Xfce Forum

EggheadDash

Member

Registered: 2017-03-27

Posts: 2

Where does xfce *really* store it's config files?

I'm trying to set up a script that changes up my panel on startup because sometimes I have one monitor and sometimes two depending on whether my primary monitor is being passed through to my VM or not. I found messing with ~.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/ and ~/.config/xfce4/panel/ wasn't sufficient and so as a test I made a new test user, set up their panel, changed a couple things, logged out, then nuked their entire home directory as root, including all dotfiles and non-dotfiles, /home/test was completely empty. And the changes still persisted. I'm not entirely sure how this is possible as pretty much everything outside the user's home directory would need root to change anything but I never had to do anything of the sort to change any settings.
I am on Arch btw.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Where does xfce *really* store it's config files?

Hello and welcome.

You're going to find that on arch, the xfconfd process (which stores all of the settings in memory) isn't killed when you log out (also see: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=11490 and https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=203080). There are bug reports about this and systemd doesn't kill the process on purpose. Not sure whose fault this is.

Anyways, you can manually kill the process once logged out or set "KillUserProcesses=yes" in /etc/systemd/logind.conf. This xconfd process is keeping the settings between logins - it isn't meant to do this.

There is also an app in the AUR called xfpanel-switch that was written by one of the Xfce devs to backup and restore panel settings, which you might find useful.

If you're looking to write a script to change xfconf settings on the fly, you should probably use xfconf-query.

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EggheadDash

Member

Registered: 2017-03-27

Posts: 2

Re: Where does xfce *really* store it's config files?

The xfpanel-switch thing worked like a charm. The logind.conf option didn't seem to help, though I didn't log out I rebooted straight from within xfce. I might test it some more later when I have more time.