XFCE is great too but far closer to that ancient description and harder to use than Cinnamon
Many people think this way because the way it is usually shipped is extremely vanilla, but it offers a lot of configuration and customization; more than Cinnamon. XFCE supports fully configurable keyboard shortcuts and quarter window tiling. I’m pretty sure the last time I tried Cinnamon you couldn’t just instantly place a window in a quarter tile with one keyboard shortcut, and it had to be done with two separate shortcuts. That is just one example of many.
And it can be made to look every bit as good as any of the other major DEs while staying out of the way and having sane defaults. The best example that I can point to without setting it up yourself is to boot into a live Manjaro XFCE and see what that looks like… it looks just as modern as any other DE out there right now. However you feel about Manjaro, they did a good job theming XFCE.
Could you help me set whisker-menu to open on meta key release? This is default behavior on every other DE, yet seems completely unsupported on XFCE. It needs to explicitly be on key release, otherwise it breaks every single keyboard shortcut that relies on the meta key.
One thing that does work, in Keyboard > Application Shortcuts set xfce4-popup-whiskermenu to Alt+F1 then your super key will still open Whisker but only on a quick release, it will not open if you hold it down which allows you to assign other shortcuts to it. See this thread for more information, there may be one additional step you have to take if it doesn’t work for you.
I have whisker set to open on Ctrl+Space because that is what I got used to using when I was a Windows user and using Launchy. But I hear you, there should be a better way to set it to on release, and there has been a lot of discussion over it. It looks like there are a couple patches for libxfce4ui available that do set it to on release but I have not used them.
I’m glad there’s discussion for it at least. This is a really annoying thing for me. Otherwise it pretty much nails most things for me. I have some other small issues, but those don’t prevent swapping over to it. But right now it competes with dash-to-panel extension on Gnome for me, and Gnome is winning there. But once XFCE does have that, it’s nice jumping to it for consistently, since you know your work flow won’t change even from a year from now.
Many people think this way because the way it is usually shipped is extremely vanilla, but it offers a lot of configuration and customization; more than Cinnamon. XFCE supports fully configurable keyboard shortcuts and quarter window tiling. I’m pretty sure the last time I tried Cinnamon you couldn’t just instantly place a window in a quarter tile with one keyboard shortcut, and it had to be done with two separate shortcuts. That is just one example of many.
And it can be made to look every bit as good as any of the other major DEs while staying out of the way and having sane defaults. The best example that I can point to without setting it up yourself is to boot into a live Manjaro XFCE and see what that looks like… it looks just as modern as any other DE out there right now. However you feel about Manjaro, they did a good job theming XFCE.
Could you help me set whisker-menu to open on meta key release? This is default behavior on every other DE, yet seems completely unsupported on XFCE. It needs to explicitly be on key release, otherwise it breaks every single keyboard shortcut that relies on the meta key.
One thing that does work, in Keyboard > Application Shortcuts set xfce4-popup-whiskermenu to Alt+F1 then your super key will still open Whisker but only on a quick release, it will not open if you hold it down which allows you to assign other shortcuts to it. See this thread for more information, there may be one additional step you have to take if it doesn’t work for you.
I have whisker set to open on Ctrl+Space because that is what I got used to using when I was a Windows user and using Launchy. But I hear you, there should be a better way to set it to on release, and there has been a lot of discussion over it. It looks like there are a couple patches for libxfce4ui available that do set it to on release but I have not used them.
I’m glad there’s discussion for it at least. This is a really annoying thing for me. Otherwise it pretty much nails most things for me. I have some other small issues, but those don’t prevent swapping over to it. But right now it competes with dash-to-panel extension on Gnome for me, and Gnome is winning there. But once XFCE does have that, it’s nice jumping to it for consistently, since you know your work flow won’t change even from a year from now.
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