Kicking the KDE habit

heleos · 2008-05-09 19:15:40

I've been using KDEmod for about the last year, and I have no complaints. I really like it, and I like a lot of the KDE programs. Lately, I've been wanting to switch to openbox/fluxbox for a more minimalistic approach. I've used both openbox and fluxbox in the past. Everytime I've tried to switch recently, I keep coming back to KDE for the features I miss. I keep reading posts about users that used to use KDE, but switched and have never gone back. I'm wondering what these users did to kick the KDE habit?

skottish · 2008-05-09 19:24:30

heleos wrote:

I keep reading posts about users that used to use KDE, but switched and have never gone back. I'm wondering what these users did to kick the KDE habit?

The only thing that I needed to switch to E17 completely was to find a terminal with full clipboard functionality. Everything else I was running already had it. Terminal from XFCE works perfectly. After something like six years of continuous use, I don't miss KDE at all.

synthead · 2008-05-09 23:01:11

Fluxbox is a great WM! I use it on a Pentium 233 laptop w/ 32MB RAM and it's as snappy as a new computer. No reason to complicate things

On the laptop that I use everyday, I wanted to have a little more features, so I installed XFCE. It works great if you don't want to be completely minimalistic ... try it

skottish · 2008-05-09 23:32:04

In the final analysis for me, it was the familiarity that I was holding on to, not so much the functionality. So heleos, how about this. Post what you're missing and see what the community did (or didn't do) to replace the functionality.

Leigh · 2008-05-10 02:57:11

I'm kind of like you, having been trying to make the switch to Fluxbox from KDE/Kde-mod. Im a little like skottish. I'm just more familiar with kde and seem to use it / keep it for that reason. Also I have a pretty nice desktop system with tons of disk space, and a lot of ram. So the extra bloat involved with kde doesn't effect me much. Considering I hardly ever use the kde taskbar any more, and I don't use, or need, icons on the destop, I would think using fluxbox would be perfect for me. The only stopper for me, bsides a few kde dependent apps that I've grown very fond of, is that I totally adore my dark kde theme. To me it's absolutly beautiful and elegant, and I don't even use Compiz. With Fluxbox, Even with experimenting with Xcompmgr, I can't get it to look near as elegant. (I know this is a lame exscuse to hold on to a bloated DM). but besides that, kde3 is extremely solid. everything works and very seldom is there an issue with something. However, when kde4 becomes mainstream, I might make the switch to Fluxbox more permanent.

heleos · 2008-05-10 03:58:02

I'm actually agreeing with Leigh about a lot of points. I recently removed my 2nd kicker bar, with all my launchers. I switched things over to keyboard shortcuts. So maybe I'm slowly converting?

I've tried XFCE a bunch of times. I recently installed it on my old toughbook, and I have it on my current laptop as well. I guess I'm trying to stray away from complete, or semi-complete DE's. I feel that I'm missing too much of the variety of linux by staying strictly to a DE. I know that you can run indepenent stuff inside of a DE, and vise-versa, but it just doesn't feel the same Anyway, back to the topic at hand:

Terminal: I really like urxvt. I've been playing around with it, it loads super fast, and has support for url launching, tabs, blahblahblah. I miss having the rightclick functionality of konsole. being able to copy/paste is pretty much a must. Also, as you mentioned before, the clipboard needs to work as well. I'd like to be able to paste from terminal to other apps (I think i have that set with clipboard-manager which i found some old pkgbuild for, seems to work).

WM: Wont be missing much from kwin. I never really played around with the super-advanced options anyway.

File Manager: I kind of miss having the all-in-one konqueror. Earlier this year, I used a lot of different functions in school (samba shares, web browser, global image viewer, ....). On this topic, I also miss how kde makes everything work nicely together, but I guess thats a + to using DE's over WM's.

Panel: Like I said earlier, I'm basically using kicker as a taskmanager and systray only. I do like some of the applets though, especially the storage media one.
KDE-Apps: amarok, konqueror, k3b, krename. All very good programs.

I guess the only thing I really want is speed. I have a pretty nice computer (core2 duo, 8800gts, 2 gigs ram), so KDE runs perfectly, but I guess I just miss the instantaneous response of the *box's. I hate waiting a couple seconds for kwrite or konqueror to open, when things like leafpad and thunar open instantly in openbox.

Last edited by heleos (2008-05-10 04:31:14)

skottish · 2008-05-10 05:35:51

Now that you mention it, having Konqueror's image viewing capabilities gone was a huge strike. gqview has proven to be better for me except that it can't open xcf files. That being said, Konqueror was the hardest part of KDE to lose.

