Xfce Forum

xfceusersince2014

Member

Registered: 2023-08-12

Posts: 10

I certainly like XFCE

I'm sorry to use a cliche, but XFCE "just works." It's spare and simple, but convenient. I have used it for a decade, and normally am not interested in using some other desktop manager.

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"O, what man may within him hide, / Though angel on the outward side!" --Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

eight.bit.al

Member

Registered: 2022-06-09

Posts: 85

Re: I certainly like XFCE

It''s one of the very few that can be configured with a right-click desktop application menu, Openbox style.

2³bit

Last edited by eight.bit.al (2025-03-31 03:37:24)

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Fight against surveillance capitalism.

Aazimox

Member

Registered: 2025-04-27

Posts: 2

Re: I certainly like XFCE

It's spare and simple

It's really not though!  Not simple, I mean.  I looked up the definition for 'spare' and one entry that came back was 'healthily lean' - yep that's it!  I recently tried out both Cinnamon and Mate, for a few days each, and while there were some things I preferred (Cinnamon's lockscreen for example), I just couldn't stick with either as a daily driver.  There were too many 'little niggles' which just aren't problems to solve on XFCE. 😊

For example, I run a fullscreen browser (and often windowed-fullscreen games) which means the taskbar doesn't display.  When I want to, for example, interact with the bluetooth or network icons in the system tray, I would just hit the Super (Win) key to open the menu and bring the taskbar to top, then left- or right-click the system tray icon of choice.  On both Mate and Cinnamon, on click this action fails, the taskbar disappears and the fullscreen program/game takes the click.  On XFCE it just works. 👍️

There are also a number of dialogs or settings windows, etc which aren't resizable (or worse, they're resizable but the actual content doesn't adapt to benefit from the more room) in those other two DEs, which work properly here.  Now, I still have some issues with default window/dialog sizes (mostly because I operate at a higher DPI setting for visibility on this bigass screen), BUT here on XFCE those are fixable.  And that's how it should be on Linux.  So long as, instead of the frustration of being 'stuck' with behaviour that just doesn't work for you, we can hack a fix together (and learn along the way), it feels rewarding. 🤓