Questions about xfce with Gnome/KDE programs

[mrnull]

I run xfce-4 as my desktop (Debian) because I heard it's the fastest. Unfortunately, most of the programs I love were written for the Gnome or KDE environment. I notice when I install these programs that several Gnome/KDE libraries get installed to. Will this slow my system down? What's the downside?

[i92guboj]

I run xfce-4 as my desktop (Debian) because I heard it's the fastest. Unfortunately, most of the programs I love were written for the Gnome or KDE environment. I notice when I install these programs that several Gnome/KDE libraries get installed to. Will this slow my system down? What's the downside?

In my humble opinion, you don't have to worry about that unless you have a very old system.

There's no general rule about this. But -generally- it's the size of the application which you should worry about, and not the toolkit used to build it.

For example: imagine you are under kde, and want to use a music player. Some would say: use amarok, because it's kde-ish and so it will run better under kde. The truth, however, is that amarok is a beast, and it will take loads of ram, it doesn't matter the desktop you use. So, even a gtk based player (let's say, audacious) will take less resources under kde than amarok, which is native to kde.

Another example: some would say that using konqueror under gnome is stupid when you have firefox. But firefox will suck all your ram because gecko (it's rendering engine) is another beast, and it doesn't matter if firefox is to some extent a gtk application. While konqueror will be much lighter, it doesn't matter if you run it under gnome or kde).

That's the general rule.

Note also that gnome app is not the same than gtk app. For example: gimp is a gtk based app, but it's not tied to gnome in any way, and does not use the gnome libraries.

The same goes for qt/kde. A kde app is the application that uses kdelibs. All the kde apps are qt apps as well, but not all the qt apps are kde apps.

I just use whatever I need. Nowadays, having a +200gb hard drive on any machine, I wouldn't worry about installing a few more mb on my disk. About the performance: as I said, it depends much more on the concrete apps you use, than it depends on the toolkit that these apps use.

Mixing programs from many desktops is not a bad thing, as long as they do what you need them to do. When you load a gtk based program, it's not like magically all the gtk toolset is loaded. The program load the .so files that are linked only, and loading a gtk-foo.so file is not different from loading any other lib that the program needs. Some people, however, seems to feel some kind of phobia about this.

Let's fight this old myth, that never was true.