brent 1) When are you saying goodbye to Plasma?

Never.

2) Am I the only one who finds the bicycles romantic?

Yes, but for the rest of us, it's very easy to get rid of them.

3) My biggest knock on all the XFCEs I've tried is there were far too many settings managers or setting never being unified but scattered like Mate. Still the case here?

Somewhat. But the main settings are available in a GUI settings manager.

4) with the workplace switcher it's a busy beaver of duplicate icons on the task bar. is there a way around that?

If you mean the worspace switcher plus the icon-only task manager, you could always simply remove the task manager. But that means you'd always need to go to the menu to fetch anything you want to run that's not in the workspace switcher

And that's not the end of the world, either. I definitely wouldn't get rid of the workspace switcher, because that's extremely useful. Those applications are all running on an uncluttered desktop of their own, without competing with any other application. That's huge. Neither the task manager or a dock provides that functionality.

I might be tempted to get rid of the task manager if I install a dock - those two provide the same functionality. But I'm not sure how well a dock would work with a bottom panel. Maybe that's not a problem. If it turns out to be one, I could always change the bottom panel to a top panel, like what I use with Plasma.

      WetGeek
      you've been great beta tester for this. I'm really looking forward to its official release. Its partition is already made🙂. Thanks for indulging my questions, even the rhetorical ones!

        That would be a deal breaker for me if you started a program and it made its own desktop
        If I understand right? Surely if it is one could change that.

        WetGeek I've been unable to find a setting to change the double-click to open an item to a single-click. I'm sure it must be in there somewhere, and I'll probably find it as I refine this configuration.

        I have used XFCE, and it's very configurable, almost as much as KDE Plasma. There is a way to do it:

        https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/thunar/preferences

        WetGeek Never.

        Solus XFCE sounds very good, and I feel tempted to give it a try. But not enough to give up KDE Plasma.

              joluveba There is a way to do it:

              Thanks. It didn't occur to me to look in Thunar preferences. I assumed it would be part of the DE. I'll see if I can find it in Solus' version of Xfce based on that.

              Yes, it was easy to find once I new where to look. Thanks again!

                Axios That was one the hardest things I wrangled with when I stopped working.
                Slowing downnnnnnnnnnn I still battle it from time to time. (I was one those hyper workers..lol)

                my day will come to not work (please dear god please) but as a fellow hyper I think in retirement I would probably build an ark, and then an entire truck, and not stop until I had my own servers that I could lease space from...then there's also days I could sit under that tree and drink beer like you mentioned🙂. We will se how it plays out.

                @WetGeek last question (maybe)--how do you like the ease of customization? just curious. and excited.

                    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.

                        WetGeek 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."

                        XFCE's tasklist does not support pinned launchers; it has no such concept.

                        WetGeek 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.

                        To do this, right-click on the panel, hover over Panel in the menu, and click Panel Preferences. In the General section of the Display tab (shown by default), uncheck the option for Lock Panel. Then, you can move it whereever you want by dragging the panel from the left and right edges.

                              EbonJaeger To do this, right-click on the panel, hover over Panel in the menu

                              Thanks. That's probabaly a lot easier to do than it sounds like. And it turns out that that's quite true. As with many other things related to Xfce, it actually does many things that other DEs do--just differently. And moving the bottom panel to the top of the UI made a LOT of difference for me in terms of usability.

                              I even think so far that it's added task-manager-like functionality to Xfce, although I've barely worked with it so far. When I launch an application from the menu, it creates a launcher in the dock. There's a right-click option to lock an icon to the dock, which is a help. If that will allow them to maintain a position in the dock, that will work for me.

                              And I was able to access this dock by going to the main menu and typing "dock" in the search field there. Instead of just finding it in the menu, it launched a dock, and I believe that may be the Xfce dock I've been looking for. I'm pretty sure I've managed to remove the other ones that I've tried.

                                  WetGeek I'm getting the feeling that XFCE is a true Mate replacement: low consumption, solid, no pyrotechnics, easy on the eyes, with it's own set of default applications, and works flawlessly. Again, speaking for myself: stoked.
                                  Thanks to all the Space Monkeys like you who beta test so I can get the best version when ISO comes!

                                  • ermo replied to this.

                                      WetGeek And moving the bottom panel to the top of the UI made a LOT of difference for me in terms of usability.
                                      EbonJaeger

                                      I think it would be very wise for Xfce to be distributed in this configuration instead of the pseudo-Budgie format that the RC1 .ISO creates. Most of the steps it takes to achieve this more useful state are not very intuitive to a new user of Xfce. I can personally attest to that.

                                          WetGeek And moving the bottom panel to the top of the UI made a LOT of difference for me in terms of usability.

                                          It may be obvious to others who have used Plank that it's indeed what's shown in that image, but I had not used it before. And I had installed three different dock-related packages that I had hoped might work with Xfce, Plank being one of those. I had also removed all three of those packages--again, including Plank--but I had not yet rebooted, so it remained in effect. I had even launched my 4.4 Xfce VM and noticed that the dock didn't look quite the same, but I attributed that as possibly a difference between 4.4 and 4.5.

                                          Today I did a backup and then an update, and when I restarted there was no longer a dock present. And typing dock into the search field on the main menu didn't launch it, as it had before. So on a hunch, I reinstalled Plank from the Solus repository, and that confirmed that it was indeeed what I'd been using. And it still had all my applications listed in it, in the order in which I had arranged them when I'd last used it.

                                          So I believe I now know how to make Solus Xfce usable: just install Plank. Two things that made me believe it was actually part of Xfce is that (1) it automatically loaded launchers representing applications that I'd started from the Xfce menu, and (2) it contains a launcher that turns the Xfce panel off and on. It seems remarkably integrated into the Xfce DE. For all I know it integrates that way to all DEs, but I've never used it with any others, so that's just a guess. To me, it just seemed like a part of Xfce.

