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# Xfce is the new Gnome 2

Linux November 22, 2011

I’ve recently had it with Ubuntu’s Unity.

Wait, why Unity?

Because my gdm was consuming so much CPU my laptop had its fan working non-stop. I’ve researched and tweaked and installed and removed – and finally moved to Unity to solve that. There may have been another solution, but that’s an old story now.

Thing is, that used to be Gnome 2, a great environment for a software developer. Easy keystrokes to move between your apps, intuitive mouse gestures. Unity presented with a very slick look, but a counter-productive environment. Perhaps it’s great for people opening one Firefox window and one Libre Office Writer document. It does not work as well for people with 3 different browsers, 5 terminals on 2 different desktops, eclipse with 4 separate perspectives, and Gimp, which opens up with 5 windows up front.

Unity does not handle these well at all. To invoke a new Firefox window you can’t just click on the launcher: that would just open up one of your already open windows (and the wrong one, by the way). You either have to work your way through the specific application you work with (Ctrl+N for new window), or create a special keyboard shortcut for your favorite app (e.g. Alt+Ctrl+T for new terminal, thankfully pre-defined). And, ARGGGH! So unintuitive at times! The “Show Desktop” seems to hide all windows except the very one which happens to be maximized and focused at the time (wasn’t that window the reason to show the desktop in the first place?). OK, this post is not about Unity.

The trouble is: Gnome 3 seems to be no better in some respects. Now I confess I did not spend a lot of time with it. I just did not have the patience to go through the whole deal again. But I do have people around me using it, and I get to hear their occasional ARGGGH! Comparing notes, I don’t see that it’s a better developer’s environment.

Back to Gnome 2? Not if you’ve upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, you can’t. And, besides, no going back in Gnome.

Back to KDE? I was an avid KDE user for years, but the premature 4.0 version made me run away. Yes, I suppose it’s possible now, but I first tried Xfce.

Wow, last time I looked at Xfce it was really lightweight, with all that implies: it used to be so poor, so minimal. Today, with the very slick work from Xubuntu, it is fairly feature rich, while remaining fairly simple. In fact, it now more resembles Gnome (I mean Gnome 2, the real Gnome) than Gnome itself.

Easy enough to customize the panels. Familiar window buttons, with no funny grouping. The ordering of window buttons alphabetically is weird, to say the least; I’m missing the option of reordering it manually (why should Thunderbird always be the last one? I want it first!). But otherwise very clear an obvious; no funny behavior.

A few days of test drive with plenty of consoles, eclipse windows, firefox windows, and I can say its easy to work with. That’s all I’m asking for: an easy to work with environment!

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Richard Shaw

I tried xfce on Linux Mint 8 and it didn’t seem to support dual head very well. I found a work around but it meant fiddling about every time I booted up.

A colleague of mine uses xfce with Debian and says he has similar issues with dual monitors.

Have you got fxce working on 2 screens?

Author
shlomi

Richard, I have not attempted as yet. I find many things are still unpolished in xfce, but that sounds like a deal breaker if you can’t make it work.

Guest
jarobe

Hey mate,

I did the exact same thing – Ubuntu XFCE is now my main desktop version.

I guess I ran into the same issues you would have with XFCE so wanted to let you know you can reorder the task bar items – you just need to change the option in the panel config menu.

Cheers
j.

Author
shlomi

@Jarobe,
Thank you.
Reorder items — yes. However I meant reorder of windows in the task bar. There are ordered alphabetically.

Guest
Baron Schwartz

I have Fedora 15 on my laptop and put XFCE on it instead of Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is just not practical to use.

My brother told me I should try out Unity. So I downloaded the bootable CD of the latest Ubuntu, and it kernel panics.

*sigh*

Author
shlomi

In time I may consider the Mate desktop environment (fork of Gnome 2).
But as long as they have this message on GitHub: “MATE Desktop Environment, a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using traditional computing desktop metaphor. Also known as the GNOME2 fork. — Read more”
– either supposed to be funny or hacked by someone — I’ll just wait.
If it’s successful, it will probably take a year or so to mature.

Guest
Baron Schwartz

I really need a well integrated desktop environment that works right. For example, it needs to prompt me for a password when resuming from suspend. This worked fine on Gnome for many years, but Gnome 3 and the alternatives (KDE, Unity) are really unusable; that leaves me with XFCE, but the problem is it doesn’t work reliably on XFCE. I’ve run Linux on my desktop for over 10 years. On Friday I ordered a Mac.

Author
shlomi

Actually, “password back from suspend” works better for me on Xfce than on Unity (where for 2 seconds I could actually see the desktop before it got protected by password). I bought a Mac 8 months ago. It took me a month to realize it was great for browsing, music editing etc., but extremely poor for development. Consider: Unity and Gnome 3 mimic the OS/X desktop. So where does that lead us? Consider: you open a shell. You try to compile some code. You type ‘make’. Unknown executable. To install poor ‘make’ you need to register for Xtools and download… Read more »

Guest
Jonas

MATE won’t become mainstream, just like Trinity (KDE 3.5 fork) hasn’t. More support should be put behind XFCE. You even have Linus Torvalds who switched to it as his main desktop environment (first dumping KDE for Gnome 2, then dumping Gnome 3 for XFCE). I actually like XFCE far more than I ever liked Gnome 2. I always had issues with the Gnome panel, and things just got really bloated. After bootup (with that hog GDM running in the background), my machine was using almost 1.5 gigs of RAM. With my clean XFCE install with wicd uses 256MB RAM after… Read more »

Author
shlomi

@Jonas,
I’m still having plenty of trouble with keyboard volume keys; keyboard layout switching (xfce keeps forgetting the shortcut key — long time bug), and other minor issues.

Apple — when I bought the MacBook Air, there was nothing as light and thin. And I use it a lot on travel, so that’s very cool. Only today to competitors begin to produce laptops in same thinness and lightweightness. I think Acer has a new interesting model.

OS/X: not for me.

Guest
Jonas

To my surprise, the volume and brightness keys on my ThinkPad work great w/ XFCE, so some tweaking will probably be required. There are definitely a few big things missing from XFCE, but they will be there in time. For me, the biggest missing piece is the ability to easily configure multiple/external displays with a gui app. I know for a fact that this is in the works, based off of screenshots from one of the XFCE developers. Keyboard shortcut fixes should be close as well. I originally ran XFCE on Debian 6, but I couldn’t deal with v4.6. There… Read more »

Guest
Przemek

Agree that both Gnome3 and Unity went into wrong direction.
XFCE is great, but I faced some annoying issues using it on two external screens (which is my day to day work environment).

I use Fedora 15 and here is where I found help to keep using Gnome2: http://k3rnel.net/tag/bluebubble/
They have back-ported Gnome2, all you have to do is remove Gnome3 and use their repository.

Guest
JM

If you do a minimal Ubuntu install, you can put whatever desktop you want on it after you install X and ALSA. For example, you wanna install Fluxbox with no login manager, Thunar as the file manager, Dillo as the browser, and no Synaptic for the basic configuration, you can do that.

Guest
JM

@Jonas: You can use a straight-up WM as a desktop too, my fave WM’s being Openbox+Tint2+Conky (or the stock Crunchbang desktop configuration), and Fluxbox.

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