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Xfce is great

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Re: Xfce is great

#71

Post by mcv »

mmh0000 wrote: post #3

I have to agree, XFCE is great! It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs. And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card. Anyway, I LOVE XF…

Maybe I do need to check out xfce, then. I use kfe, and I'm often frustrated by the ui freezing, and the mouse cursor slows down a lot. Sometimes the delay between clicking and something happening is seconds. I'm baffled at how modern OSs can be so bad at ui (because Windows and Mac do it too.)

Re: Xfce is great

#73

Post by tapete1 »

GrowingSideways wrote: post #21
dangus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome? This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.

Gnome is still a windows knockoff yea? Can you use readline bindings in a textfield? Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application. > You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome? Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguisha…

> You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field.

We "PC" users have a dedicated key for that on our keyboard, it is called "home". We even have the opposite, a dedicated key called "end".

Re: Xfce is great

#74

Post by thisislife2 »

Beijinger wrote: post #54

"Xfce is lightweight, typically using ~400-600MB RAM at idle" ROTFL. Moksha, the lightweight desktop for Bodhi Linux, has very low RAM requirements, with a default install using under 100MB of RAM

True. And Fluxbox maybe uses less than 10 MB ram. Context is important - when compared to GNOME and KDE, XFCE does use less resources and is indeed snappier, with near feature parity.

Re: Xfce is great

#75

Post by kombine »

mcv wrote: post #71
mmh0000 wrote: post #3

I have to agree, XFCE is great! It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs. And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card. Anyway, I LOVE XF…

Maybe I do need to check out xfce, then. I use kfe, and I'm often frustrated by the ui freezing, and the mouse cursor slows down a lot. Sometimes the delay between clicking and something happening is seconds. I'm baffled at how modern OSs can be so bad at ui (because Windows and Mac do it too.)

This kind of stuff was happening to me maybe 2 years ago on Plasma 5 with X11 (I can't believe Plasma 6 is two years old now!). After I switched to Wayland during the Plasma 6 upgrade, the DE has been buttery smooth and most of the major bugs were gone.

Re: Xfce is great

#76

Post by _0ffh »

literallywho wrote: post #68
ntnsndr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points. I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best app…

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.

Re: Xfce is great

#77

Post by kombine »

nice_byte wrote: post #20

Yeah, xfce is as close to an ideal desktop experience on Linux as it gets. A competent desktop environment really doesn't need that much. Post-2010ish Gnome and kde are like some sort of sick joke. The fact that there are people who actually contribute their precious free time to these, feels to me profoundly sad.

GNOME is indeed annoying, but Plasma is a flagship Linux desktop experience, which has become self-evident with it's adoption by Valve for SteamOS as well as increasing number of newer distributions choosing it as default.

Re: Xfce is great

#78

Post by GrowingSideways »

usagisushi wrote: post #72
GrowingSideways wrote: post #8

[flagged]

Can I pin a specific window to the front? - macOS (Quartz): No, you'll need a third-party app. - Windows (dwm): No, you'll need PowerToys. - xfwm4: Yes, you can do it out-of-the-box.

This seems like a concern specific to people who want to use windows. I don't know what pin means.

Re: Xfce is great

#79

Post by mrmlz »

mcv wrote: post #67
BatteryMountain wrote: post #17

Basically whenever I use a machine that has an nvidia gpu, I always use xfce, as it just works, has least amount of issues & babysitting nvidia drivers & breakages. For everything else I use KDE. I have some old chromebooks (flashed with chromebox firmware) that uses xfce too, which works great! So kde & xfce is the only two desktops I use these days & have patience for.

Does the DE matter for your GPU? Can you give some examples of what xfce does better than kde when you've got Nvidia? Because I've got Nvidia and am using kde.

XFCE is x11 only which might alleviate some Wayland bugs with nvidia.

Re: Xfce is great

#80

Post by rcarmo »

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.

https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 is what most of my XFCE desktops have looked like for the past few years. I carry the theme around.
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