Gregory's ServerYou’re very welcome Ade!
Yes #Kate is rather indispensable to me (in the GUI, or via remote SSH sessions with X-Forwarding), as a fast and accessible advanced editor and with split window for a shell right there that synchronizes with the directories as I move between them if I wish.
Slackware ships with KDE and Xfce, but years ago stopped supporting Gnome out of the box. It was just too much work for such a small team (in many ways, one person), not to mention all of the extra space that would have exceeded what would be able to ship as a complete distro on a single CD/DVD.
There were, or rather, still are, a few external support efforts including gnome-slack, Dropline, and also a build at #Slackbuilds that can install all of gnome at once on a fresh install at least, and though I don’t follow them due to concerns over how practical keeping them updated might be (I typically run Slackware-current as a rolling distro that stays always current and bleeding edge).
I actually did really like, and prefer Gnome back when it was part of the distro.
Nowadays, There’s some other really solid, maintained desktops like #Mate and/or #Cinnamon, but again, I don’t follow them, yet they’re very popular. I tend to stick with and such between #KDE Plasma and #Xfce which both work extremely well for me.
But then again, like I mentioned before, there are a few Gnome based tools that i really enjoy enough to always install too, like Shutter (for screenies) and #Geany - and when I do it seems like I’m also installing half of #Gnome too, lolz…. The list of deps that are compiled are seemingly endless lol, so it’s one of those tasks I just get right out of the way as soon as I do a fresh install of Slackware-current.
After that, it’s easy to keep everything up to date for years to come as it just continues to roll right through the versions of Slackware releases, much the same as Debian Testing or even moreso, the way that #Arch Linux does.
I’ve been running Slackware Linux for about 30 years now, since 93 when I settled on it inn earnest after hopping around a bit from #Jolix (#386BSD) to #SLS, to my own spin of that, and then discovering the Slackware FTP archive. It is still, so refreshingly #UNIX in so many respects, including it’s BSD-esque #SysV style init scripts, and Pam support was finally added in just a few years back which made a huge difference in the rate of people ‘re-adopting’ it for enterprise server roles again.
I must admit that I did get off track for a bit there, but only for a short while, around the days of #Redhat 4 through 5.2, and certainly never want to revisit those days of “RPM Hell”, as it was affectionately known, due to a distro that really didn’t age well without really getting in under the hood with wrenches and screwdrivers and chewing gum lolz.
Because of Slackware’s commitment to retaining such a UNIX-like experience, it’s really second nature to feel right at home, with some minor accommodations for differences, with the four major #BSD flavors; namely, #NetBSD, #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #Dragonfly_BSD.
Although for a longtime I encouraged beginners to use #Slackware as their second distro after getting their feet wet on say, #SuSE (which always will be affectionately known as, “The German fork of Slackware) or #Debian, I nowadays tend to usually recommend #Arch_Linux for that, after graduating from Debian or #Linux_Mint, like I did after enlightening my nephew and getting him to completely disavow any proprietary garbage that is the devil’s spawn out of Redmond, Washington (Microsoft, lolz).
I guess I did good too, because he’s now working on his Cisco certifications in addition to his full stack development development track at his college. When he was just a little tyke, I would show him pictures of things like the #ENIAC and #Colossus even the #System_360/370 families, and he wouldn’t even believe me when I explained that computers used to take up entire warehouses of space 😂
Okay… I’ve rambled on long enough I think. You have a fantastic day my friend!
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