Yeah, ok it's a little loaded question ;-)

I use slack, and I always install slack/dropline/swaret, in that order and upgrade the same way. What happens if I don't install Dropline? What I mean is that I always see argument about dropline hacks up your system and what not. Would some of the people who don't like to use dropline but do use gnome care to explain more about why they don't use it? What does it do/did to your slack box?

Thx,

P.S.
Lets not turn this into a war against Dropline, stateing why you don't like to use something doesn't have to turn ugly/hateful towards others that have put hard work into something. Constructive Critisism might even bring good change, who knows. Let's just not bash them and be :evil: about it. Simply state why you don't care to use it because it changes certian files around or something along those lines/

I used to use it all the time and I liked it at first before I really knew how to do anything. With a little effort, you can make your standard GNOME install look and feel like dropline. I did and now I'm happy NOT using dropline.

My issues with dropline are as follows:
- Nautilus was crashing way too often.
- Whenever the dropline installer was updated, the updater wouldn't run anymore.
- 2 days ago the site was down (Account Suspended), now how reliable is that?
- Once you install it, you can't go back to standard GNOME.
- I'm still working on finding out what files it changes. I would really like to know which files are modified and how as well.

One of the best uses of dropline was to motivate me to learn more so that I could manipulate GNOME and configure it the way I wanted, using some tips from the dropline folks, of course.

T

What's swaret?

Aside from breaking Galeon, it makes me a little nervous that little things like this can happen.

It also made some annoying choices, like making Totem the default audio player over XMMS when I first installed Dropline, and deleting Xine-ui every update until I figured out how to stop it.

I've also found the File Roller to be completely useless, but I can't say if this is a Dropline thing or a Gnome thing since I've only used Gnome with Dropline.

http://www.swaret.org/
Slackware package manager with dependency support which can automatically track and fix missing libraries.

I think /var/cache/dropline-installer/DroplineFiles2c lists all the packages it installs or upgrades to.

Ahh, that's pretty bad. Excellent example.

T

It's really interesting mucking around in /var/cache/dropline, all the download and install output is there plus the packages. If you want to know what makes a package tick,take it apart. I hear you about Nautilus but I've always considered it Windows Explorer's ugly step-sister and avoid it like the plague.

a full install of dropline on my slackware system really caused weird slowdowns with certain applications, most notably gedit and evolution. after closing the app, it would just sit there for up to like a half minute before actually closing. there were lags when using the program, too, where i would hit a couple of returns in gedit, or switch window panes in evolution, and it would take a few seconds to do it. *very* annoying. i tested it a few times with fresh installs, and each time it would happen.

so i removed dropline, installed everything gnome from swaret, and then just used installpkg from /var/cache/dropline-installer to get some of the gui themes and stuff from dropline. i must have experimented with removing dropline and gnome and reinstalling about 10-20 times in different combinations over the past few days trying to get it right -- ie. without that annoying lag and with the interface features i wanted. each time something else would go haywire -- wrong gcc, or X would get nuked, missing libraries, etc. -- so it was really a major hassle. now that i've got it down, though, from now on i doubt i will use dropline anymore, except for some of the themes. it's just a little too flaky for my taste.

It worked OK with me, but I didn't like how it overwrote my packages with its own (ex.: I compiled Gaim myself and Dropline uninstalled that and installed its own Gaim), so I removed it.

One other thing was that after installing Dropline, users can halt the system while I seem to remember that only root could do that when I first installed Slackware.

On a positive note though, Dropline makes a lot of things really really easy, in particular, the installation of Ximian Evolution (which I think is excellent) along with many other useful packages. True, the Dropline site went down briefly last week (dunno why) but considering that Dropline is not exactly being run by a massive multi-billion dollar corporation, I'd suggest cutting the guy some slack (no pun intended) if his site goes offline for a day. I've been using Dropline for over a year now, and that outage was the first I've seen.

As for the reported security issue, well giving Dropline a black eye for that seems a little harsh. I'd challenge anyone to nominate any software project of significant size that is 100% guaranteed, absolutely free of any kind of security issues, and if you were going to disqualify a software suite due to the discovery of a security issue, you'd be left with very slim pickings indeed. (unSpawn's security bulletins on the LQ home page are a great reminder of how widespread the problem is.) Heck, only about a month of two ago an exploitable hole was discovered in the Linux kernel itself, and even a brief scan of the Slackware changelog reveals frequent discoveries of security problems scattered throughout the packages it uses (ex: Feb 12, security problems with Mutt and XFree86 4.3, Jan 26, security problem with gaim, Jan 14 security problems with KDE and inn-2.4.1, etc) My point is just that if you were going to disqualify Dropline because one package was found to have a security issue, then by the same token, you would need to disqualify Linux itself from consideration due to the existence of multiple security issues.

Bottom line - I'd recommend to everyone who's considering Dropline to just give it a shot and see how it works for them personally before making any final decisions. If you find that it is not to your liking, as terosaur and synaptical concluded, then hey, no harm no foul, but if you don't even try it you might be missing out on something really excellent (as I think Dropline is). Just my 2 cents -- J.W.