impure

I talk a lot about how I like to use some apps that are not "native" to the whatever desktop environment I happen to be using -- in particular, KDE's Dolphin file manager, which I use in every distro, regardless of the default DE. Ken Starks, the director of the HeliOS project over in Texas, was complaining in a blog post about "the way copy and move is handled in Nautilus," and had this to say:

Previously I preferred a "clean" install of Gnome, uncluttered with KDE dependencies and apps but recently, I've had a change of heart.  A change of heart necessitated by failures of an updated Brasero no longer recognizing my -RW DVDs and Dolphin's superior ability to handle my file manager needs.  to quote my good friend Carla:

Some Linux users prefer pure environments and have only pure GNOME, or pure KDE, or whatever their favorite is. Not me -- I want it all. I install whatever apps I jolly well feel like installing, and mix software repositories: different distros, official and unofficial, third party and different versions. It's a testament to how good Linux package management has become that I can do all this crazy stuff, and suffer dependency conflicts only once in a great while.

[That's Carla Schroder, another person who writes a lot about Linux. Check here for a short bio.]

A lot of people feel the same way Starks felt in the past, that's it's best to use one DE, and only its "native" apps -- "uncluttered" with dependencies that get brought in when you add an app from some other DE. Here, I haven't seen where mixing apps from different DEs causes any real problems, unless you're one of those who simply doesn't like, for example, how a KDE app looks in GNOME. I want the best tool for the job, and I couldn't care less about how it looks. And, "clutter?" That's a non-issue for me.

I see no reason to try to keep things "pure" by restricting myself to the applications provided by any one DE.