XFCE [LWN.net]

XFCE

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:57 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: XFCE by job
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I like XFCE and use it on all my machines. However, it may follow the path of other window managers that morphed into "desktop environments" and get big and heavy. Then I'll have to move to LXDE or something... until that one gets grandiose... rinse, repeat...

Someone posted something about a stable desktop design being "mature and perfected" rather than "dead". I agree with that. Mucking about with radical new desktop concepts may be good for cutting-edge experimenters (who might even find one or two useful ideas out of the dozens they try), but it's jarring and annoying for most people.

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XFCE

Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:43 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (6 responses)

I think you should just pick up fvwm2 or windowmaker. They have a firm and stable interface that will not change. I'm not trying to be sarcastic but really an active project is going to have some kind of change horizon. If you picked one that is just in support mode you're going to get a consistent user interface over a long period of time.. until the next processor/motherboard change. :-)

XFCE

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:27 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

So far (fingers crossed....) XFCE has remained sane. :)

Windowmaker

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:13 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, wmaker for the win!

Quite stable, relatively low resources, has a convenient gui for settings AND sensible text config files that can be directly edited; what more do you need for hosting a slew of terminals plus a couple firefox, gimp, and/or wireshark windows?

Windowmaker

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:23 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

have they made it able to work across multiple monitors yet? (I used to use windowmaker but a combination of a bad release in my primary distro and moving to a multi-monitor setup pushed me away from it a couple of years ago)

Windowmaker

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:52 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link] (1 responses)

Multi-monitor as in xinerama?

Don't use multiple monitors myself, but the windowmaker-user mailing list shows a happy user of xinerama on version 0.92, which is still current.

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.window-managers.windo...

Also there was a gentoo bug a while back about adding libxinerama as a dependency, but no complaints about xinerama being broken, so that's another piece of evidence in favor of it working.

Windowmaker

Posted Mar 17, 2011 23:03 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

on KDE and Gnome with Ubuntu I've been using xrandr to do the configuration, I don't know about xinerama (I've never tried to configure it)

when I asked at the windowmaker booth at Scale (last year or the year before), I was told that windowmaker didn't currently support multi-monitor configurations, but it was a commonly asked for feature.

Windowmaker

Posted Mar 18, 2011 0:37 UTC (Fri) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

meh... generally I agree, but having to RTFS quite a bit before figuring out how to get rid of idiotic panel thrown up on Alt-Tab had been annoying, to put it mildly (SwitchPanelImages = None; in GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, FWIW). Not documented, not doable via their GUI config (verified by RTFS, again - it's not just hard to find)... And the way they launch stuff when restoring the session is racy - event at the wrong time and the damn thing gets confused, slapping everything into one workspace.

Still far less annoying than GNOME, wrt both the program behaviour and not employing marketing teams that would spew forth the gems about Craving For Change(tm)...