"Dan B."<danb@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