|
|
||
Xfce and GTK Revisited© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I have had Slackware 12.0 installed for a while now. I have not run into any traumatic issues or problems. Of course, I’m only a basic office user and tinker, use old hardware, and I still use my NT4 system for my primary needs and wants. Therefore I expect no such issues. However, curiosity continues to grasp me and I have continued tinkering with Xfce. As I wrote in my previous entry, my original opinion about Xfce remains mostly intact, although I have softened some more. Although somewhat a familiarity issue, I still find my Windows NT4 desktop more useable and configurable than Xfce. KDE still shines in that same comparison. As I demonstrated in my previous journal entry, part of my dissatisfaction with Xfce was based upon several configuration issues and I solved them several weeks ago. With those kinds of bumps out of the way I could focus more on learning how to use Xfce. Some people will argue that Xfce is designed to be a light-weight desktop environment and should not and will not contain all that KDE offers. The Xfce development community also is much smaller than the KDE or Windows population and cannot provide a similar effort. I accept these distinctions, but there remain some issues with Xfce that keep me distanced. Originally I believed that eventually I could convince myself to learn to tolerate and even like the GTK look-and-feel. I believe this happening slowly, although I have yet to find a theme and widget scheme that tickles me. This is a personal opinion. I prefer my old “boring” NT4 desktop and in KDE I prefer the simple KDE Classic widget style and KDE 2 window decorations. I would like to find something similar in Xfce, but investigating themes is a time consuming activity. I do not like the metallic look that so many themes today are based. Unlike my short testing period with Zenwalk, fonts are not a problem with my Slackware version of Xfce. I use True Type fonts only and with each new Slackware release I always recompile the Freetype package with the Bytecode Interpreter enabled. I could have done likewise with Zenwalk but did not. Nonetheless, the difference in font appearance contributes to me being more receptive toward Xfce. I do admit that, overall, Xfce provides a sharp and crisp looking desktop. With the font display issue resolved I’m sure that helped me enjoy Xfce more than with my shorter experience with Zenwalk. Still, now that I am more familiar with Xfce, what continues to irritate or rankle me? I still dislike the GTK file picker dialog boxes. I endured a purposeful and concentrated effort to better understand the design, and now I can use GTK file picker boxes without total panic. I still dislike the design. I also notice that GTK file picker dialog boxes respond slower than KDE or Windows equivalents. I don’t know why. Yet at least now I can live with the GTK boxes. One significant relief was solving the mouse cursor theme problem. For example, when dragging the bottom right corner of a window or box the default GTK mouse pointer cursor uses an amateurish, ugly, and disorienting right-angle icon metaphor. I accept that mouse cursor design is a personal issue and all I’m saying is that I loathe the default GTK mouse theme. I’m sure many people enjoy that design. After some patient searching I found a flat white mouse cursor theme using the well-tested classic design known to Windows users. I now use this mouse theme in KDE too. I think using a mouse cursor theme that no longer distracts me helped me overcome part of my dislike for the GTK file picker boxes as well as improve my attitude toward Xfce. There was one caveat with this new theme. I had to tweak the xterm cursor image because I use a black background in Konsole and Terminal in Xfce. The original cursor image was all black and “disappeared” when moved across the black terminal screen. So I learned a few tidbit skills about generating mouse cursors and I am happy with my oh-so minor modification. Additionally, by using this same mouse cursor theme in KDE as well as Xfce, I no longer have to tolerate the ugly default GTK mouse cursor when using GTK apps in KDE. I learned how to manage GTK file picker bookmarks. However, I dislike the default location in my home directory and that I cannot easily define a master bookmarks file for all users. My solution was to soft link my user version to a master version located in my /usr/local/etc directory. I still don’t grok 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 know about editing the gtkrc-2.0 file to include gtk-alternative-button-order = 1, but thus far I have had mixed success with that approach. I have not solved the problem of the useless Xfce messages appearing in the .xsession-errors file. How do I disable those useless error messages? I don’t know. Yes, I know, the messages are harmless — get a life and all that, but there should be a way to disable those messages. I admit that Xfce generates far fewer X session error messages than KDE. I have yet to see an X Error: BadAccess message from Xfce, unlike KDE, which generates dozens of such messages in a session. Another Xfce shortcoming 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, and KSnapshot adds an additional layer of flexibility. How do I perform