Xfce Forum

organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

Hello team, I'd like to turn a Trisquel setup I have into something that is close to what Manjaro Xfce looks and feels like. Not sure what DE Trisquel is using but whether its MATE or GNOME, I simply don't like it. It's ugly, lacks some nice functionality that Xfce has, and a bit slow on the old 2Gb RAM, AMD laptop for some reason. The list seems to be:

1. Install xfce4 and xfce4-goodies...
(EDIT: and must also explicitly install:
- xfce4-power-manager
- xfce4-notifyd
- xfce4-notes-plugin
- xfce4-screenshooter (PrtScrn program)
EDIT2:
- xfce4-terminal
- galculator (not strictly needed for Xfce but for parity with Manjaro)

# Tentative command (replace [...] with remaining packages):
sudo apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies xfce4-power-manager [...] galculator

)

2. ...but replace ristretto image viewer with Viewnior
(EDIT: ...and remove whatever terminal program is not xfce4-terminal ie. mate-terminal, and
EDIT2: whatever installed calculator may not be galculator (I don't remember seeing a calculator installed but just in case)

# Tentative command (replace [...] with calculator or remove)
sudo apt-get autoremove ristretto mate-terminal [...]

)

3. the Matcha themes package is not in the Trisquel (or Ubuntu) repo, so MAYBE I can't expect absolute parity with Manjaro, but maybe the Matcha Theme can be scraped from an Archlinux repo somehow??? (would rather not access M$ Github for ANYTHING, m$ can quietly burn in LLM hell along with goog, amazon and fakebook)

(EDIT2: Internet Archive to the rescue! The following could be (see below) the latest Matcha:
Get with a legacy browser - https://web.archive.org/web/20260419004 … 2025-04-11
Get with Tor Browser - https://web.archivep75mbjunhxc6x4j5mwjm … 2025-04-11
)

4. In terms of icons I would love to try Breeze icons (like Trisquel KDE) instead of Papirus (what Manjaro use, previous musings here about lots of dependencies for it were wrong,

5. The other thing I really must have from Manjaro is the way the terminal drops down from the top of the screen.
(EDIT: thanks Toz for the 'xfce4-terminal --drop-down' nugget below! I missed it! I then typed 'shortcuts' in the Whisker menu and found 'Keyboard'... in Keyboard I found that Manjaro DOES USE 'xfce4-terminal --drop-down'. So that's ONE MYSTERY BASICALLY SOLVED. 

6. When satisfied with Xfce, remove MATE (optional) (command pending)

So that's it, fwict. If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear it. My modem is out of action so I'm not going to be able to get back in touch for a few days at least (until I get a modem I'm traveling to get a connection every few days).

Thanks Xfce and looking forward to doing this.
Organicode

-

EDIT: just tried signing up at the Trisquel forums but their automated system is too strict! I left a message in a failed form field for admins to come here to see what I'm discussing.

Last edited by organicode (2026-04-19 05:25:45)

vm_x

Member

Registered: 2024-02-12

Posts: 61

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

I think Trisquel is using an older and/or customized version of KDE.

As far as your list goes, you can easily do all of that.

organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

I think Trisquel is using an older and/or customized version of KDE.

Unsure how relevant that is to making a Manjaro Xfce environment but it wouldn't surprise me. Trisquel and linux-libre folk/volunteers must go an extra mile, and it takes time to adapt, test and fix things.

As far as your list goes, you can easily do all of that.

Unsure if "easy" is the word I'd use for a couple things listed. Here's hoping that by documenting the process it is MADE easy.

Re 1) It seems in addition to xfce4 and xfce4-goodies, must also explicitly install:
- xfce4-power-manager
- xfce4-notifyd
- xfce4-notes-plugin
- xfce4-screenshooter (PrtScrn program)

Re 5) the drop-down terminal, I discovered that they were made popular by Quake and a number of programs exist especially for this functionality! (though it doesn't seem that Manjaro has installed any of them?? Will determine what works and report back)
- terminus
- yeahconsole
- guake (for GNOME apparenty)
- yakuake (for KDE)

Tips on (3) and (4) are very much welcomed. Eg. am I mistaken on anything? etc

Last edited by organicode (2026-04-06 20:22:39)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,591

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

Re: #5 - xfce4-terminal has a drop-down mode as well:

xfce4-terminal --drop-down

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organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

Thanks Toz for the 'xfce4-terminal --drop-down' nugget! I missed it! I then typed 'shortcuts' in the Whisker menu and found 'Keyboard'... in Keyboard I found that Manjaro DOES USE 'xfce4-terminal --drop-down' for Ctrl+Alt+T. So that's ONE MYSTERY ALMOST FULLY SOLVED. Just one last thing on that...

