On Sep 30, 2009, at 6:14 PM, John Culleton wrote:
So I have Inkscape 47 on Xubuntu and can play with it. But the failures under XP and Slackware are troubling. Are my bad experiences with Inkscape on Slackware and XP unique?
The XP ones sound a bit unique. In general if a build works for XP, it works. Best if you compile yourself, but that is a bit much on Windows. The areas where problems usually are seen on XP are with drawing tablets and tablet PCs.
Slackware, on the other hand, is known for being trouble. That is, it has more of a reputation for a distro for those who know what they are doing and who can troubleshoot builds, etc.
Yes I know about the available slackbuild package but it doesn't come with the needed libraries either. I hope the stable version has more universality. Perhaps someday a precompiled Linux version with static libraries included could be made. That would be easier for those who don't have Debian or a Debian derivative to install and run.
Or RedHat or a RedHat derivative, or many others. In general, most distros other than Slack and Gentoo have some packaging system that takes care of most of what you are dealing with.
So of the top 10 linux distros listed on DistroWatch, one is Slack, one is Gentoo, and the other eight are either .rpm or .deb based. And given that Gentoo is intentionally source based, a precompiled binary is not appropriate for that platform. So that basically leaves Slackware alone in need of that extra support.