Kde 4 - Plasma alternative

[Duncan]

Felipe Rodrigues Maia posted on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:47:40 -0700 as
excerpted:

> Is there some alternative for KDE 4 Desktop, instead of Plasma?

Weellll...

That depends on how you define "alternative", I think.  At present, 
there's no official released kde4 alternative to the plasma desktop, no.  
However, given kde's component nature, it's certainly possible to use 
something else instead.

One alternative that WILL be official for kde 4.4 (4.4.0 slated for 
February, you can of course now see part of it in the kde sources tree, 
tho whether it works at any random point you'd download the sources would 
be open to question, and 4.4 is still under active feature development), 
I believe, is the plasma-newspaper aka plasma-netbook (as compared to the 
current plasma-desktop) interface.  The UI is supposed to be much more 
suited to the smaller screen space of a netbook.  Google or check planet-
kde for more.

But again, the desktop is simply one component of KDE.  Like kwin, the 
kde window manager, or kmail or konqueror, the email and web browser 
components, it's possible to replace the plasma-desktop component with 
other apps with similar functionality.  It's certainly possible to run 
kde3's kicker and kdesktop as a replacement, for instance, as I did so 
here for awhile, tho of course that's a fairly resource intensive 
replacement.  But in general, anything that's prepared to supply an X 
root window should by at least minimal definition, be able to replace the 
desktop functionality, and anything with panels, etc, or even nothing at 
all, should be able to replace the plasma panel functionality.  One could 
certainly run the Gnome desktop (whatever it is, I don't run Gnome to 
know how that works) in place of plasma, if that's desired, for instance.

Of course, at some point it then becomes a question of whether you're 
actually running a kde environment with the desktop functionality 
replaced, or some other desktop, with mostly kde apps, perhaps including 
kwin as the window manager, perhaps not.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.