"Dan B." <d...@kempt.net> wrote: >For the various things that get installed for Gnome, KDE, etc., >which are specific to the chosen desktop environment, and which >work with any desktop environment (or perhaps any sufficiently >capable DE (e.g., FreeDesktop-compliant))? > >When a DE includes a (default) audio player, file manager, CD-writing >program, etc., is the only thing specific to that DE the fact that it >chose that program as its default for that type of application, or >is the application usually tied to that DE? > > >More generally, what I'm try to get at is: Of the things you get with >a particular desktop environment (i.e., of the packages installed by >installing a Gnome, KDE, etc., virtual package), which work only with >that DE, and which work with other DE's you might switch to (or also >run)?
Usually, you can use any of the ‘obvious’ applications with any DE you like. With ‘obvious’ I mean applications usually started by the user, such as an audio player, a CD writing program, web browsers and even a file manager (I use Nautilus (originally Gnome) with XFCE). You can also mostly use any ‘more abstract’ application, such as window managers, for example, I’ve used xfwm for some time together with Gnome. Normally, you should be able to use any application you like with any DE you like, however, there are problems with special services started by only that DE: KDE comes to mind, which usually starts a few services and KDE applications (for me, mostly Kolourpaint) sometimes take a while to recognise that no such service will answer their calls. Obviously, some ‘DE’ also don’t provide stuff you normally expect from a DE. Take an application that resides solely in your notification area together with a DE that doesn’t provide such a notification area (because there’s no panel, because the ‘DE’ only consists of a window manager…). To conclude, you can probably run every application you can think of as a proper application in any DE you want. There might be drawbacks, such as unanswered calls to daemons usually running in the background & non-native graphical engines (Qt in GTK and vice versa). Best regards & HTH, Claudius -- Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer Please use GPG: ECB0C2C7 4A4C4046 446ADF86 C08112E5 D72CDBA4 http://chubig.net/ http://nightfall.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111115195827.7cee5...@ares.home.chubig.net