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Article: Why Slackware Should Keep Gnome - Full Text
Posted on Wednesday, March 30 @ 23:45:53 AST by Kurt |
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By now the news is quite far spread, Mr. Patrick Volkerding, the chief (only) architect of Slackware has decided to remove GNOME from Slackware. This is a sad announcement for Slackware GNOME users. a lot of people perhaps don't see a big issue - many have already switched to alternatives like Dropline. This article will present why it's a big issue and make a case for GNOME as an official part of Slackware.
Perhaps those of us who use GNOME in Slackware should have taken the hint five years ago. GNOME debuted in Slackware version 7.0 (which, numerically should have been Slackware 5 except the version number was inflated to compete with Red Hat) along side KDE. The announcement for the two read:The K Desktop Environment version 1.1.2 is fully integrated into the Slackware distribution.
GNOME is also available for those wishing to us it.
Essentiall an "oh ya... and GNOME is in there too". This is ok, I mean, who am I to say how much importance they should attach to GNOME. That's not what the argument which will be presented here is based on. However it does add important insight about the relative importance GNOME has always had in Slackware. Though this is a guess, I think it's pretty clear that Mr. Volkerding has never used GNOME as his regular desktop. This might seem irrelevant, but this is a key point.
Mr. Volkerding says in the announcement:I'm not going to rehash all the reasons behind this, but it's been under consideration for more than four years. This is interesting in light of the fact that GNOME has been in Slackware, by my count, for a little more than 5 years (5 years and 4 months to be precise). So, essentially we are being informed that GNOME was barely in Slackware when they were considering taking it out.
The unfortunate part of this issue, and to the meat of the argument, is that it wasn't removed four years ago. A desktop environment is unlike any other set of packages in a distribution. You can switch out Xfree86 for X.Org, but that's essentially transparent to the user. You can even hold off on switching to ELF, or to glibc based on the reasoning that libc5 or glibc aren't ready for prime time yet - even when every other major distro has already made the switch - and for most users this isn't a visible issue. A desktop environment, especially one of the two major desktop players in the Linux community, is a big issue for a user. Getting a desktop "just right" is something that many users spend a great deal of time on. Especially in the Linux world, "tricking out" your desktop is a Big Deal™. I used to run Afterstep on top of GNOME, which was a chore, but it gave me a nice desktop. Recently I switched to GNOME's default window manager (which for the life of me I can never remember the name of), and then completely rewrote Peter Amstutz's Gnome Swallow in order to get my desktop the way I wanted it. After five years in a distribution, to drop support for one of the two desktop management systems used by more than 95% of Linux users is an enormous impact to a lot of individuals. GNOME has been under a bit of a cloud lately - it's star is no longer as ascendant as it once was. The promise of better technology hasn't so far yielded any real-world benefits and its once-held licensing moral high ground is much less an issue today than it once was. But cloud or not, it was one of the major desktop environment choices in Slackware.
Because of its prominent role to the user, the inclusion of a desktop environment in a distribution has to be carefully considered. This because its inclusion becomes an implied commitment to the user. Liken this to Microsoft dropping support for Windows Explorer and telling users to go find a community-supported project to offer a replacement. This is of course a rediculous scenario, it would be slitting their own throats (more than they already do daily) but it is helpful in seeing that dropping official GNOME support is a blow to Slackware's credibility. If the users' primary interface to the entire operating system is not something that will remain stable, then what part of Slackware will? If KDE gets harder to compile, will it be dropped too? What can we depend on in Slackware? If the Microsoft scenario is too silly to grok, then how about this... what would happen if Slackware decided to be more like other distributions and switched from BSD to System V init scripts? Perhaps to desktop-only users it wouldn't matter, but how many power users, system administrators, and developers would have to rewrite their setup scripts to conform? The inclusion of GNOME was, I assert, more than a technical decision; more than simply including packages. It was an implied commitment to each and every user that would make their desktop choice based on that inclusion that the work they put in to their system wouldn't be thrown away. Just the same as the choice of BSD init over System V for Slackware (one of the things that makes it very distinctive) is an implied commitment to administrators that the work they do to set up their init scripts won't be thrown away next version.
