I have not been a Slackware user for years but I have kept in touch with the Slackware development and the community in general.

I think from time to time about switching to Slackware again because as I grow older I tend to value the stability of my OS more and more.

That said I was wondering what is your opinion on the KDE matter given that the amount of work Patrick has to do has increased a lot.

Would you mind if Patrick decided to remove the KDE from the core system and keep it lean?

If you were to decide on what to remove and what to keep in the core what would you keep and what would you remove? How would you restructure your bellowed distro and how would this help Patrick?

The KDE portion of your questions is covered in this topic: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...re-4175632470/

I wouldn't remove anything unless it was broken or effected the stability of the operating system. Slackware is designed as a general purpose operating system that includes all the tools you need to do most tasks in most situations. Anything else it is missing can be installed from SlackBuilds.org.

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In a perfect world Pat would be rich with a fleet of Ryzen Threadrippers that provided everything and the kitchen sink on a 50 GB bluray disc.

I really think its in the interest of the distribution if he takes up Alien Bob's offer of providing a core that is usable enough for others to add to it. There are arguments against this that if these libraries aren't used by Slackware core then they don't belong, but it would help people who need them and Alien Bob would do the rest for Plasma 5. Alien Bob provides a great deal of packages to the community including stuff like VLC to Multilib. He isn't going to stick around if Pat doesn't meet him part of the way by providing some of the Plasma 5 dependencies. I wouldn't blame if he didn't. He does a ton for free. A ton. They both do a terrific job. Slackware is as stable as ever! If Alien Bob goes I'll be distro hopping for my main machine since I use Plasma 5 and Multilib. I know there are those who don't use those things. There are people with slow laptops that depend on Alien Bob's packages like qt5.

In the end I think Pat should do what he can. If Plasma 5 dependencies are too much then he shouldn't do them as Darth Vader desires. There are plenty of people who don't need what I do but there are some that do. Its a cost-benefit analysis that he will need to make for himself. I wish him the best in whatever he decides to do.

I believe that is time for the Slackers to discover something invented over 20 years ago: the remote repositories.

Is as simple as
OR
OR
Speaking of bluray disks, to ship in a single disk the entire software collection offered by Ubuntu you will need a whooping 100GB optical disk.

Yet, the Ubuntu installation kit has the dimension of a CD (700MB) and the rest of packages are on thousands of remote repositories. And it is the most popular distro in the World.

Speaking of remote repositories, same do OpenSuSE, Fedora, CentOS, Arch Linux, and any other distribution excluding the Slackware. Even many derivatives of Slackware has remote repositories.

We? We still do soap-opera and melodrama around "this precious software MUST be shipped by Slackware DVD!" assuming that there still will be DVDs in future...

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At the moment we need to help Pat and his family get back on their feet. Everything else is dominoes.

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True!

No drama, but...

The 'official' stable slackware .iso image includes the ability to do an offline install a fully functional desktop system with a range of applications plus all the build tools/libraries you need for compiling slackbuilds, and it has a set of readme files that tell you how to use it. The image remains useful for emergency recovery (e.g. for when I forget to run lilo after upgrading the kernel despite the warning )

Same as the Debian DVD1 .iso (except for the compiling tools).

Same as the Centos 'DVD' .iso (can't remember about the compilers).

Not saying that you necessarily need to provide these images by post as there are companies out there that will supply an optical image burned from the downloadabe .iso, and of course you can dd the image to a USB stick as needed.

It will be interesting to see what develops when the dust settles and the core team have time to consider the way forward.

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Slackpkg+ also works and is excellent.

Have you checked out AlienBob's 700 MB live-CD of Slackware Current with XFCE? It's really, really well done. I was so impressed with how polished it is while using so little space.

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I was just stating the facts as they stand right now so everyone can comprehend what all is in question. Maybe the Slackware team could gain inspiration from those distributions, but those are setup differently than Slackware and have a ton of funding. I'm not privy to how they run so I'll take your word on it. There will have to be a way to install distributions onto a computer in some form in the future.

I agree upnort!

It does support multiple remote repositories? Slapt-get does.

Of course. I know it and I appreciate it very much.

I even posted in this forum a tutorial how to install that XFCE-live in a hard drive and to transform it in an (small) installation. In the hard way, manually. You can find it if you do a search.

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Yes! And I really like how they have implemented it as an extension to slackpkg, which does come with Slackware, as opposed to a completed separate application. It does not handle dependency checking, in line with the philosophy of slackpkg itself, so some people may prefer slapt-get. I have to say that in the 15 years (at least on and off) of using Slackware, I've not once installed slapt-get. I even refused to use slackpkg until a couple of years ago, until I realized how simple and powerful it was.

Cool! I'm sure a lot of people would find that helpful. I guess that would give you something even more slimmed down than doing a full install with the kde and kdei package groups de-selected, as you'd get the KDE libs from the 'l' series among some other things.

The XFCE liveCd doesn't even include ACPID, which is fine, because it just relies on XFCE's power manager to do all of the leg-work!

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Huh? Contrary. It was considered a blasphemy to Holly Recommended Full Install. They believe that the Slackware users must install everything or the result isn't Slackware anymore.

I used this tutorial to install a functional XFCE desktop within 4GB and so I use it in two computers.

After installation it have around 2.8GB or something, but Eric Hameleers deleted manually a series of files from packages when he built the iso. When you update the packages the size of system increase to aprox. 3.5GB

slapt-get? Sit on my middle finger and twirl.

7 members found this post helpful.

Anyway looks like also Slackpkg+ can do a similar job.

At the end of day, has no importance the used tool, but the functionality given.

However, I for one I prefer slapt-get also because it works pretty well on scripting and it is pretty fast. As one could expect, slapt-get being written in C.

Ha ha! True!