Slackware has gone so far as to drop any support for Gnome and its programs
as a result of its stance against systemd and RedHat influence in general.
That is one more lie. Slackware dropped GNOME's support between versions 10.1
and 10.2 in 2005, i.e., five years before systemd's initial release:
http://distrowatch.com/slackware
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/ChangeLog.txt gives a
precise date for the remotion of GNOME from Slackware, "Sat Mar 26 23:04:41
PST 2005". Here is the relevant message in the CangeLog, where Patrick
Volkerding asks to "not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against
GNOME (...) a decent desktop choice" :
gnome/*: Removed from -current, and turned over to community support and
distribution. I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but
it's
been under consideration for more than four years. There are already good
projects in place to provide Slackware GNOME for those who want it, and
these are more complete than what Slackware has shipped in the past. So,
if
you're looking for GNOME for Slackware -current, I would recommend looking
at
these two projects for well-built packages that follow a policy of minimal
interference with the base Slackware system:
http://gsb.sf.net
http://gware.sf.net
There is also Dropline, of course, which is quite popular. However, due to
their policy of adding PAM and replacing large system packages (like the
entire X11 system) with their own versions, I can't give quite the same
sort
of nod to Dropline. Nevertheless, it remains another choice, and it's
_your_
system, so I will also mention their project:
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/
Please do not incorrectly interpret any of this as a slight against GNOME
itself, which (although it does usually need to be fixed and polished
beyond
the way it ships from upstream more so than, say, KDE or XFce) is a decent
desktop choice. So are a lot of others, but Slackware does not need to
ship
every choice. GNOME is and always has been a moving target (even the
"stable" releases usually aren't quite ready yet) that really does demand a
team to keep up on all the changes (many of which are not always well
documented). I fully expect that this move will improve the quality of
both
Slackware itself, and the quality (and quantity) of the GNOME options
available for it.
