Switching from Gnome to Xfce

Posted on: Friday 4 November 2011 /
Categories: Nerd Stuff

I have been using an Ubuntu desktop for quite some time, running Gnome 2.30 on Lucid for the past year-and-a-half. However, with the recent developments in the Gnome- and Ubuntu worlds (everybody hating Unity and Gnome3, and Gnome 2 disappearing from Ubuntu altogether), I decided to check out Xfce and see if that would work for me.

I installed Xfce 4.8 from a PPA. Easy enough. Xfce looks nice enough, and it gives you plenty of options to configure. Besides, if you have a working Gnome environment, some things will just move with you to Xfce. For example, I have been using Avant Window Navigator in Gnome, and it was started in Xfce just the same.

I tweaked the following things to make Xfce behave the way I like it:

  • Because Awn works at the bottom of the screen, I moved Xfce’s Panel1 to the top of the screen, much like in Gnome.
  • Xfce4-settings-helper didn’t seem to be started on login, so things like keyboard shortcuts didn’t work. I start it manually in a script.
  • I use two monitors, with a double-width desktop, and the Xfce display settings don’t let me specify anything about that; as soon as xfce4-settings-helper is runing, the two screens are merely a mirror of each other. However, with xfce4-settings-editor, it is possible to specify the position. I want display ‘VGA1’ to have a horizontal offset of 1920 pixels, because both my displays are 1920×1080, so I set Displays -> Default -> VGA1 -> Position -> X to ‘1920’.
  • Interaction between ssh, ssh-agent and ssh-askpass doesn’t seem to work 100%. Every time I start an ssh session, I am asked for my key’s passphrase. To work around this, I start ‘ssh-add < /dev/null’ from the same script I mentioned above. This seems to prime the ssh-agent correctly.
  • In Gnome, I used an applet called ‘Sticky Notes’. While there is an alternative in Xfce, no doubt, I still had lots of notes on my desktop that contained infomation that I didn’t want to lose. So I installed ‘xfce4-xfapplet-plugin’, which allows you to run Gnome applets in an Xfce panel. I can now keep on using ‘Sticky Notes’ for as long as I want 🙂

The script that I mentioned above (twice), is just this:

xfce4-settings-helper
#xrandr --output HDMI2 --auto --output VGA1 --auto --right-of HDMI2
ssh-add < /dev/null

The ‘xrandr’ invocation is no longer necessary since I set the X-offset for VGA1 with xfce4-settings-editor. This script is saved somewhere  in my homedir, and is run on session-start, by adding it to the list of startup applications via Settings -> Session and Startup -> Application Autostart.

Now, let’s see where it goes 🙂

P.S. I also gave KDE a try, but it was way too slow!