Wow. Lots of personalities in this thread. It seems to me that most of the posters in this thread are agreeing with each other in different ways that makes it seem as though you are all disagreeing. You all agree that Slackware fits a niche that it's users want filled - it's not a point and click distro and that is fine for Slackware and Slackers. But it is that way by design. I am perfectly confident that if Pat and Robby and Eric decided that they wanted everything on Slackware to be graphical and GUI based, then they would put in the hours to make it so. The fact that the installation and methodology hasn't changed for many years should alert everyone (including reviewers who often like to invent crises and problems) that it's not going to change anytime soon.

If you don't like the way the team do things but want to stick with Slackware you really have 2 options: either grab the software that will make Slackware more GUI based and install it or run one of the forks. No one is forced to run Slackware (except maybe Pat ;)) but if you do want to run it you have to accept that there are trade-offs: you have to do the work yourself and you won't get the package management that many people seem to need in built.

I have run Slackware for a few years* and can go from inserting the install disk to a working and usable environment in less than an hour. I take several more hours to compile and install the other stuff I need, but I can be connected wirelessly fairly quickly. The dev team deserve a massive round of applause and beer for getting such a bare bones looking distro to work so well out of the box with so few automatic configurations.

I seem to recall that KDE has long been plagued with the complaint that it's trying to be Windows. I am now seeing stories that say it is Windows that now has to play catch up. Which is nice.

Anyway, go back and read the posts dispassionately and ignore the petty name calling (which, if continued, will result in infractions. And we all know where that leads) and realise that no one is really disagreeing with anyone else here. So, to summarise: is Slackware perfect? No. Is any distro perfect? No. Does Slackware work exactly as designed? Yes.


* Declaration: I am currently on Kubuntu because of a failed hard drive and a need to get up and running quickly. I still have to tweak far more things regularly than I ever did on my Slack box.

Since I grew up with gothic in the 80's that is not something I consider negative. You probably refer to the lack of colour in the KDM screen and the logon splash. That is all themeable of course.

The improvements made in Qt4 are described here http://doc.trolltech.com/4.4/qt4-intro.html but I think you have to be a programmer to appreciate fully how working with the Qt4 toolkit is better than with Qt3. Also, Qt4 is finally truely cross-platform which means KDE could be ported to Windows and MacOS, thereby expanding the potential user base.

These "screen tricks" are sometimes quite productive - look at the compositing features borrowed from compiz, which make it easier to un-clutter your desktop in search for an application window. Making the top-level window brighter than the background windows helps to focus on what you do.

Qt4 code is faster than Qt3, so there should be no sacrifice in KDE4's speed compared to the previous release. There are several new applications that are vastly better than their KDE3 equivalents- try the dolphin file manager for instance. Or okular, the document manager. Or gwenview, the image manager.

But the core workings of KDE are revamped too - handling of multimedia is way better now, thanks to the phonon framework. Artsd audio sound system is gone for good. The list is much longer, but I just want to make clear that all these improvements "under the hood" are not immediately visible, but should result in a more efficient way of working alltogether. To me, this feeling is obvious, I like working in KDE4 more than I did in KDE3.

Eric

It's good. I hated bluish kde3 themes anyway :)

As far as I know, Qt 3 is dead. It isn't being developed anymore, and it had to be dropped.

I'm still amazed by the fact that KDE4 has managed to take a few pages out of compiz' book and is able to pull of a lot of the same effects with a much smaller dent in performance. Maybe it's just on my rig, but I've noticed that KDE4 effects run much smoother and about 50 FPS faster than they did with KDE3.5+compiz.

That and it looks BEAUTIFUL, even if it was designed by a goth ;-).

A matter of personal taste of course. Extremely negative to me, but, as you say, it is "themeable."

From a business view, that makes sense.


Have to disagree. It is distracting more than anything else, but I guess one can get use to it.

Never have liked Dolphin and would rather use Konqueror as the file manager, but really prefer Midnight Commander so as a compromise I sometimes use Krusader. :)

Okular is very good and I use it from time to time.
Edit in, 2 Jan. '09. I've just done a direct comparsion between Okular and Adode Reader (acroread) and Adobe, for .pdf viewing of course, is the better of the two packages. However, Okular does have its uses.

Gwenview I use almost daily and I can see where they are trying to go with it, but it is not, in its KDE 4.x present form as useful as the KE 3.5x version. It can't find any of the Kipi plugins, which makes it just another simple graphics viewer.
I use to, and still do in a now more limited matter, use it to view a graphic and if any editing needs to be done export it to The GIMP in about two clicks. You can still do that, but that is about all. Without the Kipi plugins, there is, as I said, not much you can do. I hope the Gwenview developers are working on that?

While on the subject of graphics is there hope that The GIMP 2.6x will be incorporated into Slackware anytime soon? It is a far superior to the 2.4x series.

Well, as you said they must be "under the hood" as they are not apparent, but hopefully KDE 4.2 will live up to the hype we have been hearing for the last year. :)

I've got gimp 2.6.3 (plus babl and gegl, it's new deps) in my personal repo for 12.2 if you're interested.

I much prefer 2.4 to 2.6, 2.6 makes it look like they are trying to copy photoshop, which annoys me

And that GiMP build is nice..........

Thanks Robby!

Thank you very much! Greatly appreciated!
:)

Well, it really doesn't matter to me, but I understand why they have done that. The "interface" for earlier versions of the The GIMP was probably the biggest, single negative to many users. By making the "command structure" similar to Photo Shop it is easier for Photo Shop users to make the switch to The GIMP.

One of those lovely "no-win" situations: for years the complaint has been that it doesn't look enough like PhotoShop and now it's becoming "too much like PhotoShop" :)

But I liked the older GIMP interface. This is one of the points in which I don't understand about people that critize F/OSS, if its not enough like the comparative proprietary software, the interface sucks, but if its too similar, F/OSS developers are innovating enough

Regarding GIMP, the solution is obvious when an interface issue is so hotly contested and divided: provide both options and let the user decide which to use.

I never have understood developers taking an "either-or" approach. Support both and end the debate on both sides. Sure, some more code is needed and a few more check boxes in the preferences dialog box, but then everybody is happy.

It can depend on what the options are. If they are minor, like a skinning option, then I can see that they would include multiple options. Thing is that some programs would effectively turn into forks of themselves and every option would need to be separately maintained. It is sometimes easier to pick an option and tell everyone that that's it.

This might not be easy, and availability of "both" options depends on program structure. Besides, for some reason I don't remember any MDI (Multi Document Interface - i.e. photoshop-like) applicaions written using GTK toolkit.