Today I’ve uploaded a slackware64-current liveslak containing GNOME 43.0 (and a few additional bug fix packages), it contains -current as of yesterday (10/19) and should be the latest update. The ISO features a “core” GNOME 43.0 install minus two large packages which I’ve generally chosen to omit from my builds and installs, as I have no use for them. Builder and Boxes are the missing core desktop components. Why have I omitted them? Between them there is likely close to 20 extra dependencies not included in Slackware already, that I feel make installing GNOME feel like a massive mess. On the plus side of this, both packages are available as flatpaks, and I’ve included both flathub and GNOME_nightly pre-setup for the live user account. You’re free to add them if you’d like to use either of them!
Also included is a single app in flatpak form, and that’s Epiphany (web-browser), there is a rather large bug that renders WebKit unable to render pages in Epiphany 43.0 on Slackware. There are people on working it out, and hopefully fixing it soon. I’ve held back doing this ISO while they’ve worked on a solution, but it’s been close to a month now and while they are closer to the solution, it seems to be quite a lot of back and forth effort to fix. I do assume in the next revision to the ISO we’ll have a working native package to ship.
By releasing this now, I hope that we can find any bugs left in these apps, and work them out as well. You’ll notice upon first boot, there is no desktop wallpaper showing, I believe this to be an issue in GNOME’s wallpaper package, we’ll fix it up soon. For now, set the wallpaper you’d like. Anything can be your default, it’s yours afterall.
There is a package repo in place for the ISO, it’s preconfigured for you. Updates will be available soon after sources are released, and it can be updated with the usual slackpkg commands slackpkg update and slackpkg upgrade-all as the root user.
I’m also moving things around on the server, things may not be where they once were. You can find the GNOME 43.0 Liveslak here along with the previous (and much more refined) GNOME 42.5 ISO as well.