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Author Topic: XFCE  (Read 5295 times)

torg

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XFCE
« on: 15 Mar 2006, 04:42 »
I got a slightly older laptop with not too much memory and i dont want to waste ressources by running the frickin' huge Gnome oder KDE on it.
So has anyone of you had any experiences with the XFCE Desktop environment?
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josiah

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XFCE
« Reply #1 on: 04 Apr 2006, 23:19 »
It works, but it's not as lightweight as EDE (Equinox), WindowMaker, Afterstep, and so on. Granted, the more you want lightweight, the less features and integration you will get; and conversely, the more features and integration you want, the less lightweight it will be. Granted, if all you wanted was a very lightweight environment with tons of functionality, you could always use something like 5dwm, but I suspect that most people would find this to be a bit on the ugly side of things.

As a halfway between the large destop environments and the barebones window managers, Xfce does pretty well, but I tend to get annoyed by little things about it. And I don't actually think that it's very lightweight... but maybe that's because I only ever use old computers that make Gnome and KDE feel too sluggish. I don't know. Maybe I'm just rambling.
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torg

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XFCE
« Reply #2 on: 05 Apr 2006, 06:28 »
Well, i worked with Enlightenment (e16) so far, but it lacks comfort when it comes to editing menus (and i often install and remove software) and for some strange reasons the epplets arent displayed correctly. as it is a laptop that it is running on i need to know the battery status and some other stuff.
Given that KDE run pretty smooth on my 1,3 ghz / 512 mb memory desktop comp i guess XFCE will do fine on the 1 ghz / 256mb laptop.
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josiah

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comfort?
« Reply #3 on: 08 Apr 2006, 18:23 »
menu-editing comfort? wow, you need ude or fvwm, or windowmaker! at least windowmaker has a gui for it, but ude and fvwm have easy text files that can be edited.  all of them respond to the debian/ubuntu menu program to automatically update the menus, but if you have to edit a config file, i don't know of any that are easier than ude. at least in that respect... ude makes other things much less easy :)

in all seriousness, though, xfce is probably what you're looking for. i just never seem to like desktop environments in general, and xfce seems to be infected by all the sorts of things that desktop environments do that seem to annoy me.
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josiah

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XFCE
« Reply #4 on: 08 Apr 2006, 18:24 »
actually, looking at your specs, i'd just advise you to spend a little money on extra ram and just install kde/gnome (whatever you prefer). neither one seems to do particularly well on less than 512mb ram, but ram's cheap.
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Curomo

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I like xfce
« Reply #5 on: 19 Apr 2006, 12:00 »
I run xcfe under gentoo on a 233mhz thinkpad with 168megs of ram.

I use it with firefox and xterm as my "I don't want to sit at a desk right now" machine and it works great.

The config files are all xml and easy to manipulate.
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nihilist

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XFCE
« Reply #6 on: 20 Apr 2006, 10:17 »
Hrm.  I generally use E17 or one of the boxes (blackbox, fluxbox, openbox).  E17 is kinda crappy with regards to menus; the boxes are a lot easier.  They're all pretty light, though.
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torg

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XFCE
« Reply #7 on: 21 Apr 2006, 01:12 »
Well, i tried xfce and after a week i couldn't stand it anymore, dont ask me why... so i am back to e16 and apart from the menu editing madness i am pretty happy with it. i linked all my users' .e16 diretories to my main users' directory so i have to care only for one set of config files.
as i am coding most of the time anyway i basically only use jedit or nano as editors (or monodevelop for mono stuff), xterm for compiling and firefox for the web and for reading documentations. so theres no need for all the fancy stuff that xfce has and e16 doesn't have. perhaps i will try one of the -boxes at some point.
Btw, does anyone know of some kind of documentation browser for gentoo? whenever i install some stuff i have to search by hand for the docs (which never are in the expected directories like /usr/share/doc but somewhere else...)
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josiah

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XFCE
« Reply #8 on: 24 Apr 2006, 00:08 »
two good places to start: the gentoo wiki, and the official documentation page (also on the wiki, but i think it links to all of the official documentation pages).

another place to look if you want to browse the portage tree online or look up use flags is gentoo-portage.

other package specific documentation is probably available at the package's main website, though this is not always the case. there are manpage readers that can be installed, for instance xman. gnome and kde both have help systems that make reading documentation a little more convenient, but i doubt that any of those options are really quite as simple or as flexible as looking through /usr/share/doc.
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torg

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XFCE
« Reply #9 on: 24 Apr 2006, 04:40 »
the problem is, that most documentation that i need (for Qt, GTK+, Pike and so on) is NOT in /usr/share/doc.
ok, will have to search for index.html files then....
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