On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:58:50 +0100
Dr Adam J Trickett <adam.trickett@???> wrote:
> While some people have a preference for KDE, Gnome or something
> else, it's hard to imagine a desktop system of any kind that
> doesn't use some Qt or GTK applications, the list of flagship apps
> that use one technology or the other is just too long.
>
> * Firefox/Thunderbird
> * K3B
> * Amarok
> * GIMP
> * Opera
>
> With disk space cheap and plentiful, and all modern distros having
> sensible package management, it's hardly much pain to run a desktop
> system with most of GNOME and KDE installed.
I may actually have a system a little more up to date than the ENIAC
Alan suggested but I until very recently I didn't have any system with
a hard disk larger than 30Gb. This box has, I think, an 80Gb disk
which is only 50% utilised so I could go mad and install kde stuff .
But what? A test-run at installing digikam wanted to install the
following:-
cdparanoia cdrdao digikam dvd+rw-tools enscript exiv2 gdb
genisoimage hal hal-info k3b kamera kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data
kdebase-kio-plugins kdemultimedia-kio-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins
kdeprint kdesktop kfind kicker kipi-plugins kmail konqueror kooka
pkg-config pmount poster procmail psutils vcdimager
Plus all the lib*'s that go with them.
I won't ever use kmail or konqueror or kdesktop or procmail, I don't
need cdparanoia or cdrdao and I don't have a DVD-writer. so why
dvd+rw-tools. My system gets along fine without hal or pkg-config or
enscript or most of those other apps that seem to get dragged in.
Installing them by default will clutter up my windowmaker menus with
unwanted apps. I know I can edit the windowmaker menu but anything
that runs update-menus will add them back in I suspect.
This is my real beef about kde or gnome - it is impossible to
install selected apps without getting all the 'dross' or at least not
when using aptitude to install the debian packages if they are
truly dependant on one another.
As for Adam's essential apps I did once try K3B but found it easier
to use wodim (once it became available as an alternative to cdrecord)
from the command line for creating bootable CDs from ISOs, which is
about all I do with blank CDrs. Does K3B now use wodim? It didn't
when I tried it so I got the scsi-emulation error messages!!
Gimp is about the only app I have installed knowing it required
gnome libs but there isn't much in the way of an alternative.
No idea what amarok is so probably don't need it
I use iceweasel when I have to but don't really like it and cannot
see me ever using icedove as I have got too used to Claws-Mail (which
uses gtk2 of course) to want to change.
and finally opera - for a long time I used the standalone version of
opera that didn't require separate libs. I now use the debian
package so got whatever libs were needed when I installed it.
Yeah! I know I am a dinosaur in computing terms but I don't care :-)
/rant
--
John Lewis
Debian (Sid) with the GeneWeb genealogy package
