<snip>
> My 2 cents: I expect no more than one more release candidate before
> Slackware 14 goes live. Slackware is not the first distro to offer a
> HAL-less system. Actually, the opposite generally is true. That is,
> Slackware usually is one of the last to adopt major changes like that.
> Thus, if Slackware no longer supports HAL and is supporting udisks, then
> the transition is pretty much complete in the Linux based world. In other
> words, TDE needs to support HAL-less systems. Users are not going to wait
> or care. :-)
>
> Darrell

To put things bluntly, unless we attract new developers TDE will become a
niche product very quickly.  The bugtracker is evidence of that; I can't
keep up with the workload (not for free anyway) and neither can anyone
else around here from what I can see.  Things keep changing for the sake
of change and all anyone can do in the Linux desktop world nowadays is
keep reinventing the wheel, wasting time and effort on a less functional,
uglier, more simplified rewrites of programs we already had years earlier.

We have lost one good developer (Serghei) already due to additional
splintering of the KDE3-continuation projects.  I don't know if the
momentum exists to keep the traditional desktop alive at this time, or if
it will simply need to be re-invented many years from now after it has
completely died out.

This is not a pleasant thought.  I don't know what happens to a society
when productive tools to execute complex, creative tasks are made
unavailable to most individuals, and I really don't want to find out.

Tim