Salix OS have released 13.1.2 KDE & KDE Live

On 30/10/2010 the Salix team announced the release of a KDE spin of their latest 13.1.2 offering. This is a boon for everybody whose favorite desktop environment is KDE 4, and from reading the announcement this a standard KDE SC with all the apps that normally gives you, so not much to say about that. It also includes Koffice and perhaps most interestingly has added the Kaffeine media player and the Clementine audio player, a successor to Amarok.
Wicd continues to be the manager for wireless networks, a welcome departure from KNetworkManager, although I myself have not had any problems with this one, but people seem wary of NetworkManager judging by comments around. So there is actually something a little bit different to Salix OS KDE edition.

This edition, like all others, will allow you to choose from a 'basic', 'full' and 'core' package sets during installation. These are actually three releases, a 32-bit and a 64-bit version, as always, and a KDE live edition as well, all released at the same time.

KDE 4.4.3 is a bit old by now, but all Slackware derived distros (actually not all, check out Kongoni GNU/Linux with 4.5.1) seem to stick with this version until the next Slackware release. Not a bad choice, when I tested installing KDE 4 on the LXDE edition it proved exceedingly fast and responsive, even with as little as 256 MB ram. This sort of performance is not what people usually think of when mentioning KDE 4, and it actually swayed me to finally seriously consider KDE again.

I won't be using it though as I am very happy using the original XFCE edition, and am asking myself a little bit what the point is when Salix set out to provide a fast and light weight Slackware derivative. Despite having hugely improved in speed, which also has to do which distro it is running on (Arch and Slackware as a base faring better here and providing superior performance and needing less ram) KDE can still not be considered as light weight, and never will be.
It's quite easy to add KDE or LXDE to any existing install, so if I want that I'll go down that road.
There already exists good documentation on How to add KDE 4 on the Salix website, just as there is a guide on how to accomplish this for LXDE and for Gnome 2.30.

I guess it's nice for people who have to do a fresh install and only use KDE as their only or main desktop. A big thank you to the people who worked on this anyway, this may contribute to making Salix again a little more known, step by step. I'm just puzzled by the many ISO images now available for download.