Xfce ... WOW!!!

inp3dance · 2011-05-02 13:48:11

Yesterday I switched back to Archlinux after a short adventure with LMDE and this time I set up an Xfce desktop.
I have everything I used to have with KDE or Gnome, all the applets I need onto my panel, transparent panels, minimal desktop effects with cairo-compmgr, gnome-do, desktopnova, beautiful theme and icons and all this uses about 170-180 Mb of memory after startup, which is ... I don't know, three, maybe five tabs in firefox - I just flabbergasted when I saw.

So for everyone who is even just a bit curious about Xfce, I recommend to try it out, it can be set to look really beautiful ( I think there are more great gtk themes than qt ones, however that I am a KDE fan ), but still remains fast and uses little ram.

SanskritFritz · 2011-05-02 14:01:23

I use compiz standalone, but Xfce gives me many nice tools that I use everyday, thumbs up, really.

disastrophe · 2011-05-02 14:38:38

I like xfce too, the desktop itself is a nice balance and 4.8.x is a very good version. It also makes an excellent haven for disaffected gnome2 users.

Lattyware · 2011-05-02 14:40:00

I tried to do the Gnome -> XFCE switch, but it didn't work with my triple monitors, which was a shame, as it seems to talk highly of it's multi-monitor support.
Obviously Gnome can't do it either now, hence why I switched off gnome, so now I'm on KDE.

inp3dance · 2011-05-02 14:53:58

I can't help with the multiple monitor support, as I have a lonely 15.4 laptop

Inxsible · 2011-05-02 16:19:27

Since this thread is not a support request, I am moving this to GNU/Linux discussion

pogeymanz · 2011-05-02 21:48:09

Why use cairo-compmgr? Xfce has its own compositor built in. Just go to the settings menu and find the "Window Manager Tweaks" control to turn it on. It's WAY smoother than cairo-compmgr or xcompmgr

Beelzebud · 2011-05-03 00:29:05

New Xfce convert here as well. I'm really liking it. Basically made me drop Gnome 3 and never look back. In fact, after using it all weekend, I think I actually like it more than Gnome 2.

hauzer · 2011-05-03 02:31:47

This will certainly give boost to DE alternatives, which is great!

Larsson · 2011-05-03 05:44:47

Two things I don't like about XFCE:
1. Thunar doesn't have tabs and they refuse to ad it. They would have one of the best filemanagers if they added tabs.
2. Menu editing is a pain in the ***. First edit a custom menu file by hand, and then editing all *.desktop files on the system, that does'nt seem right.

Other then that it is a very good desktop enviroment.

Allan · 2011-05-03 06:08:15

Larsson wrote:

1. Thunar doesn't have tabs and they refuse to ad it. They would have one of the best filemanagers if they added tabs.

You might want to look at pcmanfm.

Larsson wrote:

2. Menu editing is a pain in the ***. First edit a custom menu file by hand, and then editing all *.desktop files on the system, that does'nt seem right.

I agree that this is annoying! From what I understand, this is a bit of a hangover from transitioning to a new menu system and then having a lack of man-power to get it really done for the 4.8 release. It should improve in the next release.

Murray_B · 2011-05-03 09:08:23

There seems to be a little misunderstanding here... Xfce supports the freedesktop-menu-specifications with the garcon-library, but doesn't have its own menu-editor. You can do it by hand or you can use alacarte (gnome) or kmenueditor (I think that's the name of the kde-app). There are other panels which support the freedesktop-standards without a menu-editor and it would be great, if there would be a desktop-independent editor. But yes, AFAIK there is no one yet.

fukawi2 · 2011-05-03 09:27:51

Well I'm trying to make the move away from G3 to Xfce, but the big thing I'm missing (in any DE apart from Gnome) is the ability to mount remote shares (ie, "Places" => "Connect to Server..."). I use this a LOT, especially at work where I admin a Windows network.

