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

211–220 of 254 posts

Re: Xfce is great

#211

Post by dangus »

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.

The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something else. You can even install Gnome and KDE at the same time and switch between if that's really your thing.

Gnome doesn't limit you to installing applications that are in Gnome's own design system. You say "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" but that's not really how it works on Linux. The desktop environment is just the desktop environment, it's essentially separate from everything else.

When we are talking about "Gnome apps" we are really only talking about ~30 core apps that are included with the OS. Many/most/all of them you could even uninstall entirely and replace with something else.

Gnome choosing to have a small settings pane is a deliberate choice to keep things simple for their desktop environment's intended audience, but it is not a deliberate choice to limit functionality or freedom (installing apps from third parties, changing your browser engine, compiling code on your own system, etc).

Very much unlike iPadOS.

Re: Xfce is great

#212

Post by dangus »

GrowingSideways wrote: post #206
dangus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At this point I am almost certain that you (a new user) are just here to troll and ragebait.

No, I don’t expect users to manually modify the OS, I expect expect most users to leave it alone and learn its conventions.

Sure buddy, the most popular kernel of all time is "unusable." I wonder if 3.9 billion Android users and the entire Fortune 500's data centers know that their platform is "unusable?"

Re: Xfce is great

#213

Post by timonoko »

arximboldi wrote: post #139
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.

Neat! Does someone know a way to implement this in hyprland?

Nobody knows. I wanted preset zoom for watching widescreen movies on laptop. But xev does show anything at alt-scroll.

Re: Xfce is great

#214

Post by pkb »

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.

I use XFCE since 2000. It run great on 8 MiB of RAM on a diskless 486, with hard drive mounted over Ethernet. It is my robust daily driver.

For dark mode, try: - in 'Appearance': set Adwaita (dark), - in 'Window Manager': set 'Default', - in 'Panel': set dark mode.

This works in Debian 12 (running XFCE 4.18) and looks beautiful. Easy on the eyes, readable, comfortable.

For other themes look at xfce-look.org. You install these by decompressing tarballs into ~/.themes/$(theme_name) folder and then selecting these in settings manager.

Re: Xfce is great

#215

Post by cosmic_cheese »

dangus wrote: post #211
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something e…

Even if that’s true, the stock GNOME apps and third party GTK3/4 apps (which tend to follow GNOME design philosophy) work more smoothly under GNOME than those built with Qt or other frameworks, and so deviating makes for a materially worse experience.

And yes you can switch between multiple installed DEs and I have done so in the past, but that makes for a messy experience with many redundant apps that the user must clean up themselves. It’s a lot nicer to have just one installed.

Re: Xfce is great

#216

Post by ewzimm »

klondike_klive wrote: post #208
faustlast wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The main tiling window manager using Wayland is Sway, although personally I like the simplicity of DWM. You can easily edit the configuration and compile it yourself.

One of the things I love about XFCE is its modularity. It's literally just a collection of programs that work independently, so while I use DWM, if I need a panel, I just type "panel" into dmenu, and XFCE panel runs right on top of it with no problems, aligning perfectly over the DWM top bar.

If you want to try a more complete DE, I'd recommend COSMIC. It's fresh and fast and very customizable.

Re: Xfce is great

#217

Post by prmoustache »

laxis96 wrote: post #166
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…

I'm genuinely wondering why everybody hates modern GNOME. I have long been running Linux on headless systems but Windows on my daily, and only recently switched to dailying a Linux desktop. I started with Kubuntu LTS, it was easy to switch from Windows (shortcuts, UX) but it felt too "complicated" and distracting, not very good looking OOTB and had some graphical glitches here and there (w/ nvidia). Now I'm on Fedora…

I think it wouldn't be the default on many distros if everybody hated it.

I think we face the prism of the internet. Since it is the default on so many distros, almost everyonr has been faced to it at some point and those who don't like it are very vocal about it. Those who have been presented Gnome 3 as their first Linux Desktop and have been liking it have had no reason to try out other desktops and will be less vocal against them.

Re: Xfce is great

#218

Post by shepherdjerred »

rauli_ wrote: post #90

Xfce is way too minimal to be great. An great DE must be written mostly in JavaScript and hoard gigabytes of memory in order to render a single window.

I wish there was a Chrome extension to filter out snarky meme comments like these.

I just don’t see the point in posting something like this aside from baiting an argument. There’s nothing about JS or Electron in this article.

Re: Xfce is great

#219

Post by prmoustache »

fooker wrote: post #4

Also try LXDE and LXQT if you would like a 'lighter KDE' vibe instead of the 'lighter gnome 2' vibe of XFCE.

If I want something light, I tend to gravitate towards fluxbox, icewm, i3/sway, windowmaker or twm depending ony mood and the paradigm I am looking for.

There are many other options though.

Re: Xfce is great

#220

Post by hulitu »

kristopolous wrote: post #165
beAbU wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sourceforge gives me the heeby-jeebys though.

I have no idea why they use that either. It was legitimately great 25 years ago but it's just felt like an SEO farm for at least 15 years. (25 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20010301045035/https://sourcefor... ) Once you get down into it, it's fine. https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/ I mean ok, it's fine.

> It was legitimately great 25 years ago but it's just felt like an SEO farm for at least 15 years.

You should see github. /s

Post reply on HN