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This is a blog series designed to help people starting out with Slackware, or just considering it, be able to use it to their fullest extent, presented in a beginner-friendly manner.
From the initial install, Slackware has a solid handful of graphical environments available to use. They are (in a full install):
- KDE Plasma
- XFCE 4
- Fluxbox
- Blackbox
- Windowmaker
- FVWM 2 (F Virtual Window Manager)
- twm (Tab Window Manager)
- mwm (Motif Window Manager)
But say you want to use something else. Well, like with any distro, you can install any graphical environment you want in Slackware. For example, I recently migrated this very Slackware machine I use to write the blog over to dwm. There are several projects I'll mention that make certain graphical environments easier to install and run on Slackware (some I can recommend, and some you should probably avoid, presented here for completeness).
I should stress that pretty much all of these projects are maintained separately from the main Slackware project, and as such, don't exactly have the "Seal of Approval" from Slackware's creator and head maintainer, Patrick Volkerding. These projects might not always be of the highest quality or usability, so know that your mileage may vary and trying these comes at the (slight, but not impossible) risk of failure and not being able to use your preferred graphical environment. If that happens, I suggest you research beyond this blog entry and figure things out for yourself (I may be doing a blog for Slackware beginners, but I can't always hold your hand through every possible scenario).
With that out of the way, here are some different projects that serve to provide alternative graphical environments on Slackware.
GNOME
Believe it or not, GNOME actually used to be shipped with Slackware along with all the other environments on the install media. However, GNOME was officially removed from Slackware in 2005 after over 4 years of consideration. Slackware BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life) Patrick Volkerding announced that upon the removal of GNOME, any future GNOME support in the distro would solely rely on community effort.
If you wish to use GNOME within Slackware, there are a few places you can look. The first one I'll get out of the way, which I DON'T recommend, is Dlackware (yes, with a D). This project served to provide SlackBuild scripts for GNOME. The latest version this supports is GNOME 40, which came out about 3 years ago at the time of this blog's writing. Pretty outdated, but not unmanageable. The reason I don't recommend it is because the scripts present in Dlackware do not make up the entire GNOME desktop, nor do they make up the minimal GNOME install. In the end, I may not recommend it, but if it seems right for you, I can't stop you.
Below is a screenshot of Dlackware's GNOME 3:
Next is GNOME for Slackware 15.0. This is a set of SlackBuild scripts for a newer version of GNOME. Nicely enough, it has queuefiles included that you can copy into sbopkg's queue directory and install from there, provided you have sbopkg on your system.
I haven't tested any of these projects in this blog entry, merely providing them as references in case you wish to try any of these for yourself, so I can't attest as to whether this set of scripts works well on Slackware current.
Of course, you can always take the time and effort to compile every aspect of GNOME, or any of the graphical environments listed, entirely from the source code provided by the environments' maintainers.
MATE
There is a set of SlackBuild scripts for MATE available at mateslackbuilds. There's also a set of binary packages available at slackware.uk/msb, if you would prefer that.
Below is a screenshot:
LXQt
There's a build script for LXQt over on GitLab. It's not the latest version of LXQt, but it's still pretty new. At one point, I attempted to build LXQt using this script, but accidentally turned off the computer before it was done, and, not wanting to sit through the process again, decided on dwm for that specific machine (a Raspberry Pi, for anyone wondering).
Personal story aside, here's a screenshot:
BUDGIE
Simply enough, the Budgie desktop environment is already available from the SlackBuilds repo, so installing it should be as simple as creating a queue for Budgie and all its dependencies.
CINNAMON
Like MATE, there's a set of SlackBuild script for the Cinnamon desktop available at cinnamonslackbuilds. And again, like MATE, there's a set of binary packages available at slackware.uk/csb.
Below is a screenshot:
i3 WINDOW MANAGER
The i3 window manager is available from the SlackBuilds repository, and the SlackDocs wiki has a great guide on how to use i3 (but admittedly, there's better resources for i3 tutorials; case in point, the Arch and Gentoo wikis, and i3's own online documentation), and any Slackware-specific information pertaining to i3.
CONCLUSION
After installing any of these graphical environments, switching over to them should be as simple as using xwmconfig to set your default environment. In some cases, such as GNOME, you might be better off booting into a login manager, which I explained how to do in a previous entry.
As always, I must stress that you shouldn't rely on this blog as your sole source of Slackware information. You know the drill: the SlackDocs wiki and LinuxQuestions forum are essential resources for any Slackware user in need of answers.
Hopefully you learned something, and I'll see you next time.
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