But, the supporters of the GNOME dropping decision cry, what about Dropline? What about GNOME Slackbuild and GWARE - Mr. Volkerding even recommended those two. Ok, lets talk about those and their relationship to Slackware. There are two things I would present about this. The first is unprovable and as such merely my opinion (feel free to disagree). That is, I don't think Dropline, GWARE, or GSB would be nearly as popular today if GNOME wasn't in Slackware. It seems like a paradox - if there is no GNOME support in Slackware, then of course there would be more community involvement to make it. Having spent time on Dropline's forums from almost the beginning of the Dropline GNOME project, it was my observation that the vast majority of Dropline users were not people that switched from KDE. They were people who already used Slackware's official GNOME and switched to Dropline. If there had been no official GNOME from day one, would there have been nearly the community interest in Slackware GNOME? I suggest there wouldn't be. What does this matter to now? If the above is true, then as a GNOME user myself it means that in the long term, GNOME usage on Slackware is going to decline because of Slackware dropping official support. It means that the original scenario I suggested is more true - that dropping Slackware support officially is the touch of death to GNOME on Slackware. Not a quick death like it would be if there was no community alternative, but a slow withering one. The speed of the death is irelevant, however, to me as a GNOME user. Perhaps it is even worse when it is slow, as there is more incentive for people to make the personal decision to try and retain their investment of time and effort into their desktop in light of dwindling community support before finally biting the bullet and swiching desktops or switching distributions.
The above is, I agree, an arguable scenario. Whether the Slackware GNOME community has enough critical mass to continue, especially in light of three "competing" GNOME projects, is uncertain and eminently debatable. One thing that is less debatable is the level of integration of GNOME into Slackware.
The issue is, any desktop system as large in scope as GNOME is, is much more than a set of packages. It is a set of interrelations. It is the very thing that makes GNOME difficult for Mr. Volkerding to support that makes it even more difficult for the community. Bugs in certain library versions, connecting GNOME to the file system (fam), GNOME startup scripts, and the inherant difficulty of obtaining and installing GNOME when it's not available in the distribution. An unofficial GNOME can never be as easily maintained as an official one, as there is inherantly less ability for a community GNOME project to affect the decisions for the rest of the distro. If, to pick an example out of the air, a particular version of libjpeg doesn't work with GNOME, will it change or will that be "not Slackware's problem - GNOME isn't officially supported"? The lack of official support is just that - a lack of support. And no amount of community GNOME projects can make up for the loss.
What then is the solution? I have two readily implementable solutions that will still relieve Mr. Volkerding of the majority of work in supporting GNOME:
Solution 1: If Mr. Volkerding is going to espouse community development then go a step further and officially espouse it. Do it just like the commercial world does it. Open it up for bids. Have a competition where any community GNOME project can bid to become Slackware's official GNOME distro. They will compete in areas like ease of installation, environmental impact (how much GNOME impacts Slackware), quality of the build scripts, stability, etc. The community GNOME project that best meets the criteria (as judged by Mr. Volkerding or an appointed panel) is included officially in Slackware.
Solution 2: Accept a volunteer developer to maintain Slackware's own GNOME distro. I, for one, would be happy to volunteer (and to sign a contract to do so) a given number of hours per week to Slackware in order to maintain GNOME. I would be willing to bet money that there are other people who would do the same thing.
Either one of the above solutions will address both the concerns I raise in this article, and the concerns that Mr. Volkerding has published. There are other solutions too - I don't maintain that I have a corner on the solution market. But I do maintain that Slackware needs GNOME and it needs it in an official capacity. I also maintain that it is in Slackware's own best interests to retain it. I encourage all who also believe this to make their views known to Slackware.
Kurt Fitzner
Ex Turbo Modestum
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