Fluxbox is a great window manager and if you start akonadi you can probably run kmail in it. The only kde app that i use regularly is kmix, which seems to work well as long as you dont run kde. Konsole runs in fluxbox, tho there are better terms imo. Fluxbox has real transparency if you run it with xcompmgr, pseudo transparency otherwise and has virtual desktops. You likely already have fluxbox installed and if you get rox from slackbuilds you will get a desktop and filemanager to go with flux that offer nearly instantaneous response and are highly configurable.

I use also de kde 4.10.2 version on slackware 14 32bit. Sometimes I feel some sluggishness. But by far this is the best kde4 version I ever experienced

I disabled nepomuk, but read somewhere that it is better to remove kdepim if you do not use it, because merely starting a clock applet will wake up the nepomuk server.

I do not use thunderbird or kmail though. I used to use claws but I am now rather happy with mutt. And tmux and newsbeuter combo for news.

I use recoll for desktop search. Which I have running as a deamon. A little helper (recollrunner) acts in dolphin(!) for searching:
simply typing recollf:/search-words/ will find and deliver the results in dolphin which works pretty great.

There are (a lot) of post on the interwebs on improving your sluggishness of Kde: disabling animations, diabling special effects like:
blur, transparency (:)) and enabling window resize. And then the oxygen theme is supposed to be also a resource hog.
But I use kfaenza for icons, theming is all solarized (which I find absolutely asthonishing great).
Sorry for being off topic.

Greetz

Marcel

I use XFCE 4 as a KDE alternative, but it lacks some of the features and applications of KDE. The most notable is that Thunar will not automatically mount or access shared network folders. If you typically access the same network folders all the time then it's not a big problem (mount them permanently). If you access a lot of different folders on different computers then it can be a hassle. Even running Dolphin from XFCE is a bit faster than from KDE, so I sometimes do that.

I like Amarok a lot. I've even considered installing it on Windows, though I'm nervous about all the KDE software that would be installed along with it.

Has anyone tried using Slackware without KDE? What programs do you use as alternatives to KDE applications?

There was a thread a while ago with exactly that title, Alternatives for KDE's Applications. The thread is a little old, but most of the suggestions there are still valid.

Thanks Diantre. That was very helpful. Now I need to try some of those and see how well they work for me.

Just run Kmail in Fluxbox (or any other WM, I guess), and Akonadi awakes automatically, no need to start it by hand.

gargamel

In that thread everyone agrees that it is hard to replace Dolphin. My recommendation here would be SpaceFM, available from SlackBuilds.org. It looks ugly, but is very fast, feature-rich and relatively intuitive to use.

gargamel

Just posting to thanks gudan for the mateslackbuild tip.
few days in it and I'm loving the experience, dont think Im coming back that easily to kde...

XFCE is absolutely great -- I thought I'd mention if you have issues/bugs with KDE you may want to try to clean out prior KDE configs and also completely remove the packages and reinstall. That is pretty much common sense but it really fixed many of the qwirks that were driving me away from KDE.

I have to agree with this. There are a lot of little niggling details that had started to drive me nuts with KDE, not to mention being too much, slow and sluggish on my hardware. Once I really started to delve into Xfce, I really began to appreciate its power, modularity, and responsiveness. Now, when I install Slackware, I forego KDE completely.

for more info what version of slackware is Trinity in use on?

I almost finished rehauling my Slackware-plus-Xfce-based Microlinux Enterprise Desktop. Moved everything to Github, cleaned the scripts, added a few licences, and I'm now busy reworking the documentation. I'll post the update in a few days. You can take a peek at the work in progress in the meantime.

https://github.com/kikinovak/desktop

Nice work, Nicolas!

The official stable release is 3.5.13.1. A 3.5.13.2 release is imminent and a R14.0.0 release will be close behind.

The R14.0.0 release includes a lot of work with renaming and rebranding.

I'm using a pre R14.0.0 release from GIT and I'm typing from within Trinity right now. Everything I use is stable and pleasant to use. The project road map shows a late May release for R14.0.0.

I'm contemplating re-installing Slackware64 without KDE and forcing myself to find XFCE replacements just because it's so much faster on my machine and KDE feels as bloated to me as Windows. My needs are fairly simple but the programs I'd miss the most are K3b and Ktorrent.