Made the Switch to XFCE4

Message

asv · Post by **asv** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 6:31 pm

I tried XFCE4 for the first time this week and it is now my window manager of choice. As a long time kde user (4+ years but using a lot of gtk aps), I'm impressed with the combination of speed, features, and eyecandy XFCE has to offer. I've tried a lot of the lightweight wm's out there but it seems to me that XFCE has the perfect balance between speed and eyecandy.

One thing that the XFCE folks need to do is get the word out. A lot of people, including me before last week, are unaware of what XFCE has to offer. If you haven't tried XFCE yet:

Code: Select all

emerge xfce4

and take a look at XFCE.

DefconAlpha · Post by **DefconAlpha** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 7:09 pm

I am right there with you man :)

Was a hardcore GNOME user until the horrid 2.4 release. Now i have XFCE4 and i don't see myself going back.

dgt84 · Post by **dgt84** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 8:45 pm

Strange, I'm running Gnome 2.4 right now and I love it! I also have XFCE4 emerged, and it's great too! I'll use pretty much anything other than KDE, though I may have to try 3.2 when it comes out... (I doubt I will change from being a Gnome/XFCE user though...)
Anyway, XFCE really kicks ass. Nice piece of work, and many thanks to its authors.

Zeitgeist · Post by **Zeitgeist** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 8:58 pm

How was GNOME 2.4 a "horrid release?" It is nothing but better than 2.2, that statement makes absolutely no sense at all

slimsam1 · Post by **slimsam1** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:04 pm

I've been using XFCE4 for about 2 months now.

It's sweet. Only thing is, I wish I could figure out how to make custom key bindings...

Anyway, I miss the swallowed app thing in gnome 1.x... when it wasn't there in 2.x, I cried. Like a baby.

It was really cool because I put my buddy list in it, and could see who signed on by moving the mouse over to the side of the screen.

But I digress.

Xfce4 is great.

ebrostig · Post by **ebrostig** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:26 pm

Zeitgeist wrote:How was GNOME 2.4 a "horrid release?" It is nothing but better than 2.2, that statement makes absolutely no sense at all

And what if 2.2 was an even more horrible release? 2.4 may be better, but it can still be a horrid release.

Erik

heavyt · Post by **heavyt** » Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:44 pm

I am testing XFce4 now and it seem to be a perfect fit between Gnome 2.4 and KDE. Small, fast, some nice eye candy (but not too much), and somewhat easy to configure. 3 1/4 stars out of 4! Keep up the good work Xfce.

shm · Post by **shm** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 12:34 am

Zeitgeist wrote:How was GNOME 2.4 a "horrid release?" It is nothing but better than 2.2, that statement makes absolutely no sense at all

gnome 1.4>gnome 2.4>gnome 2.2>gnome 2.0

I'd have to say that gnome 2.0-2.4 can be catagorized as "horrid". It's become increasing less horrid however. That doesn't mean it still isn't.

xfce4 is pretty solid release however. It's ___worlds___ better than xfce3. The first time I ran it, I was expecting another CDE-like environment. What I got was something completely different. On my old computer (p3-orig 500), I even made the switch from blackbox to xfce4 (still running redhat 7.1.. gonna have to switch it to gentoo soon)

regeya · Post by **regeya** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 2:24 am

shm wrote: I'd have to say that gnome 2.0-2.4 can be catagorized as "horrid". It's become increasing less horrid however. That doesn't mean it still isn't.

I have to agree, to a certain extent. I like the newer incarnations of Nautilus, and some of the more full-featured userapps, but overall it feels unfinished. KDE is great but sometimes when you want to open a can, you want a canopener instead of a Swiss Army knife.

I first tried XFCE when the 'XF' still stood for XForms.

It's changed a lot! I just installed XFCE4 yesterday, and I'm impressed! As other people have said, it's got just enough features. I'd like to see the long-promised ROX integration happen, myself, but things look great without it!

Zeitgeist · Post by **Zeitgeist** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 3:00 am

shm wrote:
gnome 1.4>gnome 2.4>gnome 2.2>gnome 2.0

I'd have to say that gnome 2.0-2.4 can be catagorized as "horrid". It's become increasing less horrid however. That doesn't mean it still isn't.

Why?

Zephaniah · Post by **Zephaniah** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 6:21 am

slimsam1 wrote:Only thing is, I wish I could figure out how to make custom key bindings...

You probably want to change the XFce4 keybindings (not sure how), but there is a program called xbindkeys that can bind shell commands to a key.
emerge -p xbindkeys
and here's the webpage

BlueEar · Post by **BlueEar** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 7:04 am

OK, so I tried XFce and I like it. But I have two, hopefully trivial questions: is there something equivallent to .gnomerc, where I can place commands that are run every time I start Xfce? And where can I find a documentation on how to make my CUPS printer visible to Xfce. Pointers, links and references are greatly appreciated!

amne · Post by **amne** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 8:54 am

i just got a notebook with a pentium mmx 233 and 128 mb edo ram and tried xfce4. performance is great, about 80 mb of memory are in use when X + xfce4 is running. i really didn't expect things to work that great.