screen grabs in Xfce the same way? I am not going to open the bloated GIMP to perform a simple screen grab. Actually, I do not even have that program installed, so much do I dislike the interface. I think the primary challenge is that Xfce does not fully support global keybindings. Perhaps there is a work-around solution, but I have yet to find one that is as easy or elegant as simply pressing the Print Screen button. That raises another shortcoming of Xfce: providing a better way to configure desktop keybindings. KDE is great at that. I’m unsure what I might have done differently lately, but I now have access to the keyboard shortcuts list as a non-root user. However, support is limited to 10 key bindings and the configuration tool is not exactly intuitive. The trick is to create a new keybinding theme. Unlike with Zenwalk or rather, my own previous inexperience, launch feedback does function properly in the Slackware version of Xfce. I suppose I could learn to run Xfce (or KDE or Windows) without system event sounds. I doubt this is high on the Xfce developers’ list. I’m not asking for a sound for every conceivable system event, just some basic system sound events. Basic nominal audio feedback support for various events such as basic system dialog boxes, or starting and exiting Xfce. Xfce provides no way to force applications to remember their window size or placement. The only work-around I have discovered is to maximize the xfwm placement ratio (System Settings, Window Manager Tweaks, Placement). This forces all non full-screen windows to open centered rather than hodge-podge around the desktop. This is better than nothing, and far less distracting than the hodge-podge approach, but I still prefer to have certain apps open at a certain location on my desktop. This seems odd to me — isn’t a window manager supposed to manage windows? Similarly, for a while I could not figure out how to open the Xfce terminal at a specified window size. One trick is to use the --geometry option. However, that option is dependent upon the font size — doable but I prefer otherwise, and is available only as a command line option. Additionally, opening a second terminal window (Ctrl-Shift-N) from within the terminal results in the default size. Opening a second tabbed session (Ctrl-Shift-T) avoids that problem but then the tab bar appears suddenly and alters the window size, which is somewhat distracting. Eventually I discovered a MiscDefaultGeometry option in the terminalrc configuration file, which solved the windows size problem. I also discovered another “hidden” option MiscAlwaysShowTabs, which solved the tab bar issue. I hate “hidden” features! Another quirk is when I open Midnight Commander (MC) within the Xfce terminal, and then press F10 to exit MC, the function key instead opens the File menu. This is a default Xfce shortcut key. Strangely, there is a terminal preferences option to specifically disable the F10 key, and another option to disable all Alt menu access keys too. The terminal did come preconfigured with Shift-Ctrl-C and Shift-Ctrl-V for copying and pasting text, shortcuts I long ago added to Konsole. Adjusting the terminal display font adding some icing to the cake. Unlike Konsole, I have yet to discover how to add bookmarks. In all, I could adopt the Xfce terminal although bookmarks is a much needed option. The Thunar file manager does remember its window size, but like all Xfce apps 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. Unlike my Zenwalk experience, the Help files for Thunar work just fine when pressing the F1 key. Unfortunately, the files are HTML and that means waiting a dozen seconds or more for Firefox to open. I have grown accustomed to Konqueror’s Detailed Tree List View, but Thunar provides no such option. Thunar does support bookmarks, basically using the standard local .gtk-bookmarks file. The side bar can be toggled between shortcut and tree mode, but Thunar never remembers the tree state when toggling. I much prefer the Konqueror design, which provides bookmarks as a menu option and then the side bar is sued only for the file tree. I’m certain Thunar will improve with future releases, but for now Thunar lacks these basic design features. I do like the red warning bar that appears when using Thunar as root. Unrelated to Xfce, I compiled and tested the Xfe file manager. Looking much like the classic Windows file manager, I found the tool adequate and more configurable than its Windows predecessor. I would like to customize the bookmarks with more user-friendly tags rather than raw file paths, but at least the bookmarks are a menu item. Like Thunar, Xfe does not provide a tree option when using the detailed view mode in the file pane. The Windows file manager lacks this option too, so I suppose I am simply spoiled by Konqueror providing this option. However, Xfe does provide a dual file pane option to simplify drag-and-drop operations between directories. I have yet to discover that Thunar supports dual panes. Yes, I can open a second instance of Thunar — doable I guess. Xfe does not start any faster than a preloaded Konqueror and is about a second slower than Thunar, but this is due to the Fox libraries needing to be loaded upon launching. Xfce supports preloading KDE and GNOME libraries and supporting other libraries