That is almost 19 years ago. Tell me, how big was the average disk drive back then? How about now? What percentage of the disk would Slackware fill in each case?

4 members found this post helpful.

Follow Up on NVMe - After many searches in many areas regarding NVMe I find myself continually blown away. It seems a rather unprecedented technology is upon us. I don't recall any other technology taking hold and evolving so quickly. Literally the death of RAID is nigh.

I must confess that my error in judgment on NVMe was influenced by the many difficulties involved in adding, let alone switching altogether to, SSDs. Performance gains didn't seem worth the cost in reduced storage size per dollar. NVMe at first seemed to only add to those difficulties but now storage size is exploding, cost is dropping, and difficulties substantially reduced with the advent of NVMe over Ethernet. This is a for real game changer.

However, if I understand correctly, once NVMe over Ethernet becomes a viable reality, and it looks like 2018-2019 as the longest time frame for that, distro support for NVMe becomes a non-issue so the conclusion that Slackware's release cycle is an excellent tradeoff between stability, reliability, performance and "latest and greatest" is still earning an excellent cost/benefit ratio.

Note to Darth: Oh and regarding your "brave americans" type remarks - the historical facts show that without at least a few brave americans you might not even have a personal computer and certainly wouldn't be connecting to a global Internet so kindly kwitcherbitchin and give credit where credit is due, especially if you are want to engage in accusatory finger pointing.

1 members found this post helpful.

I'm not sure if you remember, but back when PV dropped Gnome from Slackware sometime around 2005, one of his reasons was the difficulty compiling it. Back then he said that KDE could easily build itself. I'm not sure if that is still true, but personally, I think that the KDE SlackBuild has become one of the many great features of Slackware. The Plasma5 SlackBuild is also very impressive. A lot of work has gone into it.

And besides, Plasma5 has been around for quite some time. It has features which are required by modern hardware. eg: Better support for High DPI screens. If Slackware 15.0 doesn't include Plasma5, it'll be behind many distributions in this regard.

If you don't like it, nobody will force you to install it. You can easily deselect KDE at installation.
While no-one outside the development team can say with any certainty, I'd be amazed if KDE has anything to do with the release cycle of Slackware.
Why do we need shorter release cycles? We're all running the current branch anyhow, right?

I'm all for simplification and minimalisation, but I have to say that it is very nice to install Slackware on a new laptop and have everything working with little to no input from me.

+1 and +1

just want to throw this out there, AlienBob did say that if KDE becomes too much of problem to include in Slackware and maintain then he will switch to Xfce.

Re (its in the comments) https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/may...e-for-plasma5/

7 members found this post helpful.

Understandable. A man has to spend time with his family.

I guess it gets even hairier as dependency upon that-which-shall-not-be-mentioned becomes the elephant in the room.

I'm all for dropping it in that case.

4 members found this post helpful.

Not sure if my opinion matters, but had been trying to use KDE consistently since 2006, and finally gave up all attempts in 2013. Seriously, the 'environment that works' of the day is Xfce.

(Well, I'm to sure about LXDE and LXQt, the first was also quite decent when I tried them last time. And yes, Enlightenment is also magnificent, although I never managed to switch to it completely.)

I'm not even speaking about the xkb layout switch in KDE, which hadn't been fixed for more that 10 years, just about so many quirks that are hard to debug and too many features that actually don't work (why on Earth would you have both KGpg and Kleopatra?).

The only reason why I would, on the other hand, regret missing KDE is that losing KDE we would lose some non DE-related features.
I would miss Kget, Ktorrent (although it's terrible), Okular is still the only comprehensive document viewer, krdp the only rdp client, kcompare and kdevelop are also irreplaceable. Ow, I forgot Calligra.

I am not sure how tightly coupled they are, and if it is possible (or any easier) to drop the actual DE parts while leaving the libraries needed for the actually useful software.

1 members found this post helpful.

I think our BDFL and AlienBob need to have a chat about the future of Slackware regarding Plasma 5. Then Alienbob can make a decision regarding his future support of Plasma 5. That is my suggestion. Perhaps Plasma 5 is a ways off from being put into Slackware Current or maybe it will happen soon. I can see why it isn't added yet if there is no reason to yet and Current is the developmental version of Slackware. Why increase workload now when you can do it later as long as there are no negative consequences from doing so for the official Stable release? Anyway that is what I think is going on.

Alienbob's Plasma 5 is very stable and I have enjoyed it a lot! I'm not sure if I could live without it on my main desktop. I use its apps and apps that require qt5 all the time. Also the ecosystem has moved on from KDE 4. I was forced to move to Plasma 5 out of necessity.

I longterm feel like KDE in Slackware is more of a marketing add-on
(if big one), hardly anything KISS-like at all. But if it's needed,
that's fine. It just seems questionable given the priority it gets
and the last EH's comments.

Personally, I would also prefer to only keep the core packages + extras
to run the top XY apps. Of course, it all depends on the package tree
and what proportion could be ditched compared to the full support.

And K3B and Kate and Konsole and Krita and Konqueror and .... Kapman.

I have feeling i586 will be in the past soon. Just my look at the cycle. The way of the IBM 390 . Slackintosh.
As one grows another may pass.

I'm always amazed when people fail to do their research before buying new hardware. Making sure the software you want to use will work on the hardware you buy seems elementary.

Buying blind and hoping the software support will be there is a recipe for disaster.

Is it Patrick's responsibility to protect people from their bad decisions?

I for one am quite pleased with Slackware's release methodology and schedule. It's one of the distinguishing features of the distribution, and key to Slackware's spectacular stability.

5 members found this post helpful.

Indeed! The hardware compatibility list is first rate.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

while there are still some KDE apps where it's hard for me to find a replacement, especially file manager with console, split, tabs, expandable treeview, no unwanted selection in list view with right click when the view is full, ....., the KDE story is a true sad one, but a showcase why linux on the desktop never made it.
And after the drop of from a/some key developer in the kwin team, and the with going stories for the reasons, I have my doubts that something will change in future and we will ever a a LTS stable desktop that will not be thrown away every some years on Linux. Or stopped developed.

however, flatpack , appimage , snap , are today an alternative to get apps on a pc, independent from the desktop used, libraries available. they need some more space, but de stress building and installing of the latest 'whatever' just to get newest version of 'whatever'.

2 members found this post helpful.

well, sometimes you just may not have a choice