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Xfce and GTK© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Despite my previous lengthy list of improvement suggestions, I like the overall Zenwalk philosophy. I also like the underlying Slackware philosophy, although nobody is going to convince me that Slackware is easy for novices or the feint of heart. I have some standing to voice that opinion because I’ve been using Slackware for several years and I maintain Slackware as my only distro on my boxes. Zenwalk will remain on my test box, but my opinion about Xfce is another story. Try as I might, I do not like Xfce. I find my Windows NT4 desktop more useable and intuitive than Xfce. KDE shines in that same comparison. Not that I haven’t tried. I never have been warm to the overall GTK look-and-feel—the aesthetics. This is a personal opinion. Many people do like the basic GTK look-and-feel. And after several days of Xfce, I convinced myself that I could learn to tolerate the GTK look-and-feel. Yes, I prefer my old NT4 desktop. In KDE, although I use the Crystal SVG icon set, I nonetheless use the KDE Classic desktop style. I prefer simple and not fancy. Some people will argue that my preference for the NT4 desktop is merely a reaction of familiarity. Okay, I’ll accept that my mental pathways have become accustomed to certain sensory input patterns. So what alienates me toward Xfce? Usability. First and foremost, the GTK file picker dialog boxes throw me into a mental panic. I freeze every time I pop open one of those boxes. The design screams to me NIH (Not Invented Here)! File picker dialog boxes are intuitive in all versions of Windows. They are intuitive on Macs. They are intuitive in KDE. They all tend to look and function the same regardless of the operating system. They are not intuitive in GTK. GTK file pickers suck—plain and simple. You either agree or disagree, I don’t care. Another GTK distraction, and I suspect I might learn how to modify this should I persist, is the mouse pointer cursor when dragging the bottom right corner of a window or box. The standard GTK uses an amateurish, ugly, and disorienting right-angle metaphor icon. Provide a mouse pointer option that uses the standard double-arrow. I use such a pointer in NT4 and KDE. Another distraction is the order of the OK and Cancel buttons. How do I globally reverse them? I’m too accustomed—and comfortable—to NT4 and KDE. Old dogs and new tricks and all that. The debate is not about which approach is correct, but about my preferences. That is all. I never discovered a way to increase the text box size with the GDM login manager. I found the gdmsetup tool, but the tool provided no method to modify the text box size. The text box size is way too small on my 1280 x 1024 LCD display. I have a pet peeve about useless and wasteful messages appearing in the .xsession-errors file. Every time I started Xfce I received messages about not being able to support composite graphics. I know that—I run older hardware. I would not enable that component even if my video card supported that option. Too much bloat for older hardware. How do I disable those useless error messages? I don’t know. Although not directly related to Xfce, I simply do not understand the GIMP. I’m no artist. I never will acclimate to the GIMP. Floating toolbars and palettes simply make me go into a dizzy spell. I immediately panic when I see floating toolbars and palettes. Similarly with Dia. For basic bitmap image manipulation a simple paint program is all I need. When I perform a screen grab and I want to crop that image for a documentation project, I want to quickly open a paint program, paste, crop, and save. A task that should take about 30 seconds. Simply opening GIMP takes that long and then all of those floating toolbars and palettes paralyze me—much like the deer in the headlight beams. For more complicated image manipulation I have been patiently watching Krita development. Krita might not yet provide some of the tools found in GIMP or Adobe Photoshop, but for my unsophisticated needs is more than capable—and all without floating toolbars and palettes. And for basic screen grab cropping, KolourPaint is more than sufficient. Another irritant is screen grabs. In Windows I perform screen grabs using the Print Screen and Alt Print Screen keys. Simple—and has been for years. I do likewise in KDE, although KSnapshot adds an additional layer of flexibility. How do I perform screen grabs in Xfce the same way? I am not going to open GIMP to perform a simple screen grab! Yet, should I learn to tolerate the overall GTK look-and-feel, should I discover alternate themes and mouse pointers to provide a GTK look that is more calming to my eyes and nerves, should the GTK developers somehow produce usable file picker dialog boxes, Xfce still left me empty. A significant distraction is the lack of support for system event sounds. Yes, I prefer a quiet office when I work, but basic system sound events need not be loud or obtrusive, just provide some basic audio feedback support. Using Xfce is living in a silent surreal world. After several days, despite a growing and changing attitude that I might learn to tolerate the GTK look-and feel, I could not adapt to not having some basic system event sounds. Xfce provides no way to force applications to remember their window position and placement. Some windows I want to open maximized, but they do not remember this sizing. Some programs I want to open in a ‘normal” window, but placed at a certain position every time. I found this shortcoming so distracting that I realized I simply did not want to use Xfce. Having windows open in the upper left corner is frustrating and distracting. The X terminal window packaged with Xfce is only at version 0.2 and is actually well done for such a low version number. The tool is functional, but unlike the KDE Konsole, there is no way to add bookmarks. I found no way to remember the window size and placement. The terminal did come packaged with Shift-Ctrl-C and Shift-Ctrl-V for copying and pasting text, shortcuts I long ago added to Konsole, but for whatever reason I could