This are the main application I use:
--Firefox,
I need Firefox because of a plug-in called Peraperakun which translates chinese characters when you pass over them with your mouse. maybe StarDict could do it? but I never really used it before... I also need to download videos from Youtube, etc. etc.
--Astrill,
it's the vpn provider I already paid for and living in China I use it regularly
--music player,
I currently use VLC for both music and video playing, even if I am having some problems with playlist reproduction randomly freezing. it should be something as lightweight as VLC and with the same reproduction quality (soundwise).
--Transmssion, Vuze, whatever,
the main reason I have to do something about my system, torrents are not working. when Transmission stopped to work I switched to Qbittorrent and it worked for a while then Vuze and it also stopped to work after a while then I finally started to portforward and... still no results. I need to solve this and using a soon to be obsolete Lucid is not a good start.
--.doc/.txt editor,
I am using gedit, I guess Abiword should do it.
--bumblebee,
because of nvidia
--skype,
not sure which libraries it relies upon
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--.ppt editor,
I am using OpenOffice but anything else is fine
--Darktable,
using the last release is one of the reasons I want to switch distro, I tried as a newbie to compile it myself but the dependencies drove me crazy.
--an image viewer,
I still haven't found something I like, thumbs view and crop/resize are the minimum requirements. In the end it's not so important but...
--M.A.M.E.,
I will use it but no big deal.
--a books/comics reader,
something to read e-books formats and something to read comics form archives
--cd/dvd burner,
I don't do it often but I need it.
--and,
maybe something else that I am not aware of...

my doubt is: can I use at least the applications over the dotted line without any dependency from gnome libraries? If I have to load multiple desktop environments libraries to use what it's always open in my computer I can as well try to configure GNOME... or not? WHY NOT?

PS. The distro I will install will either be Wheezy (because of the many precompiled packages) or Arch (because of the wiki). I don't mind a complicated installation, but maybe I'll regret the constant updates...
PPS. If I go on with these how can I set up the updates to keep my main apps gnome/kde-free?