I have opensuse 11.4 with gnome and kde, being kde the default wm. I have noticed that the interface of software management in yast in gnome is different from that in kde. There are several differences in interface and behavior but the most noticeable are the ones bellow.
In gnome, in the bottom left corner appears a list of the number of all available, not installed, installed and upgradable applications. This is very practical because when I want to update applications all I need to do is to click on list of upgradable apps and all of them appear filtered on the right side allowing me to choose wich to upgrade. In kde no matter what view mode I choose that list never appears and this becomes very complicated since kpackagekit is very, very slow to build the list of apps to update.
Furthermore, in gnome when I choose packages to install bellow the lists appears a link to view changes. Clicking there displays a list of all apps that are to be installed, the size of disk space that will be used and the size of files to download. On the other hand in kde all I can do is to click accept and everything starts to be installed without advice.
Since I have a slow internet connection it takes much time to wait to kpackagekit to load the list of softwares. And I need to know the size of a download before engaging in it, because it may delay very much depending on its size.
Currently I use kde as default and do everything in it almost all the time, but when I have to do some install I stop every activity in kde logout and login in gnome to do it. Sometimes it’s boring but I have lived with this. However I have tried to get used to kde for all my activities because in next versions probably gnome will come with many changes. Indeed, since I like traditional menu and panel config I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate gnome shell and don’t know for how long gnome 2 will exist and be supported.
So is there a way to launch yast software management in kde but with gnome interface or at last with the functions of gnome interface?
Hello fernando_a_martin,
There is, just uninstall yast2-qt and install yast2-gtk.
This will not only change the toolkit for Software Management but for whole YaST.
There’s probably a way to only run Software Management in gtk style but I’ve got no idea how.
Why don’t you try xfce or lxde?
Good luck!
fernando a martin wrote:
> So is there a way to launch yast software management in kde but with
> gnome interface or at last with the functions of gnome interface?
Yep there is 
Goto yast > System > /etc/sysconfig-editor > Yast2 > WANTED_GUI and select
gtk in the dropdownmenu.
That’s it.
…–
Chris Maaskant
Thanks.
I tried the last suggestion and it worked!
As for the question: “Why don’t you try xfce or lxde?”
They both are not as configurable and full of resources as gnome and kde. So if I have to change gnome for something else it’s better to choose kde. In the kde version that came with opensuse 11.3 I had some problems, as for example kde native apps were always launched full-screen. It seemed to have some minor bugs too. But the current version of kde is much better and more stable and the next one the is coming promises to be better yet. So I use kde and recommend it. Indeed I’m already completely used to it.