Comments on: Xfce is the new Gnome 2

By: JM

JM — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:01:40 +0000

@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.

By: JM

JM — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:53:20 +0000

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.

By: Przemek

Przemek — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:52:25 +0000

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.

By: Jonas

Jonas — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:36:51 +0000

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 is a huge difference, especially in usability, between v4.6 and v4.8. Debian backports still doesn’t have v4.8, so I gave up on Stable. As much as I hate it, I ended up going with Ubuntu, due to the rapid release of updates and fixes. I started with Ubuntu’s command line install option, then ran the following to get a nice minimal XFCE installation with X:

apt-get install xorg xfce4 xfce4-goodies synaptic wicd-gtk wicd-curses

That right there will get you a nice minimal XFCE system with great wireless support from wicd. If you absolutely must have a graphical login, check out Slim.

By: shlomi

shlomi — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:42:31 +0000

@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.

By: Jonas

Jonas — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:15:02 +0000

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 boot.

I predict that XFCE will eventually become stupid and fat like Gnome 2, at which point everyone will switch to LXDE, etc, etc, etc.

As for Apple products, I could never bring myself to spend $2500 on something that I can get in a different brand name for around $1200. Not only that, you are locked into hardware/software/accessory ecosystem with no way out. To top it off, OSX is nothing more than a slightly better version of Unity that costs money. No thanks.

By: shlomi

shlomi — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:40:00 +0000

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 10G (!!!) worth of a bundle.

I eventually installed Linux on my MacBook Air, dual boot with OS/X.
Incidentally, that was *the* *most* *horrible* linux installation process I ever had. Most of that due to the fact Apple goes to great length to actually prevent you from installing other OS on their machines.
Example? You are only allowed to boot an OS from USB if it’s OS/X. You’re not allowed to boot Linux from USB.
A far more astonishing example? You are allowed to boot other OS from CD. But **only** if the drive is Apple’s SuperDrive. Is that crazy or what? You can’t boot a Linux CD on an external Toshiba CD drive you may have…
The external SuperDrive turned to be of poor quality, even in comparison to my older Lenovo laptop’s CD drive. Which made it stall during the installation process. Which meant I made 5 failed attempts of install during which the CD drive simply stopped working midway.

I’m not going to go through the post-install process… A nightmare of its own, and still uncompleted.

But, the machine is so slick…

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:56:56 +0000

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.

By: shlomi

shlomi — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:22:35 +0000

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.

By: Baron Schwartz

Baron Schwartz — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 18:17:52 +0000

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*