                                              WetGeek xfce technically does not have a dock just a pinned app taskbar like budgie but with, I believe, more limitations (budgie has come a long way) but xfce had not in that dept. I base that on xfce auditions during the Solus Outage period of early this year.

                                              in xfce I fought with pinned stuff not sticking, including native apps, and flatpaks, appimages, etc. too much battling.

                                              budgie pinned app taskbar has come so far as much as dependability that I finally ditched plank. I think XFCE will need a dock like Plank. I am in complete agreement with you here.

                                              (From your picture I can attest that Solus is one of the rare distros that ships Plank with Plank preferences icon at the far left upon install. Most distros you have to terminal/plank --preferences),

                                              edit. xfce-4 panel is what the xfce taskbar is called I suddenly remembered. not a dock, not a taskbar, but a panel in the parlance of our times..)

                                                  brent edit. xfce-4 panel is what the xfce taskbar is called I suddenly remembered. not a dock, not a taskbar, but a panel in the parlance of our times..)

                                                  In XFCE-land, the xfce4-panel project contains a handful of what Budgie would call applets, and the tasklist is one of those; they're just bundled together in one project/package.

                                                      EbonJaeger project contains a handful of what Budgie would call applets, and the tasklist is one of those; they're just bundled together in one project/package.

                                                      That really surprises me. I've looked through the panel's Add New Items ... list a number of times, looking for a task list, and haven't seen one. What have I misunderstood? Is it an applet that's to be installed on the UI, but not on the panel?

                                                        Has anyone successfuly set the timezone and date for the clock in the panel yet? I'd like to know how to make it start displaying the correct time as per the time zone I'm in.

                                                        This image shows the properties for the date/time applet, and I've taken the VM out of full-screen mode so I can display both its panel and the one for its host machine, my Plasma laptop. As you can see, it's approximately 3:06 here in the Pacific Northwest, and that's the correct time. (I've been up for about an hour so far, doing laundry.) So both the VM and its host machine know what time it is--somewhere--and what the date is.

                                                        I've set the properties for the clock correctly. America/Los_Angeles is what I've always needed to use for the US Pacific time zone. And when I changed the properties for the date format and the time format, the new values were immediately accepted and the display in the panel reflected those changes.

                                                        But the time is obviously not correct for this time zone. It's showing the date and time somewhere else in the world, but I haven't actually done the math. I'm going to reboot the VM now, to see if that's what's needed to make the change I need to see. Hang on ...

                                                        No joy here. As you can see, it's now 8:18 PM somewhere, but certainly not here in the PNW. I've been unable to find a separate button or link to reset the time according to the properties that are set here.

                                                        If someone who has used Xfce elsewhere knows how to do this, I'd love to hear from you. I don't want to report a bug if it's just my infamiliarity with this DE that's the problem. But if it actually isn't working right, I need to do just that. Anyone?

                                                        brent WetGeek I'm getting the feeling that XFCE is a true Mate replacement: low consumption, solid, no pyrotechnics, easy on the eyes, with it's own set of default applications

                                                        This is indeed what we were going for; something that, for the most part, will feel familiar to existing MATE users, now that MATE has been -- and I use this term generously -- put on "life support" in Solus.

                                                            ermo MATE has been -- and I use this term generously -- put on "life support" in Solus

                                                            That's something I hadn't thought about before. I'll be updating my four Solus 4.5 VMs until they (hopefully) become release version 4.5 VMs, and can replace my existing 4.4 VMs. But I now realize that I'll need to retain my 4.4 Mate VM and continue updating it, so I can continue to use it to help resolve Mate issues in the forum.

                                                            I assume that there's an End of Life (EoL) date for Solus Mate, beyond which regular updates for that DE won't be provided anymore? Do we already know when that will be, or is support just continuing as usual for now until some date to be determined later?

                                                              The thing you guys are all looking for is called xfce4-docklike-plugin (Docklike Taskbar). It's a panel plugin that behaves like the dock/taskbar in any other desktop environment. It comes bundled in some user-friendly XFCE distros like Zorin Lite.

                                                              I think I've accomplished all I can for now with this VM. My new laptop will be here in a couple days, and I'll load Solus 4.5 Xfce on it to see whether any of the flaws I found with the VM are not present on hardware. For now, I'm going to devote some time working with the other 4.5 version DEs. I suspect there will be much less for me to do with those, as they're time-tested Solace editions instead of one that's completely new.

                                                              So, after configuring this VM to match my daily-driver laptop, I've been using it as a replacement for that laptop for several days now. I've read and answered emails. connected with my bank and paid the small balance on my VISA card, on Schwab I've reviewed my investments, I've connected to my clinic's portal (MyChart) to review my latest test results, ordered a grocery delivery from my nearby supermarket, watched TV on tv.google.com, chatted with a friend in Arizona using Telegram, played all three solitaire games, had lunch delivered by DoorDash, and much more that I've probably forgotten by now.

                                                              The point is that as this Xfce machine is configured, I could very easily use it for everything I need a laptop for. And after the first bugs that I documented, my relationship with Xfce has been very cordial. No, @Brent, I'm not ready to give up Plasma for Xfce, but I could, without much suffering at all. So until my laptop gets here and I install Xfce on it, this will probably be my last post on the subject.

                                                              I have one final request for the team: please consider creating the next .ISO file with a top panel and the plank, as I've used it here. It's been a pleasure to use for all these days. And maybe a background like the one I selected (see earlier picture) instead of the one that makes it look like Solus' GNOME edition. I think it would make a much better first impression.