I got a new laptop two months ago and it couldn't work with 14.2 (black screen). I did exactly what you suggest: I replaced the kernel with the huge kernel from current, and the new laptop worked ok! -- but I was lucky on this one. I think in many cases this hack doesn't work because you have to also re-build some of the graphic stack (mesa? open GL? I don't know much about this...) so it cannot be a recommended solution

I do not mean Linux newcomers, but users of other distros (Kubuntu, Debian, ...) willing to move away from their distro but put off by our older KDE. Another group is users who have a requirement for some software tool that has switched to Qt5. (I recently found that Wireshark had made the switch and that I couldn't build it easily on my old 14.2. Fortunately my use case was trivial and I could do with tcpdump)

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One thing the 'BSDs don't tend to do is telling others how to run their projects.

Once you've forked Slackware, removed all but the "base" packages and bundled in a working pkgsrc implementation, I'm sure quite a few here will be willing to evaluate your efforts.

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I don't have anything to add either as our BDFL hath spoken, but I just wanted to say I'm actually surprised by the poll results. I didn't think the community would be so overwhelmingly in favour of keeping KDE around. I guess those speaking against it are just a very vocal minority.

It seems that way Poprocks. It's not difficult to xwmconfig another DE/WM or blacklist kde if it's not your cup of tea. No need to restrict other peoples access to it.

PS. Thanks for posting Pat! This debate has been resurfacing here again and again so its nice to get some confirmation.

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I didn't say I'd use the KDE desktop (the transition from 3 to 4 left a really bad taste in my mouth). But, okular, shisen-sho, k3b, gwenview ... I'm not interested in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And, yes, when SW 15.0 ships I'll undoubtedly try out what's new. I just don't expect to be persuaded.

I take issue with that picture - only because NT4 Workstation and 2000 Pro wasn't included - I used those as my daily driver back in the day - far superior to 9x, and 2000 Pro also was a very stable and great platform to game on when I used to game on PC.

Same here. The early versions of KDE4 were really shaky, whereas KDE3 was just so bloody polished by that time. I think in the long run things worked out really well with KDE though. I think also for me the timing was quite poor. I was running hardware that just wasn't equipped for the then-next-gen (circa Vista/Windows 7, KDE4 and GNOME3) DEs.

Yes many people just use the KDE apps, but as AlienBob was saying, once the frameworks and the apps are pulled in, the disk space taken by the Plasma5 desktop itself is a drop in the bucket.

And application-wise, I know I'm sounding like a broken record here, but... kdenlive! The prospect of Slackware 15.0 having mature video editing software right out of the box is so exciting to me.

I think the community at large will be in for a real treat once they are all able to reap the rewards that those who have been using AlienBob's ktown repos have been benefiting from for so long.

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Yes, early versions of KDE v4x were shaky, to put it lightly and if you were using Slackware back then, you might also be aware that "late adoption" or how I'd rather put it "intelligent adoption" practiced by PV saved us from the brunt of that problem. You may recall and if you don't trust me or look it up, KDE did NOT officially release v4 when almost all distros excepting Slackware jumped the gun wanting to be "the first on your block" for "latest and greatest" when KDE firmly stated it was not yet ready. Despite PVs wise and cautious decision, even when v4 was finally allowed in Slackware it was STILL a hot mess. CPU and RAM usage was absurd. It did improve with the next KDE release but it took 2 or 3 full follow ups to finally get back to good. Now, at 4.14.x it is solid, stable and lean and has been for several years.

By contrast KDE makes Gnome look like a toy and a slave toy at that. It is more polished and stable than Xfce, but how much that matters depends on individual configurations. Fluxbox is a work of Art, but it is far too minimalist for as many different uses as I require. Granted, I have witnessed even Blackbox fleshed out to compete with function and polish of KDE but that guy deserved his IRC moniker of "Alphageek". Twenty years later I can't do what he did then... but KDE just does it up proper, so I don't have to.


EDIT: BTW check out how a wide variety of WM/DEs perform with resource hungry games in this test. Xfce users will be gob smacked.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2127540895

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Huh. I use XFCE, and speaking as a gamer, I knew it wasn't great, but I didn't know just how not great it was. I'm surprised about Enlightenment. The main reason I changed from it to KDE way back when was that it wouldn't work with the games I was playing. (Granted this is over 10 years ago.)