Konqueror as a file manager was tricky to leave too. Thunar came first, and then all it's problems with fam/gamin came with it. I use pcmanfm now. It's a very nice file manager. Not as slick to look at or as fast as Thunar, but very good all the same.

Terminal is awesome because all of the right click stuff is there. Once I turned off all of the menus and got it looking and feeling like a "regular" terminal, it really became the best of both worlds. It worked like Konsole and felt like a tiny bit slow xterm.

Amarok I eventually replaced with Sonata. First I thought that Exaile was going to do it, but it was far too buggy then. I ended up falling for the simplicity of Sonata. It's certainly not a one-to-one replacement though. Maybe I'll try Exaile again one of these days.

I now use Graveman for burning. It's too bad that it was never finished. It works (with some tricks), but it breaks down every now and then. Happily it never did when I was burning something. Hopefully recorder ( http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=47253 ) will become the burner of choice for me.

There's no doubt that when you leave KDE, you're not going to build something just like it. It's truly the most rounded DE in existence. But when I saw what a slim machine can do on a powerful workstation, I became hooked. Everything is just blazing fast on this machine.

Oh yeah, and memory. This machine has been up for hours. This was done with Terminal and FF3 open:

[skottish@iasE ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3950        659       3290          0        108        293
-/+ buffers/cache:        258       3692
Swap:          258          0        258

Last edited by skottish (2008-05-10 05:39:22)

heleos · 2008-05-10 05:56:47

Well, I found something that may work for me right now....

Decided to get rid of Kwin, and I'm using openbox inside of KDE.
It's using the same amount of memory I was using with openbox/pypanel, and things seem to run faster. kwrite/konsole/konqueror seems to open a couple tenths of a second faster, which is pretty much what I was looking for.

I'm using less than 300 megs with opera, konsole, and amarok playing:

[heleos@erebus ~]$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2010        729       1281          0         73        357
-/+ buffers/cache:        297       1713
Swap:         1906          0       1906

I love the idea of mpd, but I miss having a software equalizer, as bad as everyone says it is. Also, I'm always adding new music to my Ipod, and it's nice to just open amarok and be able to drag/drop files into it

rdt · 2008-05-10 07:11:26

I was a KDE user for many years. But when I came to Arch a year ago, I decided to go with Fluxbox as we use it in KnoppMyth. I really like Fluxbox now.

skottish · 2008-05-10 13:29:54

heleos wrote:

Decided to get rid of Kwin, and I'm using openbox inside of KDE.

I tried that for a while, but there was some quirkiness that was nagging at me. If it's working for you though, that's great. I love Openbox anyway. If E17 wasn't a perfect fit for me, I'd be an Openbox user now.

heleos · 2008-05-10 16:14:15

What were the quirks for you? So far, through extensive testing (about 1 hour ), ive only found a problem with openbox opening world of warcraft. It seems to max the game out vertically, but not horizontally, so it covers the toolbar under the panel. Not a big deal, I'm sure its a setting I did in wine or openbox, but I didn't have that problem with kwin.

skottish · 2008-05-10 17:31:26

Goofy things like trying to shut down from Openbox just to have KDE needing to be shut down also. I don't remember exactly but there were some weirdnesses with the KDE panel. Both of these, and probably every other issue I had were in retrospect my own lack of understanding. As I mentioned before, that was my first attempt ever at changing WMs as well as using pure WMs in a separate session.

NecroRomancist · 2008-05-14 05:43:26

I also moved from Kde to fluxbox and i'm really happy with the change. Curiously i find myself using more gtk based apps now

File Manager - pcmanfm
Media Player(s) - Sonata and VLC
Editors - geany and leafpad
Image Viewers - Mirage

I also missed from kde the ability to browse the samba, nfs,etc.. shares and for that i use a java application called j-ftp. Most peole who use fluxbox probably won't use java apps due to memory comsumptions but it is a really nice application http://j-ftp.sourceforge.net/

grandmasterb · 2008-05-20 15:43:06

i also think about leaving kde for fluxbox/openbox but i miss kde apps so i have a suggestion.. let everybody write a fastest program which they think can replace KDE apps, like this:
Konqueror (FM) - Thunar
Konqueror (FTP/Smaba) - ???
Amarok - Exaile (bit too slow for me;/)
Kwirte/Kate - ???
Kopete - Pidgin
Konqueror (www borwser) - Epiphany, Kazehakase
K3B - ???
Kaffeine - ???
etc.

