Xfce Forum

Tip giver

Member

Registered: 2011-06-25

Posts: 1

A suggestion to improve the desktop look in Xfce 4.10

Hello guys. I heard that xfce team is going to improve the desktop look in 4.10 and would like to ask about your plans regarding icons' look.
As you know, text of icons on desktop currently have borders:

The point is that all modern DE's use borders-free icon style, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 do so. I do not like their being bloated, while Xfce is a light DE in my view. So why not to create ~/.gtkrc-2.0 with the following stuff, which would be enabled in vanilla Xfce 4.10 by default:

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
    XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

It takes no additional hardware resources and requires no dependencies, but makes desktop look far better.

Even if you prefer to stuck with the old icon style, I want to say thanks for such a great DE anyway!

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: A suggestion to improve the desktop look in Xfce 4.10

The desktop will be overhauled in 4.10 (it becomes a thunar plugin). Once we agreed how do this, a discussion will be stared on sig wiki how things should look.

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the98

Member

Registered: 2009-11-10

Posts: 62

Re: A suggestion to improve the desktop look in Xfce 4.10

It can also be a nice feature to be able to change the name of the default Desktop Icons. For instance, the home dir icon is called by default "Home", but maybe I'd like to change it to "The98's Home". It's a minor thing, but a nice thing to do.

Also, another nice feature that's not related to the desktop would be to include an application like gksu, that allows to enter your root password once and remember it thought the session. That way you don't have to depend that much on Gnome's packages.

Cheers.

Sideburns

Member

From: Trinidad, CO

Registered: 2011-03-30

Posts: 467

Website

Re: A suggestion to improve the desktop look in Xfce 4.10

While we're on the subject, some DEs allow you to have no wallpaper and a transparent desktop so that the root window is visible.  This lets you run something like xplanet in the root window giving you a gradually-changing image.  (Gnome, in particular, refuses to do this.)  Is something like this under consideration?

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boswell

Member

Registered: 2011-09-30

Posts: 1

Re: A suggestion to improve the desktop look in Xfce 4.10

The point is that all modern DE's use borders-free icon style, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 do so. I do not like their being bloated, while Xfce is a light DE in my view.

I would like to see the borderless icons as well. The other thing that would be nice is to be able to single-click on a desktop icon to open an application.

An excellent desktop - runs beautifully on my pentium iv.

The gnome and kde desktops I used with ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04 all had freezes and slowdowns on my pc.

I tried lubuntu, which ran well, but whatever desktop it used was too sparse for my liking.

Using xubuntu, with the xfce desktop, there is almost no feeling of it lacking in bells and whistles.