...In Manjaro there's a button in the Panel tray with "Toggle Drop-down Terminal". Judging by this post this is part of Xfce. ie. Am I right to assume Manjaro did nothing for that? Thanks again.

Dear vm_x, after I reread my opening sentence about MATE or GNOME, I think I understand why you mentioned KDE... After a bit of exploration I can see that MATE is the desktop environment, MATE seems to be a (free-)product of GNOME. As an aside, because there may now be some confusion about Trisquel I best add the details that I *do* know, which contradicts slightly what you said, and that I agreed with because I didn't understand the scope of your reply. The Trisquel project itself has four variants. The main variant is the one I'm currently wanting to adapt, ie MATE. They have a snazzy KDE variant called Triskel (with a 'k'). a more bare-bones variant for less-powerful machines called Trisquel Mini which runs LXDE, and lastly a distro for kids called Sugar, All the variants, iirc are on their download page. I'm sorry for not being exact in my first post and opening up the forum to unnecessary quizzling.

Thanks awesome team.

Still interested in any ideas in solving #3 (matcha theme) and #4 (Breeze icons). I could be completely misremembering that Breeze had heaps of dependencies. I didn't have a chance to double-check that recently.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,591

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

...In Manjaro there's a button in the Panel tray with "Toggle Drop-down Terminal". Judging by this post this is part of Xfce. ie. Am I right to assume Manjaro did nothing for that? Thanks again.

I don't use Manjaro but I suppose they added it there to make it easier to toggle?

Re #3 and #4. Have a look at xfce4-look.org - I believe the package files are hosted on their file servers. Matcha is there for sure but I'm not sure if the full breeze icon set is there.

Edit: the Arch breeze package can be obtained from this page - click on the Download From Mirror link, uncompress the file, and copy over the Breeze icon sets from the uncompressed /usr/share/icons location to either ~/.icons or ~/.local/share/icons (create directories if they don't exist) or to /usr/share/icons if you intend to have all users access them.

Matcha isn't in the Arch repos and the AUR downloads directly from github.

Last edited by ToZ (2026-04-07 05:47:54)

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eriefisher

Wanderer

From: ON, Canada

Registered: 2008-10-25

Posts: 962

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

My favourite drop down terminal is Tilda. Been using it for quite some time. Highly configurable and a much cleaner look in my opinion.

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organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

Good news! I was wrong. Breeze has *NO* dependencies.

[Manjaro] added it... to make it easier"

If the terminal button isnt in the panel at all, I'll be fine with that actually, but I must add a little echo command to the desktop file so when the terminal is launched from the Whisker menu, people I give this to are learn they can hit Ctrl+Shift+T to use the drop-down terminal. I think that gets the best of both worlds 

Thanks, eriefisher for the suggestion for a "highly configurable and a much cleaner look" drop-down terminal. Will keep in mind.

> xfce4-look.org for Matcha (and Breeze) packages

Site seems to be down for hours, does it often go down?

A site alleges to have the Matcha Theme but page contents don't seem to load. An addon I trust is marking a request as problematic. I wont disable the addon because I see the site uses particular network services. Sigh I will continue looking for a solution.
For the sake of detailing the solution for anyone else who reads this the GTK2 engines' requirements seem to be:
1. GTK2 engine Murrine 0.98.1.1 or later.
2. GTK2 pixbuf engine or the gtk(2)-engines package.

On Trisquel (Debian) that means using the below:
sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-murrine gtk2-engines-pixbuf

Then when you can get your hands on the Matcha source. Install from source file by opening terminal at correct directory, and running:
./install.sh

# (use OPTION  -d, --dest DIR           To specify theme destination directory (Default: $HOME/.themes)

I will want the theme to be active for myself and future users on the system so I may need to do something extra.

Added later 49 min 19 s:
For the record, another identical sort of site with an identical problem

Im sure ill find a source for Matcha eventually.

organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

Hello everyone, I'm back online.

Currently scouring the web for MicroSlop GithubTM replacement servers/frontends/archivists, so i can get Matcha Theme without touching MicroSlop servers, I think I may have found a solution, but if anyone has a way to serve it in any lasting way, please do and chime in asap. Thanks.

