@All: please put away your Amazing Mike Ginzu knife sets and keep this thread on topic from now on. Thanks.

Window managers do not facilitate productive use? Only desktop environments use a mouse? Both are news to me.

As Kiki has already mentioned a lot of times in multiple threads and I'm compelled to speak on his behalf :- TRY explaining that to a range of public library students age 7 to 77. How difficult is that to understand that *not* everyone knows, LIKES and WANTS to USE bare minimum WMs?

(Pardon my tone.)

Regards.

1) He does not strike me as a seven-year-old in a public library.
2) My point was, that particular post seems to imply that only a DE like Gnome, KDE or Windows can be productive, which is nonsense. The Rat Poison = WM reference was obviously an exaggeration, but still hughly inaccurate and deserving of comment.

All a desktop environment is, is nothing more than a fancy Window Manager with extra software added. There's plenty of people who don't even use Xorg and have productive systems. I can get work done on FluxBox just as well as I can on KDE. We had productivity back with MsDOS and Linux long before DEs and WMs came around. Some people just get way too spoiled with GUIs. You can type up a paper using Nano just as well as Kate, so very moot point.

No, I'm not a seven-year-old in a public library. I'm the administrator of a series of Slackware-based networks (some 100 % Slackware, some mixed) here in South France, with a total of a few hundred users, and while I'm perfectly at ease with minimal window managers (I started on WindowMaker back in 2001 and still use it on my build box) and have no GUI whatsoever installed on my servers, I do like the comfort and the functionality of a full-blown desktop environment to get some work done.

Discussing my choice of tools with users who seem to drape themselves in their minimalistic splendor seems as tedious and downright pointless to me as discussing cooking recipes for meat with a compulsive obsessional anorexic vegan.

So question kiki, did the desktop environment always work for you even before systemd came along? A simple yes or no will be fine.

That is perfectly fine, but your earlier post claimed (paraphrasing) that Slackware needs at least one big DE to be competitive.

I do not care which GUIs you like, any more than you should care which ones I like. However, I do take notice when someone claims WMs cannot be used productively. I am neither offended nor trying to argue. I am treating this as a discussion about the merits, or lack thereof, of different GUIs, regardless of how the tone of my posts may appear.

We already do have one big DE, KDE, and technically Xfce isn't as lightweight as it used to be and probably could effectively hold it own against KDE and Gnome both.

depending on how you define competitive, this is the case
if competitive for you is just what you have running on your pc, than it is not the case

if you want to use/deploy Slackware as a workstation for others and/or as PC for students in school, office desktops whatever, you will need a useful DE

if you use if for servers, you possible do not need a DE.

Fair point.

I don't think there will be any mass exodus because of systemd.

The vast majority of Slackware users use a desktop environment. It is much more likely to see a mass exodus if Slackware doesn't adopt systemd and is forced to abandon some if not all desktop environments. I don't think the distribution has the manpower to patch its way out of systemd and for now there is no any usable and maintained alternative. It is a matter of time before Pat is forced to make his choice.

Personaly I am not going to abandon Slackware because of systemd.
I am using systemd for some time now on top of my pam+krb+ldap setup and I am happy with it. Actually it handles my wifi much better than the dhcpcd+rc.wireless+rc.inet1+rc.inet1.conf mess. And I like the After= option. It ensures that nslcd is started after krb5kdc is up. No need for 'sleep x' to ensure that kinit will succeed.

That being said I am not going to abandon Slackware if it decides to stay away from systemd neither. I am not a desktop environment fan. Fluxbox is more than enough for me.

What could make me abandon Slackware is a "community" of zealots and grandes gueules who tend to turn any discussion on a piece of software into a holly war.

Cheers

i'm sorry ivandi (and who it may concern) but i dislike systemd out of technical reasons, among other things
if the day comes when slackwares BDFL decides to include systemd in a release, then i will think about how i will respond

and i do not think that saying things like "slackware will be forced to adopt systemd" in any context except a hypothetical one is in any form constructive to.. well.. anything


for what it's worth
no hard feelings, it is my stance and only mine

I would take a wild guess that nobody complains about ZFS's supposed lack of "UNIXY'ness", because nobody is having it forced down their throat.

OK, back on topic: At first, no one is forcing systemd into Slackware, not KDE (Martin Gräßlin has explicitly stated that the old way using the startkde script will not be abandoned for at least running KDE on Xorg) and not udev (for now there is eudev and all that is needed to run udev in future versions is a kdbus userspace component). For that reason a mass exodus will not happen.
But even if Slackware switches at one point to systemd, be it (more likely) due to lack of development/maintenance of necessary components to keep Slackware in the status quo, be it (less likely, as I see it) that Mr. Volkerding changes his stand on systemd, it seems to me that only those people will leave Slackware that give the init system used more weight than the other features of this fine distribution. If that is actually a good or bad thing has anyone to decide for themselves.
But if you want to avoid that "exodus" (which can be done only with keeping Slackware free of systemd) there is IMHO only one solution: Do it as was always done in open source: If there is something you want be done that currently no one works one your options are:
1. Do it yourself if you are capable of doing so.
2. Try to convince people capable of doing the necessary things to do them.
3. Pay someone capable of doing the necessary things to do them.

For 1.: So far I have seen no Linux developers (except the Debian people with systemd-shim to keep at least Jessie sysvinit compatible) announce projects aiming to replace systemd components used by DEs and other projects, like UPower, or aiming to write a non-systemd kdbus userspace. A few OpenBSD developers are at least working on the systemd part, but you can defintely not count on them to work on kdbus.
For 2.: Besides the s6 developer asking for what he has to add that is wanted by DE and other developers that systemd offers them, I have not seen anyone advertizing to come up with a systemd equivalent for use by developers. And no, badmouthing systemd with sites like boycottsystemd.org (ask yourself, what are your estimates of the numbers of actual developers that have seen that site and thought: "Wow, I will not work with systemd anymore, despite the fact that it makes my work much easier") does not help.
For 3.: This should actually be the easiest part, if the numbers of people not willing to use systemd in any distribution are as high as sites like debianfork.org suggest then fundraiser campaigns on Kickstarter or similar sites with the aim to do the necessary work (for example, help with systembsd, develop a kdbus userspace, ...) should be a massive success, rendering all these problems virtually non-existent.