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2013-07-26

QT apps in GTK environment

There have been various problems with GTK3 - like every minor upstream GTK-update breaking something... which has created certain tendency to avoid using it (outside of Gnome-shell) as much as possible. In dev-level, latest news is LXDE porting to Qt (and merging with Razor-qt).
In user level it (avoiding broken GUI) boils down to picking and installing as much 'independent' apps as practically possible. By 'independent' here, I really mean 'everything not GTK3 dependent'.
So I decided to see if I can replace some (more) g-apps with Qt-apps. I picked a bunch and tested them on Debian Sid Openbox.
For Qt apps see: Here and here.

I already had Smplayer, Qbittorrent and Fbreader installed. All very nice apps - and which I have chosen for their merits, not for Qt. All are in Sids' repos.
So, I also obviously have some Q-deps already installed and next comes list of what I had to add:
qt4-qmake, qt4-linguist-tools, libqt4-dev-bin, libqt4-dev, qt4-qtconfig
The first one here makes config for 'make' (but more commonly used seems to be cmake), and the last one is an utility for configuring certain aspects of all installed Qt apps.

What happened, in no particular order:

# znotes (websource):
qmake -o Makefile znotes.pro
# make didn't finish, there was error in code. Fix:On unix we need unistd.h included in the qtlocalpeer.cpp, just below the time.h include in the #if defined (Q_OS_UNIX) include section.
make
make install

The thing is somewhat buggy but works. Not sure if it's worth to keep.

# qastools (repo). Alsa toolset and mixer, see also http://xwmw.org/qastools/: It looked kinda big and uglyish (but better, of course, than natural alsamixer). It also didn't detect my audio setup... and took twice more memory than xfce4-mixer: --purge.

# juffEd 0.81 (repo). Seems to be (Geany-like?) pro-text-editor. I mention it simply for creating confusion - I actually didn't bother to install it. :)

# qterminal+qtermwidget (websource), https://github.com/qterminal/
It has mightily confusing documentation. After an hour of playing around I managed to install it (widget comes first, then terminal) - and the bloody shit didn't find it's (existing!) library. Running ldconfig didn't help...
But then I had a brilliant idea - I went to Siductions' (Sid distro, has Razor-qt ver) repos and dowloaded some of their debs. Thanks, Siduction.
Install went in that order:
1. qtermwidget-data_0.4.0.2~siduction.
2. libqtermwidget0_0.4.0.2~siduction.2_amd64.deb
3. qterminal_0.4.0.2~siduction.5_amd64.deb
Transparency didn't work. Title-name is not configurable. Memory usage - twice more than xfce4-terminal (26:15 megs). Not sure if it's worth to keep.

# Two file managers, both debs from Siduction:
- andromeda. Wanted libqt4-opengl, then installed ok. It's not very much configurable. Somehow shows only mounted devices (and does not have mounting option?). Generally primitive.: --purge
- qtfm 5.9. Installed stright. Icons missing and replaced by ... colorful pieces of something? It's possible to define theme - but no effect. No devices list at all...: --purge

# taskbar (websource). Well, 'transaparent configurable taskbar'.
Do exactly what INSTALL says (surprising, no? Yes, it is.)
Transparency doesn't work. And what I mean - Comptons' transparency works, but apps' natural one does not (as with qterminal). It's kinda by-passable if using 'transparent' bitmap in 'options'. Icon name option doesn't work. The box columns doesn't work. The box resizes itself. Icon animation was unremovable: Delete, and if possible, delete several times.

# nomacs (Siduction deb). Picture thumbnailer and just a bit editor (rotate, resize, crop!). Needed libopencv-contrib2.3 and libraw9, then installed ok.
Thumbnail-ribbon is kinda silly and swimmy, otherways ok app. Memory usage is close to Gthumb... but Gthumb is a lot more advanced tool. So it looks like --purge.

# Screengrab (Siduction deb). Screenshooter, look here.
It installed stright, it works and I didn't see even bugs yet. Seems usable.

Conclusion: No, you can't replace all your GTK-apps with Qt-apps (unless going to KDE). I mean, you can, but then you end up with some pretty unusable stuff. And I am aware that using Siduction debs might have caused some problems - but I don't think that compiling from source would give very much different result (besides wasting more time).
It was very irritating project. I hope you suffered (too) when you read it.

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