Thunar doesn't seem to be cutting it, and Google isn't turning up anything it seems. All the searches I do just tell me about Nautilus (thanks!).... Any suggestions from the crowd?

x33a · 2011-05-03 09:39:48

fukawi2 wrote:

Well I'm trying to make the move away from G3 to Xfce, but the big thing I'm missing (in any DE apart from Gnome) is the ability to mount remote shares (ie, "Places" => "Connect to Server..."). I use this a LOT, especially at work where I admin a Windows network.
Thunar doesn't seem to be cutting it, and Google isn't turning up anything it seems. All the searches I do just tell me about Nautilus (thanks!).... Any suggestions from the crowd?

I haven't tried it, but maybe midnight commander. F9 -> SMB link

arinlares · 2011-05-03 09:47:52

There's also this: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=44362

Edit the PKGBUILD to use exo instead of exo-devel as a dependency, and you have an XFCE menu editor.

Last edited by arinlares (2011-05-03 09:48:22)

pogeymanz · 2011-05-03 13:27:00

fukawi2 wrote:

Well I'm trying to make the move away from G3 to Xfce, but the big thing I'm missing (in any DE apart from Gnome) is the ability to mount remote shares (ie, "Places" => "Connect to Server..."). I use this a LOT, especially at work where I admin a Windows network.
Thunar doesn't seem to be cutting it, and Google isn't turning up anything it seems. All the searches I do just tell me about Nautilus (thanks!).... Any suggestions from the crowd?

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but Thunar can browse remote shares.
If you go to the "go" menu in the toolbar and click network you should see the different networks you can browse. There is also a Network icon in my side-pane. I'm not sure if that's there by default.

I only use SMB shares, but it works just fine with that.

dolby · 2011-05-03 16:51:47

Thunar now uses GVFS so it should capable of doing everything nautilus does.

Larsson · 2011-05-03 19:57:18

Allan wrote:

You might want to look at pcmanfm.

Used the pcmanfm for a long time also after the rewrite, but felt like the development grinded to a halt, so I have not been using it for a while.

trn · 2011-05-03 22:47:56

I'm sure Xfce will be getting some more users in the future as gnome moves to the wretched gnome 3.

fukawi2 · 2011-05-03 23:48:00

pogeymanz wrote:

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but Thunar can browse remote shares.
If you go to the "go" menu in the toolbar and click network you should see the different networks you can browse. There is also a Network icon in my side-pane. I'm not sure if that's there by default.
I only use SMB shares, but it works just fine with that.

I don't know the details behind how that works, but I think it only browses the local network using broadcast traffic to find other hosts -- won't work where I have 16+ VLAN segments to manage...

dolby wrote:

Thunar now uses GVFS so it should capable of doing everything nautilus does.

Maybe I need to look closer... I couldn't find anything equivalent to the "Connect to Server..." dialog.

combuster · 2011-05-04 00:48:01

One more happy Xfce user

Stemp · 2011-05-04 01:15:35

Gigolo is a frontend to easily manage connections to local and remote filesystems using GIO/GVfs.
It's part of the Xfce Goodies project.

fukawi2 · 2011-05-04 03:05:18

Gigolo looks perfect, thanks Stemp

pogeymanz · 2011-05-04 03:45:52

I love Xfce and I'm glad that it will undoubtedly get an influx of users with the unveiling of Unity and Gnome3.

It has always had a small development team and a fairly small user base, so the lack of polish can sometimes show through compared to the highly polished Gnome2 and KDE3.5 back in the day.

Hopefully, there will be some more man-power added to their group because of all this.

inp3dance · 2011-05-04 22:28:32

fukawi2 wrote:

pogeymanz wrote:
I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but Thunar can browse remote shares.
If you go to the "go" menu in the toolbar and click network you should see the different networks you can browse. There is also a Network icon in my side-pane. I'm not sure if that's there by default.
I only use SMB shares, but it works just fine with that.
I don't know the details behind how that works, but I think it only browses the local network using broadcast traffic to find other hosts -- won't work where I have 16+ VLAN segments to manage...
dolby wrote:
Thunar now uses GVFS so it should capable of doing everything nautilus does.
Maybe I need to look closer... I couldn't find anything equivalent to the "Connect to Server..." dialog.

You still can use Nautilus in Xfce if You don't like Thunar. As a matter of fact, I use Dolphin and Krusader as my file browsers.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-05-02 13:48:11

Xfce ... WOW!!!

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