Evangelion · Post by **Evangelion** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 9:07 am

I run Xcfe on my laptop (300MHz P2, 128MB RAM) and it works quite nicely

.

heavyt · Post by **heavyt** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 4:39 pm

BlueEar wrote:OK, so I tried XFce and I like it. But I have two, hopefully trivial questions: is there something equivallent to .gnomerc, where I can place commands that are run every time I start Xfce? And where can I find a documentation on how to make my CUPS printer visible to Xfce. Pointers, links and references are greatly appreciated!

You may find ans in the Xfce4 manual. If the manual fails to open because you do not have mozilla, go in the script and put your browser name in or go to http://members.home.nl/xfce4/documentation/

Zephaniah · Post by **Zephaniah** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 8:14 pm

heavyt wrote:If the manual fails to open because you do not have mozilla, go in the script and put your browser name in

or set default browser for XFce. I put

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export BROWSER="MozillaFirebird"

in my .bashrc

Change it to your favourite browser.

noff · Post by **noff** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 10:09 pm

BlueEar wrote:OK, so I tried XFce and I like it. But I have two, hopefully trivial questions: is there something equivallent to .gnomerc, where I can place commands that are run every time I start Xfce?

you add scripts (probaby just links work) to ~/Desktop/Autostart. Which is annoying but it does work. I would rather it be a folder in .xfce4

And where can I find a documentation on how to make my CUPS printer visible to Xfce. Pointers, links and references are greatly appreciated!

I don't use xfprint, but my printer is visible through cups to all my apps.

I run a gnome/xfce4 hybrid. I hate xffm and I need a tabbing terminal. So I run nautilus and gnome-terminal. It works fine. I also keep gnome around. One issue though is nautilus by itself doesn't seem configured, when you install gnome it tends to configure it self (mimitypes and whatnot)

shm · Post by **shm** » Fri Oct 31, 2003 10:23 pm

noff wrote: you add scripts (probaby just links work) to ~/Desktop/Autostart. Which is annoying but it does work. I would rather it be a folder in .xfce4

The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart

asv · Post by **asv** » Sat Nov 01, 2003 9:13 pm

shm wrote:
noff wrote: you add scripts (probaby just links work) to ~/Desktop/Autostart. Which is annoying but it does work. I would rather it be a folder in .xfce4
The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart

The problem with this is that it dosn't work if you load XFCE from GDM.

BlueEar · Post by **BlueEar** » Sat Nov 01, 2003 9:14 pm

shm wrote: The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart

Without getting into the "one true way" discussion

thanks for the tip. It worked. I needed to run a script that sets up my Logitech MX700 with imwheel. The printer ... well, that's a different matter. I could not find anything helpful in the manual and even though lp FILE works from the command line, instructing Xfce4 that my printer is lp results in ... nothing ... ah, well, I'll dig some more.

noff · Post by **noff** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 1:20 am

asv wrote:
shm wrote:
noff wrote: you add scripts (probaby just links work) to ~/Desktop/Autostart. Which is annoying but it does work. I would rather it be a folder in .xfce4
The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart
The problem with this is that it dosn't work if you load XFCE from GDM.

That is odd, because /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions/XFce4 just calls startxfce4 which in turn is what runs the startup scripts.

zenz · Post by **zenz** » Sun Nov 02, 2003 5:53 am

It's sweet. Only thing is, I wish I could figure out how to make custom key bindings...

Took me a while to figure out too:)
The file to edit is /usr/share/xfwm4/themes/default.keys/keythemerc
OR
/usr/share/xfwm4/themes/custom.keys/keythemerc

If you use the custom.keys, make sure u tell xfce4 to use it in the settings. I usulaly just edit the default.keys to save me the trouble. Make sure you make a backup copy of the original though... The wm doesn't load properly if u make a mistake in the file.

Good luck.

paul138 · Post by **paul138** » Tue Nov 04, 2003 2:45 pm

You know what's funny?

The biggest reason I've been using XFCE4 is that I can swicth desktops with my mouse wheel and have GTK2 themes at the same time

raylpc · Post by **raylpc** » Tue Nov 04, 2003 3:44 pm

asv wrote:
shm wrote:
noff wrote: you add scripts (probaby just links work) to ~/Desktop/Autostart. Which is annoying but it does work. I would rather it be a folder in .xfce4
The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart
The problem with this is that it dosn't work if you load XFCE from GDM.

It works for me. Sometimes, the symbolic link doesn't work, then you have to put it into a shell script.

crowbar · Post by **crowbar** » Tue Nov 04, 2003 4:04 pm

BlueEar wrote:
shm wrote: The freedesktop.org way (the one true way) is ~/Desktop/Autostart
Without getting into the "one true way" discussion thanks for the tip. It worked. I needed to run a script that sets up my Logitech MX700 with imwheel. The printer ... well, that's a different matter. I could not find anything helpful in the manual and even though lp FILE works from the command line, instructing Xfce4 that my printer is lp results in ... nothing ... ah, well, I'll dig some more.

If you use xfrpint, you just have to put in the CUPS name for the printer, the xfprint will automtically add the lp for you (almost too simple isn't it?)

Made the Switch to XFCE4

Made the Switch to XFCE4

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