Thu, 28 May 2015
GNOME-Only Applications
Once upon a time, there was a windowing system called X. There were lots of applications for X written using various widget toolkits. In order to make the window operations unified across the whole desktop, regardless of the widget toolkit used by a particular application, the special application, called "window manager" provided window title bars and borders. Applications could inform the window manager about their particular needs (for example, their minimum required window size, etc.) using an open protocol called ICCCM. Not anymore.
Nowadays, GNOME developers decided that the only way to use their system and their applications is to have the complete desktop including all running apps GNOME-based. Being able to run GNOME apps under other desktop environments and vice versa is sooo last century way of desktop computing. From now on, all GNOME applications inform the window manager using ICCCM, that their windows are not to be touched by the WM. These windows then do not have window borders for resizing, raising/lowering/etc., they have their own title bar and maximize/minimize/close buttons different to the rest of the desktop, etc.
OK, after ditching GNOME desktop environment when GNOME 3.0 came out, it is time to ditch also the GNOME applications, as they are clearly not intended to run under the standard desktop environment. So far I have replaced the following applications:
evincewithOkular- This means installing lots of KDE libraries, but on the other hand Okular
does not take
over the screen on startup (unfixed since at least 2008), it can zoom to the
arbitrary size (CLOSED WONTFIX, really?), when I run "
okular somefile.pdf" twice, I get two windows as expected, etc. file rollerwiththunar-archive-plugin- Not that I use the GUI file manager often, but still.
eogandgthumbwith (undecided yet)- I am still not sure about the replacement - so far I am testing
ristretto,geeqieand some others.
There is a nice list of recommended applications for XFCE, which are written in GTK, but positively GNOME-free. Which image viewer and PDF viewer do you use, my dear lazyweb?