Slackware-Current

[Grogan]

That's too bad, Slackware has gotten too complex for its britches (i.e. no package dependencies). It's no longer the easy to maintain by hand, easy to customize system that it used to be and breakage is entirely possible.

[Zema Bus]

I did a fresh install of Slackware today. still a few things to do but I got all the basic things configured and working including Grub. XFCE only this time. I dropped in the last kernel I compiled in the previous Slackware install and I'm running on it now until I do 6.15, initrd-free!

[Grogan]

The problem with even that is (using XFCE instead of KDE Asthma), there's still a metric shit tonne of libraries in L you don't need, that you're probably installing because it's impractical to cherry pick. See, I can't stomach that, I'd have to painstakingly remove packages (it is too onerous to figure out during the install, who has patience for that lol) and that would be a pain in the ass to sort.

Hopefully this one won't blow up on you. Stick to the Slackware repos for slackpkg or whatever tool you're going to use.

Yeah, initrds are for sissies

(and for hardware enumeration, it is best to have any permanent hardware drivers built in, otherwise udev in the initramfs is going to do it in arbitrary order, changing resource assignments and device numbers, haphazardly. I fucking HATE that shit you get with distro dogfood kernels)

[Zema Bus]

I had some trouble with it repeatedly disabling sound. Sound would work just fine and then later it wouldn't. In the audio settings my primary Intel audio would look ok but there would be no sound. Switching it to another sound source, either an external USB sound adapter or displayport (via the audio jack on one of my displays) would work for a while, but eventually it would disable those, and at one point no sound sources showed up in the audio settings, just "dummy output". In alsamixer I kept finding automute enabled after previously disabling it. I went ahead and updated Slackware and compiled 6.15. After booting back in I had to disable automute again in alsamixer but so far it's still working.

This is the most recent version of XFCE, out of the box it looks better than it used to, with dark themed panels and moderately dark default wallpaper. But it has the same problem that previous versions of XFCE have had in recent years in that if transparency is used it makes panel icons and other panel elements transparent too, and if more than a mild amount is used they will look all faded out. Right now I have a moderate amount of transparency in the panels, about 70% opacity, and it's very hard to read the clock. I used to be able to take it to 50% or less opacity without any problem. I'll see if I can find some way to keep the icons from becoming transparent along with everything else.

[Zema Bus]

I found something that helped a lot. In the panel settings under the Appearance tab, with 'Solid color' as the style, click on the color and add a custom color (the + button), then slide the opacity slider (hard to see the slider but it's right under the color range diagram) to the far left side until the resulting color is almost or fully transparent. Then after applying that setting, back in the previous window fine tune the opacity to the desired effect.

[Grogan]

I compile my xfce4-settings with --disable-sound-settings

I don't want anything configuring my audio. What I do use is the xfce4 volume control plugin though. For getting at other settings I'd just pop open pavucontrol or something. I keep my hdmi audio device unconfigured, so I only have the one.

The main reason I don't want the new XFCE is because I would die without my customized black plasmafire style with the glowy orange gradient. It's got a shaped panel with image, that I really like and that will be broken because they have deprecated the thing that it uses.

That's what you have to do, tweak a style you like yourself. I'm never happy with anything out of the box.