KDE alternative in Slackware
 

Too many issues with KDE lately so I'm asking to find a viable alternative within Slackware. Biggest issue with KDE is that after a few days of usage switching between windows becomes very sluggish until a restart of KDE. Anyway, some features that I liked from KDE that hopefully are available within said alternative...

-transparency
-konsole
-kmail
-virtual desktops

I like MateSlackBuild.

Konsole and KMail can, of course, be run in any desktop.

I never use tranparency, but AFAIK transparency can be added to any DE just by swapping the WM out with Compiz. I haven't seen anything that uses transparency as heavily as KDE does though.

As for virtual desktops, it would be quicker to list choices that don't have them.

Do you not like xfce/xfwm, terminal and thunderbird?

xfwm4 can do transparency if you enable it

Xfce also has a transparent panel.

have you tried adjusting your swappiness?

Have a look at this thread

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...up-4175457526/

XFCE's a good option but I find that windows tear with my Nvidia card. Not sure if it's a bug or feature.

Xfce with compositing enabled
Terminal
Thunderbird
and, uh, virtual desktops

I use NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, and I noticed the sluggishness. What solved this for me, was choosing "OpenGL" from:

System Settings > Desktop Effects > Advanced > Compositing type

I've always been doing this, but the one time I forgot, the whole desktop was sluggish.

TBO, I don't like compositing at all, but with my new nvidia card I experience terrible screen tearing if I don't have it enabled, along with vsync. So, it's KDE or nothing for me.

and if your working set fits into main memory you shouldn't set up swap at all

I have no such problem with the proprietaty Nvidia driver. Compositing is disabled because I want to preserve the GPU resources for my, erm, applications.

For virtual desktops, you could use either fvwm2 or Windowmaker. konsole can be replaced by xterm or rxvt.
Instead of kmail, you could use thunderbird or seamonkey. If your system has limited memory, you can use instead a text based email reader such as pine or elm in an xterm/rxvt window. All the above programs are normally installed by default on Slackware (x/ and xap/ packages).

If you need a fuller desktop environment, instead of fvwm or you can of course try xfce (also installed by default on slackware) or maté (that you will have to install). Another possibility, if you are familiar with building programs from source is to replace lesstif with LGPL Motif and install
the Common Desktop Environment . dtterm will
replace konsole, dtmail will replace kmail, and you will have the dtpad editor and the dtfile filemanager.

True, I dare say many people have an unnecessary swap partition - but swap does have its uses (e.g. pm-hibernate).

Lots of good alternatives are available, though none is a complete replacement for KDE. Personally I like these:

• Xfce (part of Slackware, but enriched with stuff from SlackBuilds.org, e. g. it looks damn good with Faenza icons)
• Enlightenment DR17 (e17) Completely different, but equally good as Xfce, incredibly fast despite a lot of eyecandy.
• Fluxbox (even faster, easy to configure, good-looking, but not a full desktop)

Occasionally I also use Razor-Desktop (available from SlackBuilds.org). It's a Qt based peer to Xfce, but not yet quite as complete. Razor provides a very similar look and feel as KDE, uses Openbox as window manager, but is light and fast.

However, most of the time I stick with KDE. I experience some sluggishness with KMail, recently, but the desktop as a whole feels, at least, as responsive as Xfce (e17 and Fluxbox might be a bit "snappier"). The question is therefore, what causes the sluggishness you describe. Is it really caused by KDE, or would you have the same effect with another DE, after a while, too?

Anyhow, checking the above mentioned environments out was a lot of fun for me (and still is), so if you aren't depending on maximum productivity I recommend you just give them all a try, one by one.

Enjoy! :)


gargamel

Slackware, Xfce (compositing enabled), Faenza icons, conky. My Slack desktop here at work...

Also, Nicolas Kovacs does nice work with Slackware and Xfce, for enterprise customers (see screenshots):

http://www.microlinux.fr/desktop_linux.php

I use the Trinity Desktop, which has:

-transparency
-konsole
-kmail

To run virtual desktops I keep qt4 installed and run VirtualBox.

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.

It's hard to beat K3b, but I've gotten used to using xfburn, which is pretty good in its own right. At least it ain't Brasero! xfburn doesn't come with the Xfce installation, so I grabbed it from SlackBuilds.

