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Xfce is great

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Re: Xfce is great

#191

Post by dangus »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #41
dangus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m wildly confused at this claim. More like iPadOS, really??

Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.

To me, UI look and feel != philosophy. And having a similar looking UI != "very similar"

iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have.

Let’s not forget that most Windows PCs on the market are available with touchscreens and a lot of people do use them. The Windows PC market is full of 2-in-1 convertibles that do not exist in Apple’s hardware lineup. Gnome isn’t losing their mind by making their desktop environment friendly to them. Apple is one of the only laptop manufacturers that has avoided touch panels on laptops entirely, because they want to sell you two devices with heavily overlapping functionality.

Re: Xfce is great

#192

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

bro, new copypasta just dropped

Re: Xfce is great

#193

Post by dangus »

deathanatos wrote: post #49
dangus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am more confused than when we started, what exactly are you saying macOS is doing that nobody else is doing? > use readline bindings in a textfield I don’t even know what this means.

They mean pretty much like they say. readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line. bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically. macOS adopted some (but not all ) o…

Okay, I understand now.

And that's just a wildly nitpicky criticism by the person that brought this up.

To me, as long as the OS includes the functionality, the way it's presented to the user, how customizable it is, and what keys they use is generally irrelevant. Each user of each OS will be used to whatever that OS chooses to set up.

Re: Xfce is great

#194

Post by compass_copium »

noosphr wrote: post #109

Xfce is the definition of comfy computing. They have a visual language that's not changed for decades and just works. I prefer tiling window managers with no decorations, but whenever I have an app that doesn't play nice with xmonad I open an xfce x server and do my work there.

Also prefer a tiling wm, but xfce is great to keep installed for guest accounts on your PC

Re: Xfce is great

#195

Post by GrowingSideways »

cwillu wrote: post #58
GrowingSideways wrote: post #8

[flagged]

> far, far better thought-out ui That's hilarious. Remind me, which colour represent “maximize” again? And why are half of the apps I constantly use stuck in a group together such that I have to use a different key to switch between them? And where is the handle to resize a window, anyway? You only think osx is better designed because you're used to and therefore blind to the various papercuts that osx inflicts upon…

[dead]

Re: Xfce is great

#196

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #130

Xfce is what I settled on, when still using GNU/Linux desktops. I used a multitude of UNIX environments since 1994, starting with IBM X Windows terminals connected to DG/UX, and thanks to the way Unity got dropped, the way GNOME 3.0 went down, windowmaker no longer being actively developed, Xfce it was.

Windowmaker it's still developed.

Re: Xfce is great

#197

Post by pjmlp »

anthk wrote: post #196
pjmlp wrote: post #130

Xfce is what I settled on, when still using GNU/Linux desktops. I used a multitude of UNIX environments since 1994, starting with IBM X Windows terminals connected to DG/UX, and thanks to the way Unity got dropped, the way GNOME 3.0 went down, windowmaker no longer being actively developed, Xfce it was.

Windowmaker it's still developed.

From where I am standing it feels more like bug fixing than anything else, like it was back in the 2000's, when I used to see what were the new WINGs coming out, and play around with GNUStep integration.

Re: Xfce is great

#198

Post by loughnane »

ntnsndr wrote: post #31
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.

Remove all the xfce design elements you don't like. Ytou can even use a borderless theme, eg https://github.com/ushioichi/borderless-xfwm-theme I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard. XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.

This is precisely my point of view as well.

Re: Xfce is great

#200

Post by cosmic_cheese »

dangus wrote: post #191
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.

To me, UI look and feel != philosophy. And having a similar looking UI != "very similar" iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have. Let’s not forget…

It’s not just look and feel, it’s approach to various things, like how GNOME shares the iPadOS tendency to cut advanced features instead of putting them in a less prominent position. The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu. There are several aspects of out of the box customization that are more like iPadOS than macOS too, which is why the GNOME settings app has less than half the settings that the macOS settings app does.

If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.

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