XFCE install and Calmares Observations and Questions

brent Well underway.

When that's all the way installed, I'll have some suggestions for you. But it'll be tomorrow, probably, 'cause I'm about 15 minutes away from bed right now. Did you choose a swap partition and hibernate in Calamares? Those options made this the slickest Solus installer I've seen to date. I've totaly stopped preparing partitions in advance.

brent XFCE screenshot snaps and saves a pic way too big (2.6MB) for forum

You might be surprised. The pictures I've posted in the forum from my Xfce laptop are taken of a 1920x1080 HD screen, and not resized. I'm not sure how I figured out that I no longer needed to resize them, but I think it was probably by accident. I was probably busy with something else, and simply forgot to do it one time.

As promised, here are some suggestions you might like, but to be sure, they're only suggestions. I won't be a bit offended if you choose to have it your way. Burger King sure got that one right. But I'm going to change to my Xfce laptop now, in case I want to illustrate anything.

Okay, I'm here now. First of all, this is an image I've posted before, but I want to point out what I mentioned a few minutes ago. This is a full HD 1920x1080 .png from Xfce's Screenshot utility, and posted to the forum without any resizing needed. Obviously, Flarum does its own resizing now, which makes a lot of sense. It's an easy thing to code.

First of all, the background image was my idea. When I first started to submit bug reports the team had used the picture of two bicycles from the GNOME edition as the background for Xfce. I almost threw up. I wanted to show them something nicer, and they liked the idea. For some reason, they didn't go for the Plank dock, probably because they were trying to appeal to MATE users, who were soon to be asked to change to Xfce.

Xfce's bottom panel starts out with four workspaces, which will probably be perfect for a lot of people. My first change to that panel was to add a spacer on either side of the Workspace Switcher, to more-or-less center it in the panel. There's one more change to the panel I should mention. That imitation Icon-only Task Manager at the left end of the panel isn't really what it looks like. It's simply a few application launchers that are mounted on the panel and moved over to the left. They're in no way connected to the applications that are launched from the menu, as we're used to with other Solus DEs.

But that's alright. Plank is a perfect replacement for a task manager, and it does sync with applications you've launched, as you know. Since I wanted to use Plank anyway, I simply removed those launchers from the panel, and have never regretted doing that. It makes the panel cleaner looking. The Whisker menu stays, of course.

With the Plank dock on the bottom, I needed to move the panel to the top to keep those two from conflicting, and there's a trick to doing so that you might be aware of already, but I'll mention it here, just in case. If you right-click on the panel, the context menu lets you unlock it. When you do that, two little "handles" appear on the far left end and the far right end of the panel. You just grab one of those with the mouse, and drag the panel to wherever you might want it. The arrangement I use for Xfce matches the arrangement I use for Plasma, only with Plank instead of Latte.

There are a couple of rather inconcequential bugs (for most folks) that remain to be fixed, and you might never even run into them. The one I mentioned about not being able to use a Bluetooth keyboard is one that affects me the most, as I normally use a laptop on a stand that's made for the purpose, and placed in front of my chair in the living room. I'm constantly getting up during the day, and I don't need to find a place to put the laptop when I do that. But that makes it very uncomfortable to type for any length of time on the laptop's keyboard. So I use a small Arteck keyboard I can place on my lap, and easily set aside when I need to get up.

As it happens, that keyboard and my Logitech Triathlon mouse both are able to connect with up to three devices using three Bluetooth channels, so I connect them to my laptop, the media computer for the TV, and my smartphone. That normally works out well and simplifies my life considerably. But for some reason the Bluetooth library that Solus added to Xfce doesn't work with any of my keyboards. My mouse pairs, connects, and works fine with it. The keyboards all pair, and connect just fine, but then don't work at all. So I'm waiting for that bug to be fixed before I can substitute this Xfce laptop for my Plasma laptop and give it a good workout as my daily driver.

Another bug I ran into and reported is that the delay before taking a screenshot doesn't work when you're taking a selected area. It works fine if you're capturing the whole screen, but simply doesn't delay at all when you want to select an area for the image. That's made it hard for me to capture a context menu, because there's no time to re-open the menu before selecting the area. It's a known bug upstream at Xfce, so I'm hoping that gets fixed soon. I can still capture context menus open on my Xfce VM, using the Plasma's Spectacle tool on the host, so it's not exactly a debilitating bug, but it's annoying and I hope the Xfce team fixes it soon. Other than that, I think Xfce's Screenshot is the slickest utility of its kind I've ever used.

There's one more bug that's already been fixed by the Solus team, and will be in the next sync, and I'll mention it now in case you've already noticed it. When you close a laptop lid, the screen doesn't lock and turn off. And if you've chosen to hibernate when the lid is closed (a really great idea), that doesn't happen. But as I mentioned, those will soon be dead bugs. And there's a good work-around for the latter one - just hibernate the system via the menu, and when it shuts down, then close the laptop lid. It's not so convenient, but it works fine.

And one last hint. Since Flarum's idea of emojis really sucks, you'll want to know that gnome-characters is the utility that you can use to select them. They're just Unicode characters, after all. That's the icon third from the left in my Plank dock. Second from the left is Screenshot. I use them both often enought that I like to keep them handy.

It's even possible that none of the bugs I've mentioned will matter to you at all, depending on your workflow. You are already familiar with Xfce on other distros, so I'm sure you won't have any problems figuring out Solus' version. Enjoy!

WetGeek That background image is an excellent choice for the new XFCE edition. It's like a Pavlovian response. That image reminds me of the first time I installed Solus Budgie and how impressed I was, some for years ago. Whenever I see it, I feel home immediately.

brent I set pictures for a 4 second delay

If you're taking full-screen captures, I wouldn't expect you to notice any lack of delay. That's not part of the reported bug. It's when you want to select a smaller image - such as the area around a context menu - that it's an issue. When you set a delay, then click to take the shot, then right-click to display the context menu, it's already too late to capture it. The delay you set is ignored, and the shot is taken before you have a chance to select the area and snap it.

To be clear, this happens only for this type of image. If you set a delay and then take a full-screen image, the delay is honored. I don't remember what happens when you set a delay and then select "window under the cursor," I should give that a try, much as I hate mysteries.

The solution to the original problem, of course, is to set a delay, click to take the full-screen picture, open the context menu, and wait for the capture to be done. Then you can use an image manipulation utility (like Gwen for Plasma) to crop that image to the context menu you need. A bit more trouble than it needs to be, but still doable.

brent I am getting master a setting up budgie put it on 2 laptops
can do it in about 45min..
I had xfce on the problem child for abit didnt mess with it to much might be alittle more learning curve their.
Looked cool and all not what I was expecting tho more refined than normal XFCE.
Mate I could never kill it always worked was its biggest attributes. still running 2 computers with it
use them everyday.
Done ramblin.

Note I leave on mate comp on all the time with ftp server instead of plugging usb stick in and recopying
I just use the ftp and no matter what machine I am on can grab files.
Left it running a month last time before it got turned off..lol