GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 6:32 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode by cmccabe
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

I tried using Xfce and use it for remote desktop at work because Debian doesn't have a workable LLVM setup yet.

It's a nightmare to configure compared to Gnome 3. There are a hundred little files and changes you need to make all over the system to get anything done. On multiple occasions I find myself mentally reverse engineering various XFCE features to try to figure out how to get things working properly.

It's not terrible, but it's certainly not simple or easy to setup. I put a huge personal investment in time back in the day to get a custom Linux desktop setup how I like that, but I abandoned that approach long ago when Gnome finally got usable around 2.8 series. I suppose if I stuck with editing rc files and such XFCE would be easy, but right now it seems like a huge step backwards.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 11, 2012 18:30 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Please don't interpret this the wrong way, but I think you may be confusing Xfce with fvwm, twm, or one of those. I actually don't know where Xfce keeps its configuration files, and have never manually edited them. I'm pretty sure they're somewhere in my home directory, because they persisted across multiple distro wipes, but I don't know what they're called, and don't much care.

When I do want to change something, I use the control panel, accessible from the bottom menu bar. You can also right-click on various things to get configuration menus that way. It's basically the same as GNOME2 as far as configuration goes, except GNOME2 had that horrible registry thing, and Xfce just uses files (I think?) But that's just an implementation detail.