You can make XFCE look however you'd like. Yes, perhaps at the default, it looks Win-ish but you can change that easily. The GTK3/GTK2 "insanity", yeah I hate to say find a theme that has both in the same package, because that is not going away any time soon.

On that note a compatibility layer would have been nice with the note "This is to be nice, but it's not our priority in maintaining it" this way you wouldn't need both GTK3 and GTK2 libs installed. But, meh, not going to happen.

Yeah because they're looking at what the other ("commercial?") OSes are doing and so those DE devs are trying to emulate them to capture part of the market. I think it would be really great if these devs could figure out how to balance the gee-whiz eye candy stuff of the commercial OSes and keep the functionality of a desktop people are expecting. Or, even listen to their users (ahem devs on a DE that start with with "GN").

Gnome 3 I dont use, and unity....well, nobody needs to see me swear online LOL.

But I dont have any issues with functionality with KDE4. What functionality problems/issues do you have with KDE4?

No, I'm not suggesting that KDE4 is perfect, or even close to it. ;) Honestly, I'm probably just going to go back to Xfce on my main desktop in the next few weeks...

Have a look here: http://xfce-look.org/

@m_yates: This is a duplication of what has been said before, but Debian is not to blame.

And if you think none of the available DE/WM is matching your preferences, try Windows 8 for a few minutes. Just to make you realize how happy you are using Linux. What a mess, what a mess.

jlinkels

The Xfce folks decided to postpone moving to gtk3 in favor of getting their version 4.10 working correctly. Will be going to gtk3 with 4.12.

4.10 was supposed to be the version used in Wheezy but was having trouble with the panel during freeze and Wheezy went with 4.8 which I thought was a smart move for Stable.

Watch the backports for that version. I am pretty sure it should show up.

Thunar 1.6.3 is what I am using here in Sid and also in Jessie installs. It also has the ability to use tabs. I like being able to use separate windows but tabs are handy too.

The panel has always been able to be placed anywhere you want it (them) but now they have a "deskbar" option so that icons in a verticle panel are horizontal if verticle panels blow your skirt up.

I actually use an antique looking setup because I am a grumpy geezer. You can actually customize Xfce quite a bit to get a more modern look.

I think it is actually the DE (ignoring the "boxes") with the most potential for the flexibility to fit a lot of different form factors.

We have a large screen TV that I am tempted to hook up to someday with Xfce and use a top and center screen horizontal panel with a verticle in the center to quarter the screen for 4 window positions on that large sreen.

Don't have a touch screen but I think the Xfce panel is about as good as it gets for being usable on a touch screen. The Unity and Gnome Shell "launchers" are not configurable enough as far as where you may actually want them.

Of coarse if you want total flexibility and configurablity the boxes are great. I really like OpenBox and it is currently my fall back if Xfce decides to get as flaky as KDE, Gnome and Unity. You can make it do anything.

m_yates

its time to introduce you to the dark side of the force youngling

debian sid
with modest protection of partition images supplied by fsarchiver if I make a mistake

with modest protection of update (and config) script smxi from smxi.org

with a beautiful WM of Enlightenment (in sid called e17)

I would show you my desktop but its a little pornographic and you are a youngling

not forgetting the liquorix kernel from liquorix.net

no rant intended

grins like a sheep

It is bloated with so much useless stuff that even with 4GB of RAM, it is still sluggish. Several KDE applications are great, but the whole package is too cumbersome for my liking.

I use KDE for the guest account on my machines. Works fine on a dualcore with 4GB RAM. KDE is pretty modular, if there is functionality that you don't need just disable it.

When KDE 4 first came out, it was lacking a lot of features that 3.5 had. It seemed to focus more on prettiness at first. After a while KDE 4 has just as many if not more features than 3.5. But if you really miss 3.5 that much, check out the Trinity Desktop Environment. Debian is not to blame for this.

So its not a functionality issue, just a dislike of DEs you find 'bloated'. ;)

Yes I dislike "full-featured" DEs, but that is irrelevant. If a GUI is slow because it is bloated, that is a functionality issue.

Weird, my laptop that has 4 GB ram runs a full KDE desktop and isn't in the least bit sluggish.

I got a whole gig of memory and a dual core 2ghz processor and I can load the basic kde environment and only be using about 130mb of memory according to the ps_mem.py tool. That doesn't seem very bloaty to me. Obviously that is tweaked a good bit...


It is rarely the desktop items itself but rather the associated started/running apps that are bloaty along with effects/candy adding to it as well.

So,,, you took a "bad rant" and made it worse? :|

KDE (very changeable ;)) and Xfce are still my favorites just change them. Now I log in CLI only for anything nonlinear like here now (but if I need more than cheesy graphics :D) I almost always have at lest 3 WMs for most installs. http://xwinman.org/basics.php
http://www.engadget.com/2012/10/30/h...manager-linux/

I have LXDE as the main desktop on Wheezy, it works perfectly and I now use lightdm as the window manager/login screen.

I pretty much gave up on XFCE because the 32-bit version kept crashing X when logging out, restarting X and brought me back to the login screen each time when I wanted to either reboot or shutdown. This is a long-term problem (bug) going back several years, occurred with more than one Linux distro and it was apparently never fixed. Although on 64-bit, XFCE correctly shuts down.