You are fortunate to have had that kind of perspective on personal computing. We got Apple computers in school some time around 84 or 85 but we barely got a chance to use them. I did use Apple computers at college in the early 90s but bought my own Windows for Workgroups 3.11 PC in 93 and for the next ten years knew very little other than what went on in the Windows world. Slackware was a complete unknown to me until the late 00s. Started playing with NetBSD around that time as well.

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I don't want to hijack this conversation, but my first WfW was in 1994, when the PC I bought especially for Linux had that already installed, so it then became dual boot:
Linux Slackware and Dos 6.x with WfW 3.11
But enough of this, back to our scheduled subject ;-)

I use Sawfish with heavily customized keyboard actions. I use KDE or XFCE only when testing for compatibility.

4.12.x with gtk2

got these few binaries at runtime:

xfwm4-4.12.5
xfdesktop-4.12.5
xfconf-4.12.1
xfce4-panel-4.12.2
thunar-1.6.18

That is my preference, just XDM and 5 binaries, in comparison to KDE's numerous runtime requirements.
4.14.x I haven't tried yet, but apparently gtk3 is lot more greedy for system resources.
So as long as 4.12.x compiles on Slackware, I'll probably use that one.

KDE5 + Slackware 15: it seems that way and that’s what I’m expecting. If Plasma did end up coming only with -current and not with 15, that might be enough to get me to install -current instead of stable.

Beauty is - as it has always been - in the eye of the beholder. I like KDE4, but I find Plasma much more attractive. You can have your blonde, the brunette always steals my eye. Same with my beers, porter or stout over pale ale any day. Red wine over white...

TKS

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I'd say both are right. KDE 4 out of the box definitely IMO looks better. And it's FAR easier to make look REALLY good. But KDE5, if you find the themes that work with color schemes, and create your color schemes, and do the right window decorations, has a higher ceiling, but it's FAR more configuration work to get there.

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That's for sure!
To my eye the kde5 defaults are even uglier than windows 10. The default wallpaper looks like someone barfed in the parking lot and the icons on the lower right end of the panel look like they were drawn by a five year old with a pencil.

Some of this can all be changed, of course, but it takes a great deal more work than changing kde4, and I have yet to see a kde5 theme that is as attractive as some that were once available for kde4.
As you said, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder."


Thanks for the information.
I edited Xfce to use kwin (kwin --replace) and like the results. It and its dependencies use about 500 megs of memory, 484.8 to be exact, but it does "improve" Xfce. I would imagine the amount of memory used with kwin from kde5 would be less.
I've searched for changes that can be made while using kwin, but only found the "right click on a title bar" option. Is there anything else?
Thanks, again.

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Yes. That's what I'm expecting too. I will run KDE5 when it lands in -current. Slackware64-current is rock solid right now; I'm running it on four laptops and three desktops.

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IMHO it seems this poll is for -current users only, since stable users don't have access to KDE5 or XFCE 4.14. So since I use stable I'm going to not vote. I'm still of the opinion, and hope, that Slackware continue to have both DE and simple WM's, since some of us are still keeping very old hardware running.

OTOH, back in 2018, when AlienBob was still issuing KDE5 for stable, I did load KTOWN KDE5 and found it stable to use and lighter RAM demands than XFCE 4.12. I wish that KDE5 5.18 LTS, from May 2019, was available and I'd probably run it rather than XFCE 4.12 or WindowMaker.

I'd also like to see XDM-Themes, from Sebastian, included in 15 rather than SDDM-18.1. SDDM requires AlienBob's XSession patch to /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsession included so WM's dbus-launch work properly.

HTH, Cheers

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First log in to KDE on 14.2 and make your changes to the window manager there. It's under Window Behaviour > Window Behaviour and also under Window Behaviour > Window Rules.

Appearance of the window manager is under Workspace Appearance > Window Decorations, and also under Application Appearance > Colours & Fonts

I think you will find most of the options there. When you log in to Xfce these changes will be honoured.

I particularly like the kwin options to centre windows and to snap windows to other windows, edges, etc. Xfwm has these but I think kwin does it better. The size of the grab handles for resizing windows can also be increased, which is useful if your dexterity with the mouse isn't the best.

In Plasma 5 the location of these options in System Settings is only very slightly different.

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Thank you for taking the time to reply.
There is no need to log out of Xfce. You can access the "Window Manager Settings" by right clicking on any application title bar and then left click on "more actions" and then "Window Manager Settings."

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I forgot to mention: under Desktop Effects > All Effects toggle Snap Helper on. I like smaller windows and dialogs to open centred, and if I move them I like to be able to snap them back to the centre of the screen. Xfwm allows you to open them centred but does not allow you to snap them to the centre of the screen once you move them.

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I do to. But between these 4, kde5, no doubt.

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Just installed kde5 and "kwin --replace" no longer works with Xfce-4.12 and, as usual, kde5 has scrambled my Xfce appearance settings.

What I see is that our fellow Slackers are quite bleeding edge. Or a bit conservative.

:-D

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