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Xfce is great

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Re: Xfce is great

#181

Post by rabf »

_0ffh wrote: post #76
literallywho wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.

Yeah, I think it might be a driver thing (or driver interaction with XFCE code). After ~10 years of using XFCE, I recently for the first time encountered flickering, after an NVidia driver update. I disabled compositing and it went away. Still happy, but clearly something broke there. Pretty sure someone's trying to fix it, somewhere.

That was the Nvidia 580 driver, its a known issue. 575 dirver is working fine.

Re: Xfce is great

#182

Post by theandrewbailey »

rhubarbtse wrote: post #112
voidfunc wrote: post #25

Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.

How high? What kind of problems? I very recently upgraded from a dual fullhd to a dual 4k setup and I was genuinely surprised how little problems I had setting everything up to the high DPI displays. I am genuinely interested in hearing what pitfalls might still await me.

I've been running 2× 4k 27" monitors for about a year on Xfce. I set it to 144 ppi and nothing feels weird to me, though I run a custom theme.

Re: Xfce is great

#183

Post by theandrewbailey »

Reubend wrote: post #6

I love the idea of a minimal desktop environment, but I've never tried XFCE. Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? I find the screenshots on their homepage very intuitive but a bit ugly.

Not sure if you think Windows 95 is pretty, but I'm compelled to drop a link to this on every Xfce post: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Re: Xfce is great

#184

Post by rabf »

downsplat wrote: post #141

I've used Xfce exclusively since Gnome jumped the shark many years ago. It's fast, does the job nicely, and stays out of your way. I do hope they get stable on Wayland sometime soon, because X11 seems to have lost its momentum, and I would probably like to enable fractional scaling on my next laptop.

You do not need fractional scaling, just set the correct dpi in settings and use a high dpi theme.

Re: Xfce is great

#185

Post by UncleSlacky »

adrian_b wrote: post #163
liotier wrote: post #124

I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.

KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), far better than the contemporaneous Windows XP or Mac OS X, while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage (despite having waited to make the transition to KDE 4 until it was claimed that all its initial bugs had been solved; when I tried it there were no bug problems, only bad design choic…

There's still Trinity DE if you want an updated KDE 3.5:

https://trinitydesktop.org/

Re: Xfce is great

#186

Post by theandrewbailey »

liotier wrote: post #124

I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.

Xfce is my default go-to, but I recommend and use KDE for touchscreens, like for Surface tablets.

Re: Xfce is great

#187

Post by pamcake »

davidgerard wrote: post #129
liampulles wrote: post #108

I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time to time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again. I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after tryi…

they're actively working on Wayland and very much want it to work well there? https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap One problem is I think Xfce has no paid developers, it's all spare time.

Yeah, my worry has recently been the opposite: That at least from afar they seem onboard the same Wayland track as the other DEs just at a slower pace.

As long as Xorg is around I hope Xfce never deprecates X.

Re: Xfce is great

#188

Post by avhception »

masfoobar wrote: post #159
avhception wrote: post #103

When KDE 4 came out, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 came out in (checks notes) 2011, I switched to XFCE. And that was that. I have a minimal taskbar at the bottom of my screen, with a little tray and a little button for the whisker menu. But I usually launch that using hyper + space. It gets out of my way, it gets shit done, I love it. Let's hope that it will survive the Wayland transition.

I don't have as much hatred towards Gnome 3 like everyone else does. Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not defending it. I was a little heart broken as I really liked Gnome 2. However, I tried to be optimistic with their plans overall. (I think the early days on Gnome 3 featured something call Gnome Legacy to keep that Gnome 2-ish feel. I likely stayed on that for a while) I still use Gnome 3 today... but Xfce would…

I don't have "hatred" towards Gnome3. I use it for friends and families desktops, they seem to like it. I have also rolled out about ~20 Gnome3-based desktops for my employer.

That said, there are definitely areas were Gnome could be improved. Some of them are understandable and probably stem from a lack funding / devs. Others less so, like removing the options to scale / stretch / center the wallpaper w/o installing "Gnome tweaks".

Re: Xfce is great

#189

Post by timonoko »

thomas-mc-work wrote: post #158
timonoko wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I have "make-icon" to bragg about: convert -size 24x24 -gravity center -background yellow -fill black\ label:$1 ~/.local/share/icons/$1.png file=~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop echo [Desktop Entry] > $file echo Name=$1 >> $file echo Comment=noko-made >> $file echo Exec=$1 >> $file echo Terminal=false >> $file echo Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png >> $file echo Type=Application >> $file

What exactly do we see here?

Erh? Bash-reading disability?

make-icon ABCD:

1) Makes a small picture ABCD.png from the first letters of the string "ABCD".

2) Makes ABCD application icon to using the picture ABCD.png.

3) Moving youres pointing device on that icon and pressing appropriate button now executes ABCD.

"convert" is from Imagemagick of course.

Re: Xfce is great

#190

Post by pamcake »

timonoko wrote: post #122
timonoko wrote: post #120

I just discovered alt-scroll just by accident. Desktop Zoom (Xubuntu/Kubuntu): In Xfce (Xubuntu) and KDE (Kubuntu), Alt + Scroll is the default shortcut to zoom in and out of the entire desktop. This is an accessibility feature used to magnify specific parts of the screen.

Also I have "make-icon" to bragg about: convert -size 24x24 -gravity center -background yellow -fill black\ label:$1 ~/.local/share/icons/$1.png file=~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop echo [Desktop Entry] > $file echo Name=$1 >> $file echo Comment=noko-made >> $file echo Exec=$1 >> $file echo Terminal=false >> $file echo Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png >> $file echo Type=Application >> $file

    cat  "${file}"
      [Desktop Entry]
      Comment=Bash has heredocs.
    EOR
I think the reason they are confused is that this is entirely out of context.
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