[Discuss] XFCE

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 09:53:50PM -0500, Tom Metro wrote:
> Dan Ritter wrote:
> > I would point to XFCE as the modern desktop successor to such
> > things...
> 
> As someone, who I presume has spent time with GNOME 2 (and if not,
> perhaps someone else can address this), what bits of functionality do
> you expect a long term GNOME 2 user would miss after switching to XFCE.

I can't think of any off the top of my head. What do you use?

Focus policy is configurable: follows-mouse (with optional raise
and delay) or click-to-focus. Window decorations are themed.
There's no support for titlebar on the side. Window-shading and
minimization are both supported. Lots of applets, and a
notification area. Screensaver support. Power management. All
that's fine.

> > a session manager to handle X startup and persistence
> 
> And does it work well?
> 
> I think around 2007 was the last time session persistence worked decent
> in GNOME.

It works slightly better if you use xfterminal or gnome-terminal
rather than my beloved unicode-rxvt. Even then, you'll get most
windows restarting in the right spots. Chrome does it nicely,
Firefox usually doesn't and ends up in the wrong desktop. In
general, ending the session and then coming back in works the
way you would expect it to.

-dsr-