unless you want to research it in detail, you'll probably need to load all of it... and maintain it. As of this writing, the 64 bit kernel is 5.15.7. 5.15 is a longterm release kernel - so that's a good sign.

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This!

I use slackware heavily at work because it's the best blend of simple, consistent, maintainable, while at the same time having the latest features.

Other distros tend to be super dated, or constantly changing (rolling release), or have a maze of scripts that make them work, or dive into dependency hell, or break up every package into 1000 little packages, or some combination of above.

I don't want 800 packages on a server, I want 200. I don't want this script calling that script calling this other script, which has config sprinkled around in a bunch of .d directories. It's hard to manage. I don't want the rest of the system depending on the init system. Basically I don't want magic. You get the idea.

However, the fact that slackware has taken years to get another release out has created a lot of pain for me, so I have several times looked at other distros. They all have huge cons so I keep coming back to slackware, but gee, the release when we can get to it is rough....

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I have looked at other distros over the last several years; I'm a curious sort. I always gravitate home to Slackware. I'm also running a Slackware64-current/OpenBSD dual boot on my secondary machine. I have an old T410 Thinkpad running FreeBSD.
Slackware is my primary operating system.

What does keeping XFCE4 KDE and XAP series benefit Slackware from this point on?

Isn't SBo mature enough to bear that part of the burden so the basic OS maintains the inner subsystems in a more timely fashion?

I'm just wondering and would like to know what other fellow slackers think (if we can agree to disagree)

I'm happy that Slackware includes XFCE4, KDE5, and XAP. If I had a vote (I don't) I would want XFCE4, KDE5, and XAP to be included in the DVD image. If you don't like them you can opt for a custom installation.
SBo is a volunteer repository and the maintainers are not always able to continue to keep up their build scripts.

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You could argue that Patrick Volkderding should delegate package maintainers, but desktop environments and software are very much part of a distribution.

Yeah, we'll have to agree to disagree.

If you're not shipping desktops in the default install, what's the point of keeping X?

How far do you cut back? Where do you stop?

Here, I think :

https://slackware.nl/slackware/slack...ni-install.iso

I guess OpenBSD isn't and still they somehow manage to survive:

The red line IMHO is at building ability - if you can install a fully fledged desktop environment by a single command:
I think it does not matter what desktop came shipped with - as long as you are able to build/pick your own.

I too don't have a say to this - we merely discuss our opinions.

Also as i wrote above - there can be a window manager shipped - i don't particularly like TWM or DWM for that matter - maybe fluxbox (IDK) and a limited set of apps on top of that - stuff that absolutely mandates top expert to be built properly - not the trivial stuff like calendar or web browser.

The more would get delegated to the community the more attention could be devoted to the core, right?

How many times you built the Plasma5?

From my own experience, on the best computer I have I need over 25 hours to build it fully. And let's do not talk about Qt5...

IF Slackware will ask me to build Plasma5 every time, then probably I will treat it like I do with Gentoo. I will give it a hattip and I will never look back.

Anyway, the SBo infrastructure is way behind of what BSDs uses. Their Ports systems has package managers which supports fully dependencies resolution and multiple remote repositories. Binary repositories. And builds with dependency resolution.

To have something similar with "pkgadd kde" Slackware needs a package manager with full dependency resolution. This will never happen.

Until then, if you want to see how looks Slackware with a BSD ports system, you can try NetBSD's Pkgsrc ports system, as it supports also Linux as host operating system.

There are people who did this, and they say that you have to keep around 100 packages from the original Slackware.

Yes, but as LC says above, their model is quite different.

I really like having a fully functional desktop installed in 15 minutes. I really dislike the Debian/BSD way of installing the core, then adding bits and pieces.
Slackware isn't a community project. Was your question asked out of impatience for a release?

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Same! It is truly wonderful to be up and running with a full Slackware desktop in minutes. I like and use the BSDs, but, as you say it is a more of an effort to get a desktop installed and configured. Vim is required.

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Horses for courses! I was really impressed when I discovered Debian net-install. It's not all that different from LFS actually: you start with a core system and then you add what you want. But you can do that with Slackware too if you ignore everybody else's good advice. I did it and I'm very satisfied with the result.

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