On moving from KDE to XFCE

posted on Feb 07, 2012

KDE has been my window manager for ages, but I am getting tired of how it has become slow and wasteful. By and large the KDE applications are fine, but the increasing dependency of the system on its semantic desktop is not. (You may think that a semantic desktop would be a nice feature, and in theory it is, but in practice it consumes large amounts of resources for no visible advantage).

So I am trying out XFCE, a GTK-based window manager that is very slim and sleek (ie nothing like Gnome!). I am not really worried about the disk space that the KDE applications take, so I am happy to leave them on the disk and maybe even use them (as long as they don't require running akonadi or nepomukserver).

This blog post is really meant to be a list of applications that I will use in XFCE instead of the ones I use in KDE. It is an evolving post: I will come back and edit whenever I find better options. If you are interested, do come back to check.

In case you don't follow my blog, I should say that I use Slackware, either 32-bit or 64-bit (pure, I don't like 32-bit compatibility libraries!).

KDE applicationSubstituteComments
KMailThunderbirdI've already done this switch and use it in KDE. It is not better than KMail; I particularly dislike that it uses mbox files rather than Maildir, but I've overcome this by running my own IMAP server (dovecot)
KonquerorFirefoxnothing to be said here, firefox is the leader, otherwise it would be Chrome
Katemedit medit can have several files open, does syntax coloring and can open terminal window - all the features that I use in kate
Amarok VLC not as good as amarok, will try other options too: xmms, audacious, aqualung, exaile
Okular ? candidates:evince, epdfview, acroread (only 32-bit)
Digikam ? This is a toughie, I use Digikam for my large photo database and really haven't found anything equivalent (apart from KPhotoAlbum, but that is also a KDE app) This will be a showstopper, at least on my home PC
KdenliveOpenShot Kdenlive does not use akonadi, only kdeinit4, klauncher and kded4 (the basic processes of KDE), so I consider it usable for my purposes. The alternative, OpenShot is a python program and does seem suitable (not as much features as kdenlive but close)
KSnapshot xfce-screenshooter-plugin Gimp also does the job well
Konsole Terminal defaut XFCE application; works well, especially after setting all properties (window height had to be done on ~/.config/Terminal/terminalrc)
dolphinthunarthis is the default on XFCE, seems ok. Alternatives could be XFE or PCManFM
gwenviewgeeqieworks fine
K3b ?xfburn, Xcdroast?
KCalcgalculator GTK2-based calculator, has scientific and hex modes.
KCharSelect?????
KTimes????
kdesu? ktsuss, gtksu
KHexEditor?GHex, JHEditor?

I already use several applications that are not KDE-specific and these don't have to change: OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Inkscape, Calibre, Sigil, Skype, Hugin, Pidgin, Audacity, XVidCap, Xournal, Eclipse.