I don't use the kde desktop environment so don't mind if plasma goes but I note Alien Bob's comment that what's common between plasma and the kde applications is the bulk of the work. I do regularly use k3b.

Also I am interested in Plasma Mobile and want to learn more about their whole set of libraries and qt programming with a (fantasy?) aim to one day help with the efforts afoot to run a straight up linux distro on a phone instead of Android, so maybe looking at plasma on my desktop would be something future me would want to do.

In that direction the fact that Slackware has KDE jived well (moreso, contributed to me having this plan) after I recently needed a spreadsheet and tried Calligra Sheets. Sheets seems to have a double free (double delete if you prefer) problem from a confused ownership model for style objects, so I had to switch to gnumeric (gorgeous program) to get my sheet made. But fixing this bug (these bugs?) would be a great way to brush up on my C++ and as an entry point for learning Qt and kde/Plasma.

So here I'm torn. I've been debugging in the version of Calligra Sheets in 14.2, the kde 4 version. Normally my first step would be to get to as new a version as practical, head in source control if possible. But I didn't want to go to the newer qt5 calligra and have qt4 and qt5 on the system. So I'm half thinking it would have been better if none of the qt and kde stuff had been in Slackware, and I'd pull recent versions myself or from slackbuilds. But then I see what Alien Bob has written about the work involved and am reminded of the early days of Gnome when I wanted to get involved in that. All I ever submitted was one tiny patch so their build would work as well with BSD's yacc as with bison. All the dependencies, building them in order and keeping up with all their activity sucked away my enthusiasm.

Maybe it's the best thing for all of us, if the complexity is excessive, to steer away from those packages in favour of those of greater Wirth (i.e. simpler libraries and applications, maybe not Oberon simple, but simpler). If it's frustrating for someone like Pat or Eric to manage the plasma dependencies then if ever there comes a time when I want to dig into that code the dependencies will likely be unbearable for me. To not include these things he would be sparing me that trauma, pointing me to applications that I'd be more happy with when I look under the hood.

But is there a middle ground? Could a right answer be to start towards qt5 and quit when it becomes frustrating? That seems a valid filter to me about what software deserves to be packaged and promoted by a distro.

Same. I also like Kate and a few other KDE applications. I've tried KDE-plasma on a few other distros. I was impressed with the performance of plasma compared to KDE4.
I am gratified that plasma is coming to the -current tree. I will certainly use it.

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Ugh, I really must start reading more carefully and not writing little books into forums. Somehow I read the answer P.V. gave in the other thread in the opposite sense. Well, that's good news and again we are to be grateful for all the work done for us.

Proof you aren't a bot.

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The forum user, quoted by you, talked about the modularization of Slackware, as opposed of the monolithic way from today, where you people expects a Slackware user to install everything and everything to be included in Slackware.

This "monolithic" way of using Slackware is demonstrated even by yourself, because apparently you think that an minimal installation of Slackware is not Slackware anymore, but a "fork" . Seriously?

Also, I believe he does not talked literally about using pkgsrc on top of a minimal Slackware installation, even this is possible - even myself I did this some time ago, getting a fine XFCE desktop from pkgsrc, on top of a minimal Slackware.

However, the forum user quoted by you apparently talked about a possible way to modularize the Slackware: splitting it in a core system and a dedicated Ports infrastructure, from where an end user to install what s/he likes. No matter is KDE4, or Plasma5 or XFCE. Or a LAMP server.

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I noticed yesterday a slackbuild in SBo for some scripts inspired by freebsd ports tooling and pkgsrc:

It wasn't quite what I wanted. I want to manually run the slackbuilds scripts myself, look at them, scan over the source -- sort of Linux from Scratch style. But I want to see the dependencies up front so I know what I'm getting into and have a checklist to work against. So I took the function they had to parse .info files and wrote a script around that to give me the dependencies (and now I know I won't be building Sphinx and shellcheck anytime soon). But for people wanting pkgsrc but done closer to normal Slackware and SBo procedures sbotools may be just the thing.