Xfce Forum

daffyduck

Member

Registered: 2026-06-25

Posts: 57

Hello!

Been using XFCE for 6 years.
It's the best DE.

I hope that transition to Xfwl will be completed as soon as possible (hopefully before the New Year). I really want to transition to Wayland, due to increased security it offers. And, all major distros have transitioned to Wayland already.
I agree with the decision to pay a developer specifically for that task, and using the smithay library is a good choice, especially since smithay supports CPU compositing, AFAIK, and that feature is important to me.

Keep your focus on important features.

I tried Gnome and KDE on several occasions, but I didn't like them.

- Gnome is too mouse-centered, doesn't respect M$ Windows standards well enough, and I don't like grouping of windows in the taskbar, I like every window to be visible separately in the taskbar. To me, it looks like Gnome is trying to resemble Macintosh DE, which I dislike. And, I mostly dislike CSD, I usually turn those off if possible. I really tried to like CSD, but having a hamburger button without even providing a standard keyboard shortcut for it is absolutely unacceptable to me.

- KDE was repeatedly crashing, its settings were counter-intuitive, it was very SLOW to load (over 20 seconds on one machine, while Xfce takes 5 seconds on that same machine), and I grow tired of disabling hundreds of unnecessary visual effects that are applied by default in KDE.

- Also, Xfce used much less memory than both of those.

Came here to submit a new xfwm4 theme. Well, if it is good enough.
I will post in themes / screenshots.

Well, why not a quick review of XFCE, since I'm writing this post.

============ The review: ==============

- Simple, usable, fast, mostly intuitive. Offers most important customizations, just the ones that are usually required.
- I like that it starts in a few seconds after login at login manager
- I like that you don't spend unnecessary development time on kitchy features like transition animations.

- I use XFCE with a dark theme (very dark gray, not black)

- I like that "scaling" works mostly well in Xfce, and it is simple to adjust, so it is usable on my medium-DPI displays. I scale the apps by changing font DPI "Custom DPI setting" to around 140, and that mostly works perfectly. I do not use "Window scaling", because it is too coarse.
- However, the problem with the "Custom DPI setting" is that it is placed under "Fonts" tab, and it is not named intuitively. It should have been named "DPI scaling", "Monitor DPI size scaling", or something alike.

- I used Xfwm for a long time, in no-compositing mode, because I don't like the idea that GPU is rendering my desktop, for both stability and security reasons, i.e. I want to minimize the trusted computing base "TCB")
- recently I switched to picom compositor, because I noticed it tears less in no-GPU mode, i.e. picom can properly composit with vsync in CPU mode, while Xfwm can't.

- One usability issue with Xfwm was windows thumbnails/previews when task-switching with Alt-tab, where it can do them only in "Compositing" mode, i.e. via GPU, and even then I couldn't find a way to adjust the size of previews, or adjust whether the icon gets displayed together with the preview, and what text is displayed alongside it. Compiz had much better task switchers than Xfwm.

- It seems to be impossible to select MULTIPLE shortcuts for the same action in Xfwm.

- The main problems for me were around keyboard shortcuts and reducing the usage of a mouse.
- The "Super" key to open Start Menu (Whisker) menu is mostly unusable for me, because XFCE can't differentiate between press-release of that key (for opening Whisker menu), and key combos involving the Super key. Well, perhaps that was recently fixed, I'm not on the latest XFCE yet.

- In Thunar, it is very hard to navigate to the left side pane just by the keyboard. The "tab" key cycles through too many GUI elements to be easily usable for that action. Either use the Tab key to cycle between at most 3 elements, or (worse option) choose some convenient shortcut for selecting left and right main panels.

- In various Xfce applications, make better usage of arrow keys up/down/left/right to enable the user to select the desired element with the keyboard

- XFCE is using the computer's beeper (motherboard speaker) to indicate various user-input errors, particularly in "Settings" application, and in "Logout" (xfce4-session-logout). Don't do that. It is extremely annoying. Leave the MB beeper only when user specifically asks for it to be used. The reason why users don't complain is that 99% of modern motherboards have no beeper by default, but it can usually be easily plugged in, they still provide the connector for it.

- I'm of the opinion that it is better to copy standard shortcuts from M$ Windows, then to comply to Gnome guidelines. Here are GNOME shortcuts, for the reference:
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/reference/keyboard.html

Most users are better accustomed to Windows shortcuts, and they use Windows either at work or on other computers. The Gnome recommendations are really bad. For example, they recommend things like Shift-Ctrl-Z for "redo" action. That is plain stupid: just try pressing that combo, I find it extremely awkward.
- Therefore, for tiling widows, it should be (as in M$ Windows):
Ctrl-Super-Up    for "Tile Window to the top"
Ctrl-Super-Down for "Tile Window to the bottom"
Ctrl-Super-Left for "Tile Window to the left"
Ctrl-Super-Right for "Tile Window to the right"
Super-E for opening the file manager (thunar)
Super-T for opening a terminal emulator (Xfce5-terminal)
Super-D for show/unshow desktop
F3         Find Next
Shift-F3 Find Previous

- Alt-F1 and Alt-F2 shortcuts should be left free because those are standard shortcuts for selecting filesystems/mountpoints in dual-pane file managers. Fortunately, it is really easy to disable those two shortcuts in Xfce. I would guess that almost noone is using them anyway.

- The other main problems with Xfce were HiDPI and dark theme support, which I fixed a long time ago by making my own Xfwm themes.

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              .&_ oO_&-..--.
            ( __         -/..--'      daffyduck
              . ' -__- '

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,644

Re: Hello!

Hello and welcome.

I hope that transition to Xfwl will be completed as soon as possible (hopefully before the New Year).

xfwl4 just got released as an alpha release. It can be installed and tested now by those that are interested, but as the developer noted, it is still missing some pieces. I think it might be optimistic to expect a completed release by the new year, however, there is a dedicated developer working on this.

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