I am using Gnome3 as my primary desktop environment for quite some time, keeping an eye on other desktops since I like always having a "way to escape from choices I hate".
So I collected some alternatives to Gnome softwares and I think that some softwares are really tailored for Gnome and not for some other desktop environments, thus I think that it would be worth it enabling some gnome, or Gnome specific, USE flag on them: evolution: this mail client is the standard on Gnome, a nice, desktop independent and lightweight alternative would be sylpheed, and there are many more of them. deja-dup: this backup utility should be the standard on the next releases of Gnome, I think it would be worth it to integrate with nautilus enabling the nautilus USE flags, releases from the 0.19 version also support the integration with the Gnome Control Center (I guess subsequent ebuilds will have the gnome USE flag), luckybackup is fairly desktop independent (even if it is QT4 based). totem: even if sushi makes it useless to change it USE flags, I guess it could be considered the default Gnome media player (as opposed to gnome-mplayer which is quite independent). evince: it would be very nice to have all the Gnome integration features for this document viewer, unfortunately there are little or no alternatives (aside from the very lightweight ones like epdfview and xpdf or the proprietary ones, like adobe-reader and foxitreader). I would love having the choice of a, let's say, evince-base package, without the Gnome integration, and a evince-gnome package, with all the nice integrations (gnome-keyring and nautilus USE flags on). -- Lorenzo Cogotti
