There were a whole bunch of comments on this past week's posts, so I'll try to repost most of those.
Commenter Mitsos had this to say: "There are some ultralight apps out there that are fantastic. Epdfview is a great example as you mentioned, and I use it on my openbox machine. On gnome I'd prefer evince which has an option for continuous display of pages (epdfview doesn't), and you already have the gnome dependencies installed. You could also try out FoxitReader. Viewnior is just amazing. My computer is 6-7 years old now, so apps like that make it fly. I mainly use GTK applications, but nothing keeps me back from using a Qt app like SMPlayer, or KDE apps, like K3b. They all run just fine."
There was a bit of back-and-forth about whether Mozilla Firefox is a GTK+ application or not, so an anonymous reader finally came to the rescue with this clarification and insight: "PV and anonymous, you are wrong in the following way- yes, firefox uses XUL for UI toolkit but currently, AFAIK, XUL only has a GTK renderer. There have been unofficial ports to QT that couldn't keep up and so got abandoned. The problem is that GTK is too tightly tied to gnome - the credentials, the VFS, the notifications and for many other features. XUL has nothing to do with gnome so if firefox is 'well integrated' with gnome, WHY is that ? It has to be because of GTK's assimilation into gnome."
Commenter Barnaby said, "Gpicviewer is another good and light weight one. Talking about KDE, I just wiped my Fedora 14 KDE install that I had around since October a few days ago, even upgraded to 4.6 it was still very slow, and that without effects turned on. It depends on the distro though. KDE 4 in Salix, Kongoni and Chakra is markedly faster."
Reader Barnaby (again) said, "Thanks for trying this out. I was initially quite excited as well. I now think the most important thing to take away from their announcement is that they are progressively switching over to a Debian base for all but the main edition. The remaining polish will come as time goes on."
Commenter Ed the Red said, "I love and generally use Debian (over Ubuntu, my second choice), but I'm not sure I would have chosen this particular moment for rebasing a XFCE distro on Debian testing. Debian just released Squeeze as stable a couple of months ago and the big changes that always follow a release of stable have yet to really hit the testing repos. Those changes can cause snafus. It does seem like the big changes that normally hit the Debian testing repos after a stable release are taking substantially longer than normal. [...] Although Thunar is a lot faster than Nautilus (though less full-featured), I've never been convinced that XFCE was that much less memory intensive than Gnome (Xubuntu often uses more than the more full featured Gnome version of Ubuntu). And Mint generally seems less responsive than standard Ubuntu to me. But I was impressed by LMDE, I like it much better than the latest Mint Ubuntu spin, it seems faster. [...]"
Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I have one fairly big post coming up, but that's all I have planned, because once again, I'm going to be quite busy with classwork. Once again, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting!
Ditching KDE Applications
An anonymous reader said, "As a kde user, I feel exactly the same about gnome apps - they start slow and perform badly- so the only gnome application I have is firefox, though konqueror with webkit is what I use more and more. I will add that I prefer KDE over gnome because a) KDE apps are MUCH better integrated with each other b) gnome is tightly controlled by RH and ximian and their agendas as opposed to KDE which I believe is a more community based and oriented desktop and c) these entities have acted and are acting a lot like m$ w.r.t. their dictation of policies and agenda in the desktop arena ( not to mention all the FUD they have spread and keep spreading on KDE)"Commenter Mitsos had this to say: "There are some ultralight apps out there that are fantastic. Epdfview is a great example as you mentioned, and I use it on my openbox machine. On gnome I'd prefer evince which has an option for continuous display of pages (epdfview doesn't), and you already have the gnome dependencies installed. You could also try out FoxitReader. Viewnior is just amazing. My computer is 6-7 years old now, so apps like that make it fly. I mainly use GTK applications, but nothing keeps me back from using a Qt app like SMPlayer, or KDE apps, like K3b. They all run just fine."
There was a bit of back-and-forth about whether Mozilla Firefox is a GTK+ application or not, so an anonymous reader finally came to the rescue with this clarification and insight: "PV and anonymous, you are wrong in the following way- yes, firefox uses XUL for UI toolkit but currently, AFAIK, XUL only has a GTK renderer. There have been unofficial ports to QT that couldn't keep up and so got abandoned. The problem is that GTK is too tightly tied to gnome - the credentials, the VFS, the notifications and for many other features. XUL has nothing to do with gnome so if firefox is 'well integrated' with gnome, WHY is that ? It has to be because of GTK's assimilation into gnome."
Commenter Barnaby said, "Gpicviewer is another good and light weight one. Talking about KDE, I just wiped my Fedora 14 KDE install that I had around since October a few days ago, even upgraded to 4.6 it was still very slow, and that without effects turned on. It depends on the distro though. KDE 4 in Salix, Kongoni and Chakra is markedly faster."
Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104
For one of the things that I noticed, an anonymous reader suggested, "Firefox is set to be updated from Mozilla. Open it as root (gksudo firefox), update it and close it again," while for another thing that I complained about, another anonymous commenter suggested, "multimedia keys: sudo apt install xfce4-volumed"Reader Barnaby (again) said, "Thanks for trying this out. I was initially quite excited as well. I now think the most important thing to take away from their announcement is that they are progressively switching over to a Debian base for all but the main edition. The remaining polish will come as time goes on."
Commenter Ed the Red said, "I love and generally use Debian (over Ubuntu, my second choice), but I'm not sure I would have chosen this particular moment for rebasing a XFCE distro on Debian testing. Debian just released Squeeze as stable a couple of months ago and the big changes that always follow a release of stable have yet to really hit the testing repos. Those changes can cause snafus. It does seem like the big changes that normally hit the Debian testing repos after a stable release are taking substantially longer than normal. [...] Although Thunar is a lot faster than Nautilus (though less full-featured), I've never been convinced that XFCE was that much less memory intensive than Gnome (Xubuntu often uses more than the more full featured Gnome version of Ubuntu). And Mint generally seems less responsive than standard Ubuntu to me. But I was impressed by LMDE, I like it much better than the latest Mint Ubuntu spin, it seems faster. [...]"
Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. This coming week, I have one fairly big post coming up, but that's all I have planned, because once again, I'm going to be quite busy with classwork. Once again, if you like what I write, please keep subscribing and commenting!