IIRC, didn't Mr. Volkerding move to Xfce?

If he did, I missed it. (Not that I was paying a ton of attention, so it's very possible I missed it.)

Well, this proposition to drop KDE was from 2007. Now eight years later with GNOME2 and KDE3 long extinct, I also see no sense in prioritizing those new...I like to call them "desktop experiments", which just have been labeled with well known acronyms for marketing reasons. Of course, this phenomenon isn't restricted to FOSS, just look what happened to Opera.

I support dropping KDE. It never reaches a stable state, requires too much time to maintain and brings a lot of bloat. I think it is already as difficult to maintain as GNOME was when Slackware dropped it. And from what I read for KDE5 things look even worse.

Cheers

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I didn't have had a KDE glitch in several months - if that isn't stable, what is? I like that at least one major window manager is supported.

KDE5 is still under heavy development. Sure, AlienBob is ranting about build problems - but I'm very enthusiastic, that the first stable releases will be easier to build.

I like a lot of the packages included with KDE as well. Kate/Kwrite is extremely useful for editing scripts.

+1

KDE, Gnome, Unity and all the rest = slow learners. Fvwm could do all that and more 20+ years ago.

And not once in those 20+ years did the Fvwm devs wilfully alienate the users, just because "they knew best" what the users wanted. Unlike the devs driving unwanted change in the more fashionable desktops.

That's my point. When most of the core components reach sort of a "stable" state (meaning some several hundreds of open bugs) developers loose interest and move to the next brand new shiny KDE-next that takes several years to stabilize. In the meantime the user is left with unsupported and still not quite production ready KDE-old and completely flawed and buggy and constantly changing KDE-next.

IMO the KDE development model simply doesn't fit with the Slackware development model. Slackware tries to provide a solid system. It sacrifices a lot of useful functionality for the sake of stability and simplicity and at the same time its main desktop environment is in unusable state most of the time.

Cheers

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I disagree. I think that KDE is a selling feature for Slackware. I personally use XFCE, but, I know that KDE is a very popular desktop environment. Eric continues to do an exemplary job maintaining KDE. I really appreciate the fact that Slackware ships KDE and other environments. More choice is a good thing.

And with every cycle third party projects building on KDE get thrown under the bus, just look what happened to Quanta Plus.

The Linux desktop is continuously losing functionality now. In the late 90s/early 2000s is was about what we didn't have yet. Now it's more about what we already had and is now lost in bitrot.

I don't think so. Almost every distribution on this planet has the K Desktop Experiment somewhere in the repo. Slackware's selling feature is its simple and reliable UNIX-like OS design under the hood, because that is what makes it different from the bunch of *buntus and other customized Debians.

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It would be nice if slackpkg+ was included and Pat made a 'default' config with some third party repos he trusts/likes (since he trusts alienbob's packages ) even if commented out like the mirrors file in slackpkg.

This would greatly expand the number of "trusted" packages available for Slackware which, arguably, is one of its weaker points.

Yes, yes, I know there is slackbuilds.org and I use it all the time, but I'd rather download the chromium package from alienbob than download the slackbuild + source and waiting an hour until it compiles on my old box (I'm a slacker after all).
For a newbie, it would be especially useful to be able to run "slackpkg install msb" so the very nice MATE packages made by Chess and Willy get installed with little effort.

I think slackpkg+ was one of the greatest things that happened to slackware lately.

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I feel inclined to support this.

+1 on that.

According to my crystal bowl ball, it is very unlikely that KDE be dropped in next Slackware release, even more if not replaced, unless maybe if Eric ceases to maintain it, but I have no indication of that and am sure that then he would post his intentions in his blog soon enough for his users to take action.

Or (but I wouldn't bet much on that either) unless Eric continues to maintain KDE, but only as a set of third party packages & SlackBuilds.

That said I'm not much in concern as I am a Fluxbox user, and this is pure speculation

I prefer KDE to other DE's, and it seems stable enough (using Alien's 4.13.3). But if it got dropped as an "official" package, it wouldn't bother me, really. I could adapt to something else, even if Eric stopped providing it.
P.S.
Ball(s)

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