would be handy to improve performance. Otherwise Xfe is as fast and responsive as advertised and more flexible than Thunar. Theme choices, however, are few and frustrating — and ugly. I also cannot get fonts to display as crisply as I do in KDE and Xfce. I wonder whether Xfe or the Fox libraries supports the Freetype font package. I remain unchanged in my opinion that NT4 is faster and more responsive than Xfce. Although Xfce startup and shutdown is much faster than KDE, I find desktop performance only marginally faster than KDE. Firefox opens just as slowly in Xfce as in KDE, although perhaps using XUL crap as an example is a poor choice. Mousepad, about as usable and limited as Notepad, opens almost immediately. I will have to explore further before forming a long-term opinion about desktop speed. Regardless I still do not understand why Windows 3.11 with the Norton Desktop was faster on a 486 box with a measly 16 MB of RAM than today’s desktop environments. The hardware today is many times more faster and capable than that old hardware. Modern software is bulkier and more bloated and the hardware has improved proportionally more than the software. KDE 3.5.7 on Slackware 12 with the 2.6.21.5 kernel is the fastest my old boxes have run GNU/Linux, but NT4 remains my speed champion. Xfce is somewhere in between. I remain curious about Xfce because although I dislike the GTK file picker dialog boxes, there seems to be a wider software selection for GTK apps than KDE apps. Important to me is an overall consistent look-and-feel for my desktop. KDE provides such an environment and I prefer to avoid GTK apps when in KDE. Like KDE, using a desktop such as Xfce would provide me a consistent look-and-feel. However, having been solely a KDE person for several years has left me ignorant of what is available in the GTK world of software. I have accepted that I am more or less stuck with the XUL crap known as Firefox. Email poses a challenge for me. I don’t care what the religious zealots think or scream, I like some rich text formatting in my emails, which by today’s standards means HTML. I am not going to adopt another XUL based monster therefore Thunderbird is not a viable option. I tested Thunderbird under Windows and did not like the design and the app was slow. Perhaps I might experience different results in Xfce and GTK, but I am suspicious. Sylpheed does not support HTML mail. Evolution might be an option although I have no need for the additional personal information manager (PIM) bloat. I’m not a developer and I am going to look at the tabbed Geany as a fancy KATE text editor replacement. Most of my need for syntax highlighting is with HTML web pages and shell scripts. Bluefish might be an option too. I suppose I could use Abiword for simple document files, but so much of my writing is dependant upon my Word 97 templates and my work environment there is dependent upon the many macros I have written through the years. So Word 97 will remain, even if in a virtual environment. Yet there is so much to learn with a new desktop environment, such as how to handle file associations the way I want. I continue with KDE but I now admit that Xfce could one day attract me more enthusiastically if there are additional improvements — or I learn various reasonable work-arounds. For example, although Xfce supports a system Autostart directory there is no similar directory to run scripts or programs at shutdown. A work-around might be to move those tasks from the KDE shutdown directory to my .bash_logout script. I also do not like the way Xfce clutters the root of my home directory with the .recently-used.xbel file. Store that file out of site somewhere in the user’s .config directory. Of course, those kinds of “nits” are minor. I certainly want to see better window size and placement management, although I can live with the current work-around. The Xfce menus still open with a noticeable delay and perhaps I have something misconfigured. Improved keybindings would be nice too. There is a growing third-party community to provide Xfce add-ons. There should be little doubt that Xfce is becoming more popular and will improve as that support grows. A few of the third-party packages interest me, yet overall I am inclined to think that the Xfce environment does not pack as much punch as KDE. I suppose if I focused for a few weeks on seriously improving and tweaking Xfce that I might obtain a desktop environment as flexible and useful as KDE — or close to that and equivalent to my NT4 system. I will remain open to Xfce and GTK apps. I am somewhat surprised that my attitude toward Xfce has softened the past many weeks. Mastering GTK file picker boxes has helped, as well as a new mouse cursor theme and a dose of patience. Perhaps I should continue my original 2007 journey of investigating Slackware derivative distros. Zenwalk has a new release. There also is Wolvix and Absolute. Like Zenwalk, Wolvix is a Xfce/GTK oriented system. Like Zenwalk, Wolvix provides a nice Control Panel interface for various configuration tools not packaged with the stock Slackware. Perhaps tinkering with those two systems might provide me a better feel for how the GTK world functions and clicks. Absolute uses IceWM, but also provides several Control Panel configuration tools. Finis. Next: Zenwalk 4.8 |
||