Isn't this what sites like Slackbuilds.org are for?

And just once, I would love to see one of these reviewers state what advantages a GUI based installer has over the Slackware ncurses installer. Just once!

Well thats just it isn't it? I mean they all 'advocate' the use of such utilities but never really go into any REAL detail of any of the perceived 'advantages' of a more 'glitzy' installer, and gui-based tools.

It seems more like a herd of sheep thing. Slackware rather than conforming with the rest, stands out and refuses to simply follow a trend. This seems to irk them, and try to 'demand' that Slackware be like other distros.

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No additional graphical tools are necessary for me. I learned more about how Linux works with Slackware in one month than I have in years of working GUI based distros.

Bob

Another hearty "NO". I like this distro because it is what it is and does what it does...no more..no less

There is no bootsplash in slack. As I understand it is about to cover all messages issued by the kernel during the boot process. A present "bootsplash" is the Lilo's bootlader "splash".
I think that what is really needed is a simple tool for building graphical tools. I always wonder why there is no a button for 'eject CD tray ' and 'close CD tray'. Eg. an icon on a desktop. Click this icon once - tray is opening - click again - tray is closing. Really amusing. Sometimes ago I was thinking about creating such 'graphical tool' as a frontend to 'eject' and 'eject -t' commands using Tcl/Tk widgets but I was unable to find a good introductory to Tcl/Tk - the standard man pages for Tcl/Tk are awful. My idea of *nix - it is a bunch of small parts which easily fit together. And this is my idea of what the GUI should offer - a set of basic tools which allows user to build its own graphic interface. Some kind of lego pieces. This is why I am displeased of the way both GNOME and KDE are evolving. For me they becoming non-unix. People say "if something is for everything then it is for nothing".

xmessage, gxmessage, dialog (ncurses), xdialog, gtkdialog are all desktop independent and can be slapped over shell scripts. Individual desktops have their 'zenitys' and 'kdialogs' or whatever. I'm sure there are many more. And what you're wanting could likely be done as a simple desktop icon, depending on what you use for such things (if anything). TCL/TK is probably overkill for what you're talking about and, while these things vary and people will probably be using TCL/TK decades from now, it seems to me it is a kind of fading language.

at first I was inclined to select "yes", but then I read on, there seems to have been a discussion going on in my absence :-) Probably too long to catch up;

I LOVE the simplicity of Slackware, and any GUI tool that should be allowed imo is one that ADDS to, but never REPLACE any tool we currently have. Over the years I've been using Slack (I've never left it since I switched over in the nineties) I've leared to value that things remained essentially the same. I leared lots, more than I thought there would be to learn an operating system. (yet, there are miles to cover yet to know "everything")

GUI tools are not evil; Sometimes they ease up your work. No need to keep things needlessly complex. cfdisk is one of those tools; it keeps you with a good overview of what you've done and what's still to be done, yet keeping you in good control. I LOVE cfdisk over fdisk. It's an example of my philosophy of GUI tools. Webmin is one of the tools I rather like as well.

With computing world becoming more and more complex, demanding more and more in-depth knowledge about various aspects of your computer, it's handy to have tools that can discover settings for you. Yet it must be the administrator who is in control, always capable of tweaking things to his liking.

I love Slackware for providing the tools necessary to fulfill this, and hope and expect this to continue. Not to leave the user lazy, but neither frustrating him towards ugly things.

I'm inclined to say "no" now, as in: I don't want the existing tools replace any new tool. Slackware is GREAT for learning unix/linux, it's also GREAT for being stable and it's GREAT for not including stuff you can install yourself. Over the years I've also discovered that if you need a GUI tool, it's a fun way to discover and run along a few ones till you find one to your liking. Then create a package for it and maintain it. With a little bit of shellscripting you normally manage to get something that works for you.

A little hint for those that are curious, this is how I created all my pacakge scripts:
- A function that downloads the source tarball
- A function that does the ./configure --options
- A function that does the build
- A function that does make install to your package dir
- A function that creates the package ball
- A "main" function that calls the above
- call main :-)

Upon testing and fiddling with the configure options (usually), you can easily comment out those part of the build process you want to skip, so you don't loose too much time over the rest of the process; In the end you have all you need and it just keeps working when you upgrade. That's one of the strenghts of Slackware for me. So, no; Slack should not include the GUI tools, you can discover for yourself; Freedom!

I went ahead and ran through a Ubuntu install last night, just for kicks. It's a fully GUI installer, and IT'S AWFUL. I don't like fdisk, but with fdisk I'm in control. The Slackware installer asks me "do you want to format this partition?" Ubuntu was horribly confusing and the graphics were just confusing to try and read all the various partitons. I didn't want any partitions formatted, but ubuntu picked up my swap partiton (I didn't want it to use it) and I couldn't figure out how to make it let go of my swap, and then it wouldn't let me proceed without formatting my swap space, even though it let me leave the actual / partition unformatted. I got the feeling that if I would have chosen to let Ubuntu either overwrite everything or automatically use my free space as it saw fit, I wouldn't have been so frustrated, but who besides a newb that doesn't know any better, or someone with a virgin disk is going to just let an installer have it's way? To make matters worse there was no choice about packages anywhere that I saw.

If this is what people are wanting in an installer they can have it. It's neither simpler or easier. It really feels like it is intentionally trying to confuse you to have it's way. I feel a little dirty and suddenly fdisk isn't sounding so bad.

I voted no, but it really depends on how useful the tool is and whether the box is already running a GUI in the first place

If something looks like flower it is a flower. If Linuxes will look like Windows then they will be Windows. "Mom an pop" even don't know what is it an operational system. So they may ask: Why this Windows looks so strange?

@slakmagik
You have a piece 'ls' and a piece 'grep' you can join them together 'ls | grep'. Now imagine that instead of writing you draw rectangle, drag'n-drop into this rectangle two small boxes named 'ls', 'grep'. This way you get a new 'graphical tool' functionally equivalent to 'ls | grep'. I may call this 'scripting with GUI'. This is ,roughly, my idea about 'graphical tools'.

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It seems to me that despite his "ongoing bumpy relationship with Slackware", the author still does not "get" what Slackware is all about...

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Do I want Slackware to become Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva?
NO, I want Slackware to be Slackware.
If you want something like Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva, you should go with Ubuntu, Suse or Mandriva. Simple as that.

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Greetingz!

I'm from the "frustrations build character" camp. I don't directly help Ubuntu users IRL (in real life), aside from one peice of advice; "If you want a GUI, great, UbuntuForums can always use another user." usually followed by "This is why I never call home, Mom."

My answer is NO. I think that if you want graphical everything, you are using the wrong distro ... sorry, but I think it's the truth.

GUI apps tend to be buggy and difficult to use and understand, at least for me. I'm glad that slackware exists, and that it doesn't have any GUI tools except those provided by KDE.