Why does gthumb work on my Xfce desktop?

Support Software & Applications
1

gthumb is said to be “Image browser and viewer for the GNOME Desktop”: gthumb

Also I’ve found posts (not here on Manjaro forum) by those who could not get it to work on their Xfce desktop.

But it works fine on my Xfce Manjaro.

Questions:

  1. Why should it? (That is, on which factors might gthumb’s working or not working on Xfce depend?)
  2. Am I perhaps storing up trouble for later?

Here’s the terminal output from my install. (I used sudo pacman -S because I knew my system was current.)

[luna@jar ~]$ sudo pacman -S gthumb
[sudo] password for luna: 
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (5) clutter-1.26.4-2  clutter-gtk-1.8.4-3  cogl-1.22.8-2
             gst-plugin-gtk-1.22.5-1  gthumb-3.12.2-7

Total Download Size:    5.66 MiB
Total Installed Size:  34.73 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
:: Retrieving packages...
 gthumb-3.12.2-7-...     2.9 MiB  2.51 MiB/s 00:01 [######################] 100%
 clutter-1.26.4-2...  1923.7 KiB  3.71 MiB/s 00:01 [######################] 100%
 cogl-1.22.8-2-x86_64  829.9 KiB  2.40 MiB/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
 clutter-gtk-1.8....    48.9 KiB   457 KiB/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
 gst-plugin-gtk-1...    36.3 KiB   423 KiB/s 00:00 [######################] 100%
 Total (5/5)             5.7 MiB  2.16 MiB/s 00:03 [######################] 100%
(5/5) checking keys in keyring                     [######################] 100%
(5/5) checking package integrity                   [######################] 100%
(5/5) loading package files                        [######################] 100%
(5/5) checking for file conflicts                  [######################] 100%
(5/5) checking available disk space                [######################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/5) installing cogl                              [######################] 100%
(2/5) installing clutter                           [######################] 100%
(3/5) installing clutter-gtk                       [######################] 100%
(4/5) installing gst-plugin-gtk                    [######################] 100%
(5/5) installing gthumb                            [######################] 100%
Optional dependencies for gthumb
    brasero: burn discs
    exiv2: metadata support [installed]
    liboauth: web albums
    libraw: read RAW files [installed]
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/4) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/4) Compiling GSettings XML schema files...
(3/4) Updating icon theme caches...
(4/4) Updating the desktop file MIME type cache...
[luna@jar ~]$
2

Why do you think it should/would not work? It is the first time i see someone ask why something that is supposed to work works…

3

Maybe you didn’t read my post. Go back to the first two paragraphs.

After that, if you need more explanation, I am willing.

4

Of course it works. It is a normal GTK program with some Gnome specific dependencies (libsoup). There is no reason why it would not work on XFCE. You need to ask the users that don’t get it to work what they did wrong.

5

The answer to the original question “why this did not work somewhere”: because somebody somewhere had some OS that was broken, not updated, missing some dependencies or having some conflicting packages or maybe stumbled on some rare bug.

6

That’s reassuring. Thanks.

If a package works equally well for all desktops (I am not assuming this is the case since only two of them came up expressly for discussion), then I would think the qualifier “for the GNOME desktop” is at least misleading and maybe downright wrong.

If this is unclear, just analogize from “tennis rackets for women” for rackets that work for anybody.

7

For all desktops might be a stretch. For a desktop mainly using the GTK toolkit would be a better fit. But in the end it does not really depend on the Desktop, and more on the additional libraries that can be installed on the system.

All programs develop by the Gnome Projekt are “for the GNOME desktop”. It is intended to be used with the Gnome desktop by its developer. If there is a problem with it on different environments a bug report might be closed since it is intended for Gnome. But this does not mean it does not work at all on different desktops.

8

Thank you for giving me an idea of the complexities that might be involved in making a package a good or bad fit for an environment and confirming my first suspicion that I (not knowing about them) had no reason to assume anything was supposed to work.

If ever I run into a mismatch between a package’s (expressly) named desktop and my own desktop I will be sure to ask again this valid question.

9

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.