I know the term "heavier" is relative to the capacities of each machine, but I am asking the question within the limits of that relativity, while considering a PC on which Xfce is more stable and more responsive than Plasma/KDE.
I remember a discussion on some forum about whether Xfce is still lighter than Plasma, and the argument that Xfce may start not feeling "lite" after a while, when people try to bring it closer to Plasma for instance, by installing Kwin, Dolphin or Okular, which come with a lot of KDE/Qt dependencies.
I have about 8 year experience with Linux and I know better than mixing desktop environments, despite so many saying that "we can" do that.
I had to move from Plasma to Xfce because the system became less responsive and with frequent little crashes (Kwin and panel mostly) and I am now using Xfce for almost an year. The desktop is absolutely stable and feeling as snappy as ever (and looking as good as any with the Vertex Dark and Green themes). But, for the purposes of this answer (about changing colors in pdf books in order to improve readability) I wanted to try Okular.
In Xfce, installing Okular with apt
would bring 100 new dependencies in a 19 MB download, taking 101 MB on disk :
The following NEW packages will be installed:
kinit kio kpackagetool5 libaccounts-glib0 libaccounts-qt5-1 libdbusmenu-qt5-2 libfam0 libkaccounts1 libkf5activities5
libkf5archive5 libkf5attica5 libkf5auth-data libkf5auth5 libkf5bookmarks-data libkf5bookmarks5 libkf5codecs-data
libkf5codecs5 libkf5completion-data libkf5completion5 libkf5config-data libkf5configcore5 libkf5configgui5
libkf5configwidgets-data libkf5configwidgets5 libkf5coreaddons-data libkf5coreaddons5 libkf5crash5 libkf5dbusaddons-data
libkf5dbusaddons5 libkf5declarative-data libkf5declarative5 libkf5doctools5 libkf5globalaccel-data libkf5globalaccel5
libkf5guiaddons5 libkf5i18n-data libkf5i18n5 libkf5iconthemes-data libkf5iconthemes5 libkf5itemviews-data libkf5itemviews5
libkf5jobwidgets-data libkf5jobwidgets5 libkf5js5 libkf5jsapi5 libkf5kexiv2-15.0.0 libkf5kiocore5 libkf5kiontlm5
libkf5kiowidgets5 libkf5notifications-data libkf5notifications5 libkf5package-data libkf5package5 libkf5parts-data
libkf5parts5 libkf5pty-data libkf5pty5 libkf5purpose-bin libkf5purpose5 libkf5quickaddons5 libkf5service-bin
libkf5service-data libkf5service5 libkf5solid5 libkf5solid5-data libkf5sonnet5-data libkf5sonnetcore5 libkf5sonnetui5
libkf5textwidgets-data libkf5textwidgets5 libkf5threadweaver5 libkf5wallet-bin libkf5wallet-data libkf5wallet5
libkf5widgetsaddons-data libkf5widgetsaddons5 libkf5windowsystem-data libkf5windowsystem5 libkf5xmlgui-bin libkf5xmlgui-data
libkf5xmlgui5 libkwalletbackend5-5 libmarkdown2 libokular5core8 libphonon4qt5-4 libpolkit-qt5-1-1 libpoppler-qt5-1
libqca-qt5-2 libqmobipocket2 libqt5script5 libqt5texttospeech5 libsignon-qt5-1 okular phonon4qt5 phonon4qt5-backend-vlc
qml-module-org-kde-kquickcontrolsaddons qml-module-qtquick-dialogs qml-module-qtquick-privatewidgets
qml-module-ubuntu-onlineaccounts qtdeclarative5-qtquick2-plugin
0 upgraded, 100 newly installed, 0 to remove and 9 not upgraded.
Need to get 19,0 MB of archives.
After this operation, 101 MB of additional disk space will be used.
How many of those dependencies could be qualified as KDE-specific and considered out-of-place/risky in Xfce?
Looking at ways of installing in a "sandboxed" manner — which, as far as I understand, is keeping Xfce separated from KDE dependencies:
Trying Flatpak: I see this message: 798,8 MB will be downloaded in total. 2,7 GB more disk space will be used
— enough to be taken aback. (Separate question: Why is flatpak so much bigger than snap (at least for Okular)?.)
I have installed from Snapcraft (sudo snap install okular
) but it stopped working after a short while. I have asked a different question on how to fix that.
(Also: installing in this way Qt apps in Xfce results in them not following the system theme and looking rather poorly.)
So, I'm thinking about installing Okular with apt, but I would like to know a little more about the impact of those 100+ dependencies.
sudo updatedb
every 15 minutes in cron to give my system something to do and while typing this all 8 CPU cores are running 2 to 3 %. Long gone are the days I was dying to get an IBM PC/AT so things ran faster. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Dec 17 '19 at 01:00