Debating on moving to XFCE

Linux Distributions Debian
1

Hello,

Really just putting my thoughts down onto the screen. I’m a gnome user and actually used Debian KDE for some time before but my go to has always been Gnome. I’m actually finding myself a little bored with gnome for some reason.

I’ve used xfce before with Manjaro and really enjoyed using it but this will be raw Debian xfce with no tweaks or customisations as such I think.

Loading the live usb, I’ve noticed screen tearing on webpages but I recall that being a simple fix as that has happened on xfce for me before.

Those that choose xfce over other DEs, what is your reasoning? Is it the pure customisation?

2

Welcome to the forum!

The DE war is pretty pointless. Generally if you don’t need to save resources, just pick your poison. Some DEs might have certain workflows or tweaks that improve your workflow, e.g. GNOME Shell does a lot with touchpad gestures, I think KDE has some tricks too. XFCE is a bit more barebones, but solid and fits certain computing usage styles.

To get rid of screen tearing, you need to install and enable an Xorg compositor. I don’t remember what window manager XFCE uses, but I think you can install and run compton