Last edited by grandmasterb (2008-05-20 15:49:27)

alex_anthony · 2008-05-20 20:02:29

kate - leafpad, mousepad
K3B - Recorder (see community contributions in forum)

Last edited by alex_anthony (2008-05-20 20:03:14)

TecnoVM64 · 2008-05-21 00:31:27

grandmasterb wrote:

i also think about leaving kde for fluxbox/openbox but i miss kde apps so i have a suggestion.. let everybody write a fastest program which they think can replace KDE apps, like this:
Konqueror (FM) - Thunar
Konqueror (FTP/Smaba) - ???
Amarok - Exaile (bit too slow for me;/)
Kwirte/Kate - ???
Kopete - Pidgin
Konqueror (www borwser) - Epiphany, Kazehakase
K3B - ???
Kaffeine - ???
etc.

Amarok - Banshee, Quod Libet (my favourite)
Kwrite - Mousepad
K3b - Graveman
Kaffeine - Totem-xine, Gmplayer
those are my replacements, although I use KDE anyway

NecroRomancist · 2008-05-21 02:56:14

I to substitute Kate use geany.
As for ftp and samba the latest version of pcman has suport for those protocols using fuse

http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/PCMan_File_Manager

I just wish there were some alternative for pidgin, with support for jabber,msn and yahoo.. Miranda Im should have a Linux version.

Last edited by NecroRomancist (2008-05-21 02:56:36)

jb · 2008-05-21 03:35:10

I know what you mean, that KDE to *Box transition is hard.

My move from Gnome to Flux was much more permanent. I managed to stay on it for about 2 years. But then I switched over to KDE about 2005-ish and have been there since. For the last year or so, I've tried to go back, but I find myself using so many KDE apps (amarok, konqueror, kontact, qalculate mostly) that I find the move trivial and go back.

heleos · 2008-05-21 03:47:17

Yeah, i've been jumping back and forth between openbox/pekwm and kde. I just miss how quickly things open in non-kde (mousepad, thunar, etc), but at the same time, i miss the power features of kde stuff

grandmasterb · 2008-05-22 10:39:02

well for now i am using KDE apps in openbox and its bit faster but still...;/

zio · 2008-06-13 06:33:09

Heleos, for me its all about console. vim/emacs, weechat/irrsi and of course screen. Because I'm more dependent on the console it doesn't really matter what WM/DM I use, I'm still productive. I happen to use Xmonad and sometimes WMii . But personally that's all about style. I also find with a console dependent setup, working remotely is a breeze. I have less installed and less hidden from me. Another thing I do is keep ~/ under git control. And add git status to .bashrc to so I know what software is messing with what. I can make small incremental changes to rc files and I can revert at any time.

JeremyTheWicked · 2008-06-13 08:25:04

My experience: Gnome with all the KDE apps I use (amarok, kontact, kadu) uses 200MB memory less than KDE with the same apps open.

dyscoria · 2008-06-13 08:26:38

I've done what alot of people have done: started with a fully blown DE before moving down into Xfce, then into the boxes. Strangely though, i've now moved back up to KDE(mod) and loving it. Even stranger is that I previously hated KDE and konqueror with a passion, but it seems to have grown on me (took nigh on 6 months to do so ). Personally, I can't wait until KDE4 becomes properly stable. Fluxbox/Openbox were nice when I used them for a couple months. Blazingly fast too. But I just couldn't find an appearance that I was fully happy with. Plus, KDE apps are among the best you can get and I didn't want KDE dependencies, let alone GNOME dependencies installed when I was using the boxes.

funkyou · 2008-06-13 10:10:34

JeremyTheWicked wrote:

My experience: Gnome with all the KDE apps I use (amarok, kontact, kadu) uses 200MB memory less than KDE with the same apps open.

Never ever
You are using two different toolkits + runtime dependencies that must be loaded (gtk and friends, Qt and friends), so it will never be as light as when using one toolkit/desktop environment... Also notice that many KDE apps load a lot of stuff when started outside of KDE (like kdeinit for example)...

For me, the use of less memory does not count. What counts is the "subjective speed"... Hey, we have a good kernel, we dont need to have an eye on memory, like on other, less matured OSes

And to keep on topic: KDE is simply the right thing to "get the job done" for me... Whenever i try something else, i get frustrated quickly, let it be features alone, speed compared to features and integration...

So, why kick the KDE habit? "If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em"

JeremyTheWicked · 2008-06-13 10:44:08

@funkyou: I checked that with 'free' several times. See for yourself. And yes, we do have to have an eye on memory. I often have to run windows in a VM (that dreaded .docx format) and KDE consistently runs out of ram in that situation and starts swapping - making my system very slow. This happens a lot less in Gnome, even though I run Kontact and amaroK all the time.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-05-09 19:15:40

Kicking the KDE habit

#2 2008-05-09 19:24:30

Re: Kicking the KDE habit

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