or, we could do plasnome, I guess.

By basd on Feb 8, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse, gnome

Following the system of hybridization I have mentioned to create kdomows, icekd34omows, and the like, I wondered what would happen if I ran plasma on top of a Gnome login.

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Works fine. The plasma widgets geometry is not saving correctly for this option, either. But, everything can be moved around to where I want it after logging in. But, the interesting thing is that everything works -- and if I select the KWin windows manager, then there is very little difference between running plasma in a KDE session and running it in a Gnome session.

However, I have noticed two specific differences. If I run Yast and the various Yast tools, I get the Gnome version. (Which I don't care for too much, BTW.)

But the second difference is a very useful one -- the Gnome interface to NetworkManager is active and not the KDE one. This means that I CAN LOG IN TO WIRELESS, which is a pretty important difference.

A useful thing I noticed -- I have not been able to get the Gnome alt F2 to bring up the launcher in these sessions. However, if I run "krunner", then I can access krunner via alt f2, which is very useful tool. It doesn't always work. It appears that I have to run KWin, and then it seems more reliable if I run krunner before I run plasma.

An advantage that I like is that I can make the plasma panels narrower, dropping the size of the icons, so I can fit a lot more icons in the panels for shortcuts to my most used programs and websites.

Some interesting observations:

If I switch to the Compiz windows manager, I the plasma panels suddenly have their official blue tint. But, as mentioned before, I can't seem to get any window frames in Compiz at the moment.

Switching to Metacity as the windows manager, I get the blue -- but the panels suddenly get way too big (and stay that way when I switch back to KWin).

Well, actually sometimes I get the blue tint running in KWin. There are a lot of plasma indiocyncracies, same as running in a KDE session itself.

An oddity I've noticed for some time with Superkaramba -- Aero Monitor has neat buttons for popping up various information about the computer, etc. But they don't work. (Perhaps they work in KDE 3.5, I've never checked. However, I do know they used to work for me.) But, on one occasion I crashed the session manager or something, leaving virtually nothing running but superkaramba -- and then the buttons worked.