Too many gnomes. What should I do?

[Isaac]

So I keep finding solutions to problems by installing things that depend on Gnome to run.

I completely avoid KDE applications, since those are the heaviest of all.

I'm running XFCE4.8, but a large percentage of my applications are for gnome. I believe they're both rooted in something called GTK, so I think they might be similar.

My system seems to run fast, but I'm starting to wonder what the point of switching to Xubuntu was, when I'm basically installing Gnome anyway. Should I just go to Mint?

[vision]

If you really need specific apps, just use GTK. I know the Gnome window manager provides options to increase performance by turning off a lot of graphical features. It's like splitting the difference between KDE and LXDE. A stripped down Gnome is way lighter than KDE (and of course, way, way lighter than Win/MAC).

Check out this article benchmarking the top window managers:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... tals&num=1

Maybe that helps you make a decision?

[Jeff250]

GTK is just a widget toolkit library. Basically, it's a library for drawing and laying out menus, buttons, etc. in GUI's. It's part of the gnome project, but the xfce project doesn't develop its own widget toolkit library and uses libgtk as well. You shouldn't worry about gtk dependencies using xfce.

Keep in mind that window managers (e.g. metacity, kwin, xfwm) are not the same thing as desktop environments (gnome, kde, xfce). You can actually mix and match, say, kwin with the gnome desktop environment, if you want the hassle.

[vision]

That's good info Jeff.

[Isaac]

Thanks guys. I guess I'll stay with XFCE