Xfce Forum

corrafig

Member

Registered: 2016-03-21

Posts: 1

How do you flavour XFCE with Gnome or KDE applications?

XFCE is fantastic and offering a lot of basic tools. However, often users are required to use tools from KDE or Gnome world (i.e. Qt vs GTK). If you do that, do you prefer always only KDE or Gnome software in XFCE? Or do you mix everything?

For example, you need a video editing software so do you prefer Qt or GTK, or do you just take the best software available?

I have used XFCE for ~10 years in symbiosis with Gnome software (due to GTK). However, nowadays I have been more willing to use KDE/Qt software in XFCE (for example kate for writing). Maybe I go so far that I replace all Gnome related software and use only KDE alternatives.

KDE desktop environment (DE/WM) itself is that complex and unstable system so I want to stay in XFCE world. But single applications are different story.

I just would like to hear how other XFCE users are choosing applications (that are not in XFCE) that they are using.

janp

Member

Registered: 2016-02-05

Posts: 25

Re: How do you flavour XFCE with Gnome or KDE applications?

I swictched from KDE to XFCE about two months ago. The reason was that I was sick of the neverending bugs that affect kde. As soon as they achieve a good stability they break something again for whatever reason. Kde it's more advanced when it comes to multimedia and maybe looks nicer, but Xfce is quite faster , stabler, and far less bloated.
Kate and the few programs I found useful in kde (e.g, okular is very good) have good replacements in Xfce.
So the answer for me is to stay with xfce and add the best programs that you can find.

sixsixfive

Member

From: behind you

Registered: 2012-04-08

Posts: 579

Website

Re: How do you flavour XFCE with Gnome or KDE applications?

I personally prefer plain Qt applications since they integrate itself on any system or any toolkit. I also can use them on other operating systems and they work the same way as on X11.

I try not to use any KDE or GNOME applications due their heavy dependencies but I also never liked their style(I really like the unix philosophy((do one thing well)) instead of having applications that try to be anything(amarok, vlc, parole, etc.). the only thing that i really miss from the kde2/3 days is Konqueror(I never was more effective on linux than with this file manager).

few programs I found useful in kde (e.g, okular is very good) have good replacements in Xfce.

xfce has no replacement for okular, sure okular is a great document viewer but like some other apps it tries too much.

Last edited by sixsixfive (2016-03-21 16:53:54)

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hacknix

Member

Registered: 2014-07-15

Posts: 24

Re: How do you flavour XFCE with Gnome or KDE applications?

The way in which I figure out my favoured apps is that I have an idea of how an app should do its job or what kind of app I need in general and then I google for "x-app for Linux" and read some of these "10 or 20 best xyz-apps for Linux" articles on the web.

For instance I wanted an image viewer that works similar to Xee on mac (double click file, opens in fullscreen view, scrolls through all pictures of the folder with the mousewheel, double clicking on the screen exits fullscreen and fits on screen, double clicking in the app window makes it go back to fullscreen again) and for that reason I replaced Ristretto with Mirage and then Mirage with Viewnior which is perfectly fitting my preferences.
In similar ways I found Foxit Reader and Zathura for reading PDFs for instance. You could call my method "trial & error", maybe?

What I avoid if possible is anything that needs tons of KDE dependencies or is written especially for Gnome/Unity DE.