Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xfce is great

rubenerd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 254 posts

Re: Xfce is great

#201

Post by zozbot234 »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #183
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

https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic (and other repositories under https://github.com/B00merang-Project/ ) includes a GTK+ 4 theme that works quite well with Chicago95.

Re: Xfce is great

#202

Post by masfoobar »

avhception wrote: post #188
masfoobar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah - I find it a little frustrating that the first thing to do after installing Gnome3 is to install Tweaks.

Re: Xfce is great

#203

Post by zozbot234 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #200
dangus wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iPad…

> 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.

This is a kind of "responsiveness" that should be implemented in GTK+ 4 and libadwaita (dynamically changing padding/size values within the theme depending on active input devices, with mouse supporting smaller sizes than touch-only input), not so much GNOME itself. Windows does it already, so it's a realistic possibility.

Re: Xfce is great

#204

Post by jmclnx »

I am a fvwm person, but if I had to use a desktop environment, xfce would be my first choice. I find it works great for me. Once it ends up on Wayland and I am forced to use Wayland, right now xfce will be my choice.

Only one thing I wish I could set, allow windows to cover the 'bar'. Yes, I can make the bar auto-hide, but I cannot have a portion of it covered by a window.

The same is true for GNOME, but KDE it is allowed. I expect this is a gtk thing.

Re: Xfce is great

#205

Post by hxorr »

Daunk wrote: post #94
enricotr wrote: post #93

If someone somehow enlarge the 1px handle for windows resizing by default (not default theme) I can say 'it's perfect'.

That is not XFCE itself, that is up to your theme. I'm on the Dracula theme and have about 16 pixels.

Are there any themes that allow changing window border size, title bar size, scrollbar width etc, like win 9x?

Re: Xfce is great

#206

Post by GrowingSideways »

dangus wrote: post #193
deathanatos wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It makes linux unusable

> Each user of each OS will be used to whatever that OS chooses to set up.

You cannot seriously expect each user to manually modify the os

Re: Xfce is great

#207

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

alextingle wrote: post #133
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…

Wayland just seems really unstable to me. I try it occasionally, but glitches, freezes or crashes quickly drive me back to X.

That's not wayland - you have some config or driver issue.

I've been using Wayland as my daily driver for a few years now. Any issues I have are from my window manager or apps and not wayland itself.

Re: Xfce is great

#208

Post by klondike_klive »

faustlast wrote: post #119
klondike_klive wrote: post #113

Xfce has long been the only DE that gets out of my way enough for me to actually be productive instead of excited by the possibility of different configurations.

Have you tried a tiling window manager? All I want is an empty black screen and an app launcher.

I admit I'm intrigued by the idea. Do you have any recommendations?

Re: Xfce is great

#209

Post by steanne »

_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.

yes. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/580-release-feedback-d...

Re: Xfce is great

#210

Post by steanne »

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.

it's a lot to go through, but this is a great resource

https://www.xfce-look.org/browse/

Post reply on HN