Newbie here. I'm thinking about going from Ubuntu to Slackware and I just saw on Wikipedia that there is a number of projects that maintain GNOME binaries especially for Slack. So that made me wonder, why is that needed? What if I download a bare version of Slack and then build the standard GNOME version from source? Would that produce problems?
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It's not about bloat (as someone else posted, Slackware uses KDE which is just as bloated), but about the way that Gnome packages itself. Pat Volkerding determined that Gnome is too much of a pain to package properly: too many disparate packages, the dependency tree is too fragile, and there are dependencies on packages that he determines to be immature, redundant, or simply a Bad Idea (the chief among these being PAM).
See the ChangeLog for Slackware 10.2 for a brief summary of Pat's decision not to support Gnome: http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/ChangeLog.txt
Josiah
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Slackware is a distribution targeted towards being as minimal as possible so I am going to venture a guess and say that the standard Gnome is way to bloated for what they want so they stripped it down some.
If you went with the standard Gnome you shouldn't have any issues you would just need to install more bloat and dependencies to support the extra features that the people who use Slackware normally don't care for.
If you truly are a newbie you should probably install virtual box on your Ubuntu installation and install Slackware in it to get a feel for what you would get getting your self into.. they are two different worlds :)
Riguez
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Actually there is a Gnome build that is targeted at Slackware users: Dropline Gnome.
Gareth
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Xenoactive
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