On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 12:30 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
GNOME applications pull in most of the GNOME desktop as dependencies.
Properly developed KDE applications will pull in the KF5 libraries and
occasionally some Plasma libraries. That's just how it goes. It is
also unrealistic to expect GNOME applications to work fully "to spec"
on KDE because KDE does not provide all the D-Bus interfaces and
services that GNOME does. We can and do have quirks when applications
are transplanted from one desktop environment to another, if the
underlying frameworks don't handle this well. While most of the KDE
frameworks adapt well to a non-KDE environment, it's rare that GNOME
applications fully do, especially ones that depend on things like
gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-shell, or gnome-control-center. In the
case of gnome-sound-recorder, it'll be fine as it's quite simple. But
if you were using something like the GNOME screencast app, that would
fail in KDE. Note that I'm specifically saying "GNOME applications".
Plain GTK applications are generally fine on Plasma.

Neal, you're doing a great job in Fedora, but this made me somewhat angry. Because I *did* spend the time yesterday, installed KDE in a VM from scratch, and tested gnome-sound-recorder, audacity and kwave in it. And sounds like you haven't. Gnome-sound-recorder only pulls in gjs and libhand1, and that's *all*. It's the most minimal application I could find. I also tested its functionality, it worked without issues. I stand by my opinion that this is the best sound recorder to recommend. Your reaction is the tribalism I was talking about, negatively reacting to anything that has "GNOME" or "K" in the name.

Audacity is OK, but it's UI is quite old, it crashes every time I close it, and it pulls more dependencies (11 more packages in KDE). It's a decent fallback option, but I wouldn't recommend it as the first one.

KWave pulls a zillion packages on GNOME systems (over 50 packages) and it's UI is the worst of the three, at least from a beginner perspective.
 

If you want to endorse a cross-desktop tool for testing, I would
suggest Audacity. It's simple, powerful, and known to work on all
desktops. It also standardizes the test and minimizes the variables
for validation.

Sigh, this is just a testcase. We don't "endorse" it or place it anywhere visible. It's just a hint for anyone helping us test releases (which is our core QA team plus a handful more people from time to time; at most this will be read by 20 people during a testday) to be aware of a small and simple application to record sound, in case they don't know any.