brent -how do you like the ease of customization?
I set a goal to build four VMs for the four new versions of Solus (done) and configure them as daily drivers (mostly done, depending on DE) and use them as such for as long as I can in order to find what doesn't work and to log bug reports.
Of course, Xfce is the one I'm concentrating more on, because it's the newest DE for Solus, and the Solus version of Xfce differs so much from the usual presentation. It's as if Solus is doing its best to make it a Budgie twin. And there are lots of things that aren't working well--yet--but i know that they will before this new version of the new DE is made public.
In general, our Xfce seems very customizable, although perhaps not quite to the level of Plasma, or even Budgie. And in many ways it's more difficult to achieve that cutomization. Therer's no task list, for example. What looks like one in the pictures is just some icons that are moved to that end of the bottom panel. And there's no connection between those icons and any running applications. No way to "pin" them to the "task list." To get these icons there, one must go to the main menu, find the application, right-click on it, and select Add to Panel. Then the icon is added to the far right end of the bottom panel, from where it can be carefully moved to the left end, where a real "task manager" is usually found in other DEs.
So, AT THIS TIME, I can accomplish much of the configuration that I can with, say, Plasma, but it's harder to do, and doesn't provide all of the same functionality. I stress AT THIS TIME, because this is a first for Solus. I wasn't very impressed with the first Solus Plasma years ago, either. But for now, I can't find a way to move the Xfce bottom panel to the top, to keep it from conflicting with a dock. I can't get the Xfce VM to hibernate, despite having a swap partition that's 1 1/2 times the size of RAM, and so far, I can't get a dock or plank to work with it. Many of these things were not a problem with the Xfce VM I created from what started as a Budgie VM.
So, am I ready to stop using Plasma? Heh. But the Solus team has a history of working miracles, and I have no douubt that they'll be able to pull off a few of those with Xfce. And the more of us who help, the sooner they'll git 'er done. Testing is vitally important. It's sometimes boring, trying to reproduce an issue, and getting to "root cause," but before developers can solve a problem, the problem needs to be discovered. Every Solus user can help with that.