EDIT: Managed to finally get what **I believe** is the latest version from the Internet Archive (IA) after some wrangling (for a while the IA wasn't processing my requests, bless. and now M$ are literally blocking the Internet Archive). It so happens that the IA already had a copy of these source files since August last year! So when I searched the IA's 'Software' category last week and it didn't include M$Github resluts when it probably could/should(?) have?.... Interesting. I may bring this up with an IA rep one day.

On my quest I came upon an archivalist group who seem to do volunteer work for archive.org(?), with hive-style software setup in Docker. This is not an endorsement, because I only skim read it and there was nothing about the software license on the page, but it does sound like something I've always been interested in, not just for archiving but my pet interest: replacing centralized search engines completely. Something hive-based like this may be a good starting point. But I digress...

In case anyone is interested in Matcha (without M$) in future:

(LEGACY WEB BROWSER) - https://web.archive.org/web/20260419004 … 2025-04-11

(TOR BROWSER) - https://web.archivep75mbjunhxc6x4j5mwjm … 2025-04-11

I will report on any tricky aspects to getting the Xfce (Manjaro-style) setup working on the actual Trisquel distro next. If needed.

Last edited by organicode (2026-04-19 02:22:39)

organicode

Member

Registered: 2026-04-01

Posts: 20

Re: Making a Trisquel Xfce (Manjaro-style)

UPDATE: Matcha appears to install very easily. Only tested on Trisquel (KDE) so far but after enabling it in the settings, relaunching most any GTK-based applications shows great improvement instantly.

Will likely have more info after fully replacing MATE and Mini (LXDE) DEs with Xfce in such MATE/LXDE variants of Trisquel and testing the effects.

The included installer script can be run as a normal user or sudo with expected results for each. It boggles my mind that maintainers are failing to package it to help gnu/linux look nice without touching a terminal, or MicroSlop GitHub servers.

Unrelated to Xfce to achieve full parity with Manjaro in KDE:

0) automate the enabling of the 'Matcha Sea' theme for all users on system by default.
1) adjust the window border to 2px; its now 1px, whereas Manjaro does a confident-looking 2px border. (on Xfce, I imagine achievable with https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pi … 61456]this)
2) ensure that the Top titlebar, in programs where CSD (Client-Side Decorations) is not in force, matches with the darker background that 'Matcha Sea' uses for (most) toolbars. (I may not need to do this, actually. I may have lightened the titlebar in the Breeze theme once while experimenting and forgot)

Added later 13 min 02 s:

My favourite drop down terminal is Tilda. Been using it for quite some time. Highly configurable and a much cleaner look in my opinion.

Almost forgot to mention, if your interest is in a cleaner look than default xfce4-terminal, you might love it combined with matcha theme. It really is night and day!!!

Again only tested on KDE Trisquel at this stage, but I doubt the amazingness will be lost on MATE or LXDE Trisquels.

Added later 47 min 36 s:
The following may be a dumb question in that I think it may be a Trisquel issue and nothing to do with xfce4-terminal, and I now suspect I may be able to just copy code from a '~/.bashrc' file to do it... especially given that...

Outside of Manjaro, all other distros don't seem to color the root users' prompt red. This is a UX thing for me. I like it to be obvious when I'm root, and I also like color to visually separate output from each command.

Upon thinking about this, based on past experience, I remembered I saw coloring for this prompt being set from the '~/.bashrc' file with the following code. This code is taken directly from a Manjaro ~/.bashrc file (see 'PS1' in it, yes the code for adding coloring is MESSY!):

if ${use_color} ; then
    # Enable colors for ls, etc.  Prefer ~/.dir_colors #64489
    if type -P dircolors >/dev/null ; then
        if [[ -f ~/.dir_colors ]] ; then
            eval $(dircolors -b ~/.dir_colors)
        elif [[ -f /etc/DIR_COLORS ]] ; then
            eval $(dircolors -b /etc/DIR_COLORS)
        fi
    fi

    if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
        PS1='\[\033[01;31m\][\h\[\033[01;36m\] \W\[\033[01;31m\]]\$\[\033[00m\] '
    else
        PS1='\[\033[01;32m\][\u@\h\[\033[01;37m\] \W\[\033[01;32m\]]\$\[\033[00m\] '
    fi

    alias ls='ls --color=auto'
    alias grep='grep --colour=auto'
    alias egrep='egrep --colour=auto'
    alias fgrep='fgrep --colour=auto'
else
    if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
        # show root@ when we don't have colors
        PS1='\u@\h \W \$ '
    else
        PS1='\u@\h \w \$ '
    fi
fi

If successful I'll add to the OP

Sometimes just formally addressing a problem by just starting to type it out can reveal the answer. We will see?