I actually use Brasero, with all the third party gstreamer-{bad,ugly,obscene} stuff as well as totem-pl-parser. Now it burns about everything nice and clean, even M3U playlists with normalizing. Little bit more patience, then I'll (re)publish my new application repo for my Xfce stuff.

http://www.microlinux.fr/images/bure...es_brasero.png

really..? there's a gst-plugins-obscene package in addition to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

Just "une façon de parler", as we say here in France. A manner of saying.

Do you plan to layout your repo in the Slackware way, so that it can be used with slackpkg+?

Niki, what do you use as your display manager for your Xfce enterprise setups? Initially, I had replaced xdm with SLiM, but after some difficulty I moved to gdm, which is more involved as far as dependencies go, but there are some nice themes out there.

OK folks, [NN] here's the Microlinux Enterprise Desktop 14.0 revisited:

https://github.com/kikinovak/desktop

Step by step installation instructions included.

Enjoy!

Niki

I had started out with Slim also, but eventually, I'm now quite happy with GDM. I took the source from Salix and modified the theme to my needs.

Unfortunately I live in the remote South french countryside, and our Internet connection is very poor. Uploading a couple of gigabytes would take days, so what I did this time was simply host the build scripts but add some automated source download.

Hey thanks, I've installed xfburn for cd-burning, as well as transmission for torrents, and both seem to do the job quite well with very few dependencies. Appreciate the input!

Thanks for all the wonderful replies! Decided to give all the ones available in Slackware a try, as well as MateSlackBuild and I have to say I've narrowed it down to XFCE and Mate.

As for the the sluggishness of KDE, it's not that KDE as a whole is sluggish. It's that the longer I stay in KDE the sluggishness begins to increase to the point where it's annoying to use without a restart. It's not even a matter of swap because the swap barely gets used even during extreme times of sluggishness. This coupled with the little annoying quirks inherent in KDE, I've kind of had enough of it.

If I wasn't using my own blend of Xfce (see above), I'd probably be using MATE from MateSlackBuild. Gave it a spin a few days ago, out of simple curiosity. It's as clean and reactive as GNOME 2.30 on a RHEL or Debian install.

You have done a great deal of work!
:hattip:

Is there anyway to get a look at how you have improved (or enhanced :) ) Xfce without having to do a fresh installation?

Many Thanks.

@kikinovak - I must say, your tweaked Xfce looks fantastic. Really, really great work. And I'm glad you found MATE to work well for you too. It's been my daily desktop for awhile and I enjoy it.

I am a Fluxbox fan. It's been my go-to window manager for years. It's got enough desktop features to meet my needs, without all the overhead.

Lately, though, I've been having a lot of fun with E17 from the SlackE17 Project. I would say it's worth a look.

I gave a presentation about it at my LUG. You can find the handout here.

(The one from Slackbuilds gave me segfaults.)

Xfce is one of the best desktop environments I've found. It's lightweight, flexible, and isn't too heavy on the resources like Gnome 3.x and KDE 4.x can be. Gnome 2.x was good also and didn't have too much weight on the system except in libraries and apps, and many BSD/UNIX distros still use it.

Look into LXDE as a good alternative desktop as well. It's based on KDE and is very lightweight like Xfce.

Based on KDE???

Completely agree with you about XFCE.
Anyway i don't think that LXDE is based on KDE :)

Thanks, Chess! I really appreciate the encouragement, and doubly so if it comes from you, as I'm regularly relying on your own work.

I really enjoy working on this project, but there's a downside to being alone for it. Not enough quality assurance. I'm vaguely thinking about opening it up and invite other guys (like you or Willy etc.) to participate. IMHO, it's always better to work as a small team than to work alone, and it's also much more fun too. Besides, if the project was to be moved from my personal Github repo to something more "official", it would potentially reach a wider audience. It would only be a small step from there to host all the binaries and easily downloadable ISOs. Thinking about it, I have even a big fat dedicated public server (running Slackware) with unlimited bandwidth that could host all the stuff.

Thinking about a project name... what about slickslack.org? I just checked, and it's available.

The project aim would still remain the same. Download and install everything needed to turn your vanilla Slackware install into something as functionally complete as, say, your average openSUSE, Linux Mint or PCLinuxOS desktop, only much more solid and perennial and based on Xfce.

You tell me. :hattip:

Wow, that sounds like a great idea, Niki. If I had any skills in that realm, I would be a part of such a project. Perhaps one day...

And I like the name SlickSlack, it rolls off the tongue nicely.

Are you familiar with the work of the SlackerMedia folks? Different focus, but similar, although they don't plan on ISOs and such.