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 Channel Futures

Open Source


Open Source Heartbreak, Learning to Love Again with Xfce4

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • December 7, 2011

In the last month, my search for a sufferable desktop environment in the wake of my Unity and GNOME Shell disappointment has led me to try a lot of things I never had the patience for before, such as compiling one alternative interface from source. It’s also inspired me to revisit Xfce, a desktop environment I’d once sworn off but which is suiting my tastes more and more these days. I may even end up a Xubunter. Here’s why:

I’d experimented extensively with Xfce in days gone by when I was looking for a lightweight desktop environment to run on older hardware. But I was never particularly impressed because, as one articulate reader put it best in comments on a post a couple summers back, Xubuntu always felt like “Ubuntu’s cousin that went on a diet to be light, but decided to quit halfway through the diet.” It never appealed to me as a truly resource efficient interface.

I also always thought the default Xfce screen configuration was pretty poorly thought out. The thick upper panel and the dock-like contraption on the bottom of the screen sucked up a lot of valuable pixel real estate for no clear benefit.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Xfce

But they say happiness is relative, and my decidedly bad experience with Unity and GNOME Shell, which have superseded the tried-and-true GNOME 2 interface I knew and loved for most of my years as a Linux user, made Xfce seem like a much more appealing option once again. This time, I wasn’t so worried about resource efficiency, since my current hardware is up to much greater tasks than the tired old machines I owned a few years ago. I just wanted an interface that worked well.

Xfce desktop in Ubuntu 11.10

So I installed the Xfce4 package on my Ubuntu 11.10 system to see if it just might make me feel at home again. And it did! But not out-of-the-box, of course — I made the following customizations:

  1. Deleted the bottom dock and shrunk the upper panel down to about 24 pixels.
  2. Changed the font to 9-point Verdana and enabled anti-aliasing, which improved the aesthetics dramatically on my LCD screen.
  3. Replaced metacity with compiz for the window manager so I could enjoy desktop effects.
  4. Installed Synapse, a neat little tool that offers pretty much everything Unity’s dash does, without the bugs.

There are still a few things in Xfce that irk me — for example, I can’t figure out how to stop it from displaying autosave files whose names end with a tilde on the desktop, an issue which seems unlikely to be resolved because it’s stuck in it’s-not-a-bug-it’s-a-feature land. But overall, Xfce has been a pleasure to use after feeling like a desktop environment refugee in the time since GNOME 2 ceased being a real option.

I may even decide to give up on Ubuntu and switch to its ostensibly lightweight cousin Xubuntu, just because Xfce app integration would be simpler there. Or maybe I’ll try Fedora’s Xfce spin or Zenwalk. First, though, I’ll probably play with a few other alternative desktop environments, such as LXDE, to see how they stack up against all the others I’ve thrown around recently.

For the time being, though, I’m just happy to be running a well-maintained interface that wholeheartedly embraces the traditional desktop metaphor on which I was raised, tired and boring as it may be. I like my panel, my alt-tab application switcher and my freedom to disable hardware acceleration if I feel like it. I even like the little Xfce mouse. Things are finally starting to feel right in my computer-world again.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Open Source

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6 comments

  1. Avatar Michael Knisely December 7, 2011 @ 4:56 pm
    Reply

    I’m glad that others are experiencing this issue and working though things too. I feel that we only get better as a Linux community by experiencing discomfort and talking though them to build things better. I’ve forced myself to stick with Unity and while it is getting better there are still major usability issues for me.

    One of the things that bugs me most is that I feel the interface is being morphed to resemble Mac… and I don’t perceive that it’s for any good reason other than to copy what is vogue.

    I want my Linux distro to do three things:
    1: Have a tried and true option
    2: Push the envelope with cool NEW ideas
    3: Allow me to choose between the two experiences

  2. Avatar Ambleston Dack December 7, 2011 @ 6:16 pm
    Reply

    Have you tried Enlightenment? Bodhi Linux is good and is based on Ubuntu 10.04 and uses Enlightenment 17 as it DE. The only drawback with Bodhi, its very minimalistic, and I mean minimalistic. But most things are an apt-get install away and I found it fitted me better than XFCE and LXDE.

  3. Avatar Christopher Tozzi December 7, 2011 @ 6:42 pm
    Reply

    Ambleston Dack: yes, in fact I wrote about my experiences with Bodhi about a year ago when it was new: http://www.thevarguy.com/2011/02/22/bodhi-brings-enlightenment-to-linux-desktop/. The lead Bodhi developer told me then that he expected dissatisfaction with Ubuntu’s shift to Unity to spur interest in alternative distributions built on Ubuntu but with different desktop environments, and it seems he’s been proven right.

    I haven’t personally tried Bodhi again since last winter but I may well give it a new look, or just install Enlightenment on top of the half-dozen desktop environments I already have on my Ubuntu 11.10 system.

  4. Avatar Tal December 7, 2011 @ 9:16 pm
    Reply

    I found Lubuntu (LXDE) to be everything Xubuntu should have been: extremely light on resources, but actually very, very usable as a “traditional” (= Windows-98-like) desktop.

    I installed it on a secondary machine (package lubuntu-desktop) and was very impressed by how well everything worked, and with minimal resources. I just wanted something workable, but found myself actually enjoying the retro experience.

    I should add, though, that like XFCE for you, I found the packaged defaults rather atrocious. You do want to change the visual themes, especially the mouse theme. Luckily, LXDE has about a million different themes right in the box, so it should be easy.

  5. Avatar istok December 7, 2011 @ 11:54 pm
    Reply

    Xubuntu was and probably is still bloated. It had a whole ugly sh-load of gnome underneath Xfce last time i looked. Its performance has nothing to do with Xfce, Xubuntu is simply badly implemented Xfce.
    As a learning experience, you might want to dl the Xfce implementation on Crunchbang, which is based on yet more goodness, Debian.
    Then come back and try not to confuse Xubuntu with Xfce, please.

  6. Avatar Jack December 8, 2011 @ 12:16 am
    Reply

    Somewhat surprising, but I’ve found Gnome 3 to be quite edible and I don’t think it’s bad at all. One do however have to assume that it’s not feature complete. Yet.

    XFce and LXde are good for what they want to achieve and suits a lot of traditional Linux users well.

    But neither of those are the future for Linux desktop. That would be the same as keeping an old filesystem or a legacy graphics driver. There must be development within all aspects of Linux, and disregarding the need for progress and development is a one way route to the museum.

    The question should not be whether changes needs to take place, but in which direction the changes should take the Linux desktop and how Gnome, KDE and Unity are likely to become the right choice in the future.

    For now, I believe both Gnome and KDE is in a far better position than Unity as regards UX and usability. LXde and XFce is a thing from the past and suitable for traditional Linux users. But that’s all it is.

    Unless the object is to cease all development and give up on Linux as something for the crowds.

    At the moment there’s no Linux distro good enough for the general consumer market. For Linux enthusiasts and Linux proffessionals it’s fine. But not for the consumer market.

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