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.

6. Mint 14.1 Cinnamon + Mate

How Mate looks (as of February 2013)

Those two desktops co-existed almost two weeks. Record for me, of course. Partially it's explainable by my then-fixation with software. Means, I didn't make too many efforts to better my Linux (read: break it).

SOME OBSERVATIONS

One thing which makes a noob-user gawk is main menu hodge-podge after successfully adding another session. Means – new DE adds its menu-items to your existing menu. Not all of them – there are some rules – but quite a lot, and in this case there were bunch of same things (editor, calculator, terminal etc) but of slightly different version. Explainable by mixed Gnome 2 and 3 sources. Then I had Cinnamon-settings in Mate, and mateconf-editor in Cinnamon...

Made me quite angry, you know – I had carefully perused nicely available (not every distro provides that) menu-editor, had made some group-changes (shitty thing to do!), uninstalled apps, added apps... I had made a system, and now it was …$%$... very unruly.

Cinnamon and Mate both have editor for such kind of work. After you have hidden/shown/moved/deleted things in both sessions' menus – it stays like that. Except maybe couple of items which might have their own life and behave … differently despite of your wishes. But that's the free thinking of Linux.

I am not going to blab about how editors exactly work. The process is quite self-explaining. Try it. But try not to delete things only because you can – to get them back is not self-explaining.

Mate has panels to add! They are movable and re-sizeable. You can swap your Stuff between them. Or move this Stuff into different order. And you can add new Stuff. Right-click the panel, discover the menu and find out. It's possible to create quite funny mess! Just kidding. Or not...

Settings/Appearance. The place to visit, and fast – to show those devs that they do not know an iota about real design. Play around, get new themes, icons, and shit. They do not work all as they are supposed to – but that's a part of fun. Throw out what you don't like. Tweak others (if you can). Download even more themes, icons, stuff. In some point you will have problems – as said, not everything is 100% compatible, despite being there and free to take.

INFO. Took me some time to get the idea: There are two separate managers in Linux for making windows on your desktop. One makes window frames (windows manager), another creates inside-style of every window (desktop manager). So you can apply features from different theme sources – frames from one theme, insides from another – and of course, icons from third. I like it.

Customizing, tweaking:
I like darker wallpapers and darker panels – means some black text gets invisible. Changing themes makes some things better, but probably not all. Panel-clock text, for my theme choices, tended to remain black. Following is taken from Mints' web-tutorials, and it also works. So, proceed like that:

Simple text file (use default text editor) has to be created, name has to be .gtkrc-2.0 (with dot at the beginning too!), save it to ~home/username/ - means, to root of your real home directory.
Put following code into your new file.

"my-panel-clock" 
{ 
fg[NORMAL] = "#FFFFFF" 
font_name = "sans bold 11" 
} 
widget "*.clock-applet-button.*" style "my-panel-clock"

Save. After logout/login – clock text will be white. #FFFFFF means white and font_name is also place to test your hand.

Silly and annoying default time-formats.
Sequence %F %H:%M displays the time in the format 2012-10-13 15:17.

Problem is, Mate clock doesn't have field for adding this. To aid comes mateconf-editor. Open editor, navigate through tree to: /apps/panel/applets/applet_clock

and click on "format", change value to "custom" - then click on "custom_format" field and change it to abovementioned string.

Took me several tries because of moronic mistakes, but finally it definitely worked.

More interesting and educating reading concerning time-formats.