not get the font display to look the same as in Konsole, despite using the same font. (More on the probable reason later.) I detest iconic views in my file manager yet this seems to be the standard moronic dumbed-down way to package file managers these days. I prefer a Detailed Tree List View. I learned how to provide a detailed file view, but there is no detailed tree view. I also learned how to provide a location bar and Up/Back button. Thunar does support bookmarks, but to me in an awkward manner. There are two possible directory panes for the left panel: 1) a directory tree or a shortcuts listing. The shortcut listing is how users add bookmarks. Well, that is fine, but in that mode a user then no longer enjoys the directory tree view. This is another example of developers forcing users into an either-or mode rather than provide both options. In Konqueror I have both my directory tree in the left pane and my bookmarks in my pull-down menus. Konqueror also provides a shortcut toolbar. I prefer the Windows model for a file manager. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. That is how I have configured Konqueror in KDE. I want a directory tree in the left pane and the files listed in the right pane. But I want an expandable file list to create a tree structure. Thunar provides a straight file list and as the user drills down the directory, the directory tree in the left panel expands. But often that is not what I want. I want to see the relationship of files with respect to each other. I do not want to look back-and-forth between panes. Thunar needs a tree-based detailed file view. Although Thunar remembers its windows size, the program does not remember its window placement. Oddly, Thunar is designed to display file modification dates in some sort of cutesy dumbed-down mode using syntax such as Today and Yesterday rather than display the actual date. Thunar provides no way to include the time portion of the modification stamp. Lastly, I never discovered any Help files for Thunar when pressing the F1 key. I never discovered how to get launch feedback to work. I found the option box in the Properties section of each applet, but there remained no visual feedback with the mouse pointer. I found no way to disable the tool tips from popping up when I hover the mouse over the icons in the Task List. I already can read the program name from each Task List button. The tool tips are redundant—and disruptive and irritating. Although not directly a GTK, Xfce, or Zenwalk issue, I do not like the fonts. I always use a version of Freetype with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled because I use only True Type fonts. That one little change makes all the difference in how my desktop looks. But without that enhancement, I struggled looking at the Xfce desktop. All fonts suffered from this shortcoming. But finally the kicker reason for abandoning Xfce. A significant reason I decided to investigate Xfce was the many claims of how Xfce was a light-weight desktop—and fast. Xfce is supposed to be ideal for people using older hardware. I use older hardware and I see no reason to spend money on new hardware when my NT4 operating system flies on hardware that remains perfectly functional and operable. I expect any GNU/Linux desktop to do likewise. Although I like and prefer KDE, KDE never has been a speed demon on my boxes. KDE has always been, at best, adequate. I’ve done a lot of tweaking, and each release of KDE provides just a tad improvement with speed. Nothing glorious, for sure, but KDE 3.5.5 is the fastest KDE I’ve used. KDE certainly is usable, but NT4 remains my speed champion. Recently I installed the 2.6.17.13 kernel that is packaged with Slackware 11.0. I did not enable udev or hotplugging or any of that overhead. My boxes are old and the hardware is static. Although boot times with the 2.6.17.13 kernel are about the same as with the 2.4.33.3 kernel, running the KDE desktop with 2.6.17.13 is snappier. I noticed this the first time I loaded KDE with the 2.6.17.13 kernel. KDE loads faster than with 2.4.33.3. Konqueror opens faster. KDE has become more enjoyable (except for the way the Kate developers have totally mucked up Kate with sessions). And with this noticeable increase in desktop performance, Xfce provided me no improvement. Xfce loaded faster than KDE, but that is all. Thunar opened only barely faster than my Konqueror file manager profile. To me, Konsole seems to open faster than the Xfce terminal. So not only do I not prefer the GTK look-and-feel, not only do I detest GTK file pickers, not only is the GIMP a usability nightmare, not only are Thunar and the terminal not as developed as KDE, the once long-held claim that Xfce is much faster than KDE is, after all, a fallacy. Sorry to break the news like that folks, but that is how things stand with my older hardware. After installing the 2.6.17.13 kernel, another KDE nuisance disappeared for me. The K menus all popped open immediately, with no delay. The Xfce menus always opened with a noticeable delay. At least before 2.6.17.13 the KDE menus opened immediately after that very first usage delay, but not the Xfce menus. They always paused before opening. The Xfce Setting sub-menu was always notoriously slow to open. And I never discovered how to modify the Xfce menus. I think this might be more of a Zenwalk problem, however. The menu editor opens, but there are only a few menu items to edit. And yes, I opened the menu editor as root. Many people like Xfce and those people all should install and enjoy Xfce. I admit that I am meticulous in my computing needs and wants. Perhaps if Thunar and the terminal improved, and the overall desktop provided the speed differences claimed by so many, and the GTK file picker dialog boxes mysteriously improved, I might one day take another look at Xfce. But that day is not today. I plan to install another Slackware derivative distro: Vector Linux. I want to see if my issues with Xfce and GTK are global or distro-specific. And I want to see how the Vector people have done with KDE on a 2.6.x kernel. Finis. |
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