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I am installing an Ubuntu VM and wanted a good integrated development environment for C/C++. A simple Google search pointed me at this question that recommends Eclipse, KDevelop, and others.

On the second answer, the author said "if you're fine with downloading KDE libraries...".

Why would I not be fine downloading KDE libraries? I guess I don't have enough of the context to understand, and a simple Google search didn't reveal anything that would dissuade me from downloading KDevelop.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

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    this question has been around for a while. consider accepting an answer (or if you don't find the answers to be satisfactory, tell us why). Commented Jun 15, 2014 at 1:39

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There are a number of reasons you might want to avoid this. Some are reasonable, some are not.

The first is disk space: this is the most basic. If an app depends on just Qt, that's not too bad (although Qt is still rather large). If an app depends on part of KDE, however, you are likely to essentially pull in all of the KDE library stack, which will probably total several gigabytes of storage (I'm not sure as I've never done this due to the reasons I'm listing now). This is because the layers that make up desktop environment stacks tend to be interdependent, and the higher levels of the stack will pull in the lower levels. Programmers are unlikely to use just the lower levels of the stack.

The second reason is integration. If you're running something from the GNOME family, like GNOME Shell, Cinammon, or MATE, a KDE app isn't likely to integrate well into your environment. This is because the app expects the KDE version of things like notifications or the system tray to be there, instead of the GNOME version, and can't deal with the difference. Therefore, you may experience ugly UIs or the fact that certain niceties are gone.

The final reason is the most religious and unreasonable: purity. Some people feel that if you have GNOME and KDE libraries simultaneously installed, you have destroyed the "purity" of your GNOME system and the OS has now been "dirtied" with the KDE libraries. This feeling has no technical basis, but a lot of people do feel like that (including me, I must admit) and will therefore avoid pulling KDE libraries in as dependencies (or, conversely, avoid pulling in GNOME libraries into their KDE systems).

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    In addition (see my answer), I've found that KDE settings can "dirty" the UI of other applications, not just the new KDE applications. Commented Jun 15, 2014 at 1:28
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One reason is that depending on how many KDE libraries are involved, you might have to download and install a large amount of additional packages. You can check which additional dependencies will be installed with apt-get -s install kdevelop. I'm not sure if it's possible to get the total size from apt-get.

Also, from personal experience, I used to run Unity, and attempted to install KDE libraries to fix digikam. Unfortunately, something in there conflicted with Unity themes, and my icons changed. However, since you are only using a VM, this is probably not a major problem.

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Super short answer it is 310 MB (from my system, which may have some of the general dependencies installed). It also may conflict with certain parts of your 'normal' operations day to day. You could also just install Kubuntu since it is a virtual machine anyway, and add whatever dependencies you need after.

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