Last Thoughts on XFCE

brent

I was able spend a day in XFCE finally, yesterday. I will keep returning to tinker.
At the end of the day, Budgie is my comfort zone and where I feel more productive. But who knows, I may migrate someday post-Beta.—-When Solus found me years ago Plasma scared me, Gnome confused me, Mate bored me (it looked like Win7 which I fled from), and Budgie was just right—utter perfection— for the way I like to rock. Now if XFCE had been there, I may have had a different outcome. It’s a very solid DE.

What I took away from the very lovely (anyone ever call Mate that?🙂) XFCE is I got the feel for the way the DE ebbs and flows. Customization is incredible. It’s got its own way of doing things. That’s its charm.

Solus XFCE is a good I-just-fled-windows-I-heard-good-things-about-Solus users first-timers. It’s intuitive and the panel is better than any xfce’s I test drove. I think it’s a great place also—which the Solus maintainers likely intended—for those eschewing bells and whistles and just wanted Mate’s simple dependability.

I think aesthetic versatility/variety is much better here than Mate. You can dial XFCE in to set it and forget. It took some time to make it the productive workstation I needed to be, and it's still being worked on in my spare time.

Installed XFCE the day after the Beta was official and I have not subsequently wrecked it any way. I always wreck something after a couple weeks. I’m losing my touch.

To un-romanticize it, every DE has its preferred terminal, file manager, screenshot, picture viewer, word suite, pdf opener etc etc. That stuff is all variations on a theme. I really didn’t replace any of that stuff (just one thing) with beloved and comfort-zoned budgie stuff. I didn’t need to. The OOTB stuff worked fine so it’s competently curated that way. XFCE is easy to keep bone stock.

I had my own xfce bugs to report, as did others, if you peruse dev tracker, and that will all work out soon.
Really, really nice work. Thanks to the Solus Team and its xfce testers. Personally I love this selection.

WetGeek

brent Personally I love this selection.

I've worked a lot with Xfce lately, as you know. And like you I'm not ready to swap my daily-driver DE (Plasma) for Xfce, even after the bugs I've submitted are dealt with. But I think that Xfce is one hell of a good replacement for MATE, which I never found attractive.

But neither am I inclined to give up testing new fixes for Xfce on the laptop I bought for that purpose. Solus has been my distro of preference since about 2018. But I think the addition of Xfce and removal of MATE has already made Solus an even better distro than it was before.

brent

WetGeek I could not have said it better, all of it ^^.

One has to really spend time exploring it to see what a remarkable job they did here.

WetGeek

WetGeek I've worked a lot with Xfce lately, as you know.

brent

I've worked with it even more now. As part of my investigation of the Bluetooth keyboards issue, I bought another one that's quite different. This one connects with just one machine at a time, unlike my others, but it can do so using BT3.0, BT5.0, or wireless 2.4G. Using either Bluetooth protocol, the results are the same as before, so no new light shed on that issue.

But by connecting with the 2.4G dongle, I've been able to set it up on the laptop stand in front of my chair, thus replacing my daily-driver Plasma laptop. So I can comfortably come and go during the day, and temporarily replace my Plasma laptop with this Xfce laptop full-time, and give it a throrough use test. Remember, these two laptops are identical hardware, and their DEs are configured with identical UIs.

I've now been through every menu item in the Settings menu, and I'm even more impressed than before. Take a look sometime at the Scale: setting for displays, and compare that with what Budgie offers. Users with >1920x1024 monitors will be impressed, I'm pretty sure.

Next, I'm going to work through every section in the menu, and try every app and utility. Since Xfce had no problem connecting with my NAS, and therefor my music, book, and video libraries, I can exercise a number of utilities. I'm looking forward to that exercise. In fact, I'm revising my DE preference list a bit. It's now more like:
1. Plasma or Xfce
2. Budgie
3. GNOME

I can't fsck'n wait until the remaining Xfce warts are removed and I don't need to make allowances for anything.

Axios

For the short time I messed with Xfce looks promising I knew budgie and didnt want to go through
a learning curve right now.
But at some point may revisit xfce. (If something isnt kept current prob no reason to keep it around mate.)
and the logistics for it was just not there.

I use to be big in making my custom (I called them rescue repair disk) bootable functional Os (Winders) from cd
which grew to usb size. And I know the amount of effort and time it takes to make stuff work in harmony.

WetGeek

WetGeek Next, I'm going to work through every section in the menu

The first thing I tried is the media player. I mounted my NAS shares, and loaded a music file to test it. Since my wife is watching TV in the same room, I also paired by earbuds, aother first. They paired and connected perfectly, and are working flawlessly.

The one media player handles both audio and video media. So I'm trying it on a movie next. This is ABBA In Concert:

WetGeek

The image viewer is also excellent. It makes it easy to browse through a large collection of pictures and pick the ones I want to examine more closely. I photographed this penguin at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle:

As I prepared to copy a full-frame image to the forum, as I can do with my Plasma laptop, I got an error, so apparently there's something about the screenshots from here that are too big (?) or otherwise not suitable for the forum's consumption as-is. I haven't found a way for the image viewer to do a resize, other than resizing the window itself. But I'm sure that's not an Xfce problem - probably just my unfamiliarity.

brent

WetGeek I got an error, so apparently there's something about the screenshots from here that are too big (?) or otherwise not suitable for the forum's consumption as-is.

this is why I replaced it. not forum upload friendly by default. ---If Thunar had that pic re-sizer that Nemo does it would be perfect. Also: ABBA Rules.

I did not not try the media player yet, strangely, thanks for the report.
The picture viewer is always fine to me.
Mousepad is starting to piss me off without a context menu or right-click options. I made a .conf file and had to CRTL+S to save it. I thought that was kind of primitive but kind of cool at the same time.

"1. Plasma or Xfce

Budgie
GNOME"

this is accurate. Budgie/XFCE for me for #1. (Gnome #4 that never changes🙂). I am spending MORE and more time in XFCE.

the only riddle I cannot solve besides the mousepad one is this:

this is the budgie panel. it's the same as plank. active apps have a dot under them to tell you they are running.
I can't get the XFCE panel to do this, It litters the panel with small verbose rectangles of everything open just like windows(and mate) and when you have a few things going on, the bottom of XFCE is an anxietic wreck of bottom-screen cluster-fscks (to borrow from your usage🙂).

I'm happy for your updates here--if you are going on a native menu app journey then count me in. Useful to the forum imo.
I know you replaced your terminal right away but the gnome-terminal for xfce-terminal seems to be even. I like the xfce one the same.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who seems to be logging into Solus XFCE more and more.

WetGeek

I got it. When you click on the pencil icon to edit an image in the image viewer, a dialog asks what application you want to use do to that. I installed gwenview, and assigned it as that application. Cost me 36 new dependencies, but the results were worth it.

She's another resident of the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. The original photo was 4K in size, and I used gwenview to resize it to 1,200 pixels wide.

Does anyone know of an equivalent to gwenview that's GNOME-based, so there's no need for all those foreign dependencies? If such an editing tool exists, I'd like to give it a try in place of gwenview.