I’m running XFCE on a geriatric laptop as it simply doesn’t have the muscle
for KDE.
Since knetwork manager is deprecated in favour of the networking plasmoid -
does anyone know if it’s possible to run the plasmoid/widget in xfce?
And how 
–
Alan
It maybe possible, but running those widgets means installing kde also.
The xfce desktop will not run the plasma widgets, the trick maybe is to
quit the xfce desktop and run plasma-desktop inside xfce.
To stop the xfdesktop the command is xfdesktop --quit
Then run the command plasma-desktop. You may also have to stop the xfce4-panel by doing this
because it will stay underneath the kde panel.
If the above work you can add plasma-desktop in the xfce-settings autostart to trigger it when you login to xfce.
Got to get back to add to my previous post.
When running plasma desktop inside xfce to disable the xfce4-panel and xfdesktop I think is:
xfdesktop --quit & xfce4-panel --quit & plasma-desktop
Does it have to be the plasmoid? You’re running XFCE because KDE is too heavy for the machine. AFAIK you would virtually start a KDE session to run plasma-desktop to run the networkmanager plasmoid.
If any networkmanager would do, use nm-applet. Again AFAIK XFCE pulls in some gnome stuff anyway.
At least for 11.4, the gnome networkmanager applet (nm-applet) runs just fine in XFCE. In my opinion, you are better off with that than with trying to use the KDE applet.
I agree with knurpht suggestion to use the nm-applet.
I just tried the plasma-desktop on xfce, it does work and faster than running inside kde. I also added some plasmoid and work too. The problem I got is the logout function doesn’t work and have to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to get out.
I tried this on my old Asus P4G8X Machine with 2GB RAM with xfce 4.8. The kde installed is minimal just to experiment on running plasma-desktop and the plasmoids.
Solve the logout problem I added the xfce4-session-logout in the plasma-desktop as a widget and now logout, etc works.
An alternative lightweight DE might be Openbox, with KDE integration the rpm downloads are less than 1MiB.
Here is how xfce4.8 look with plasma-desktop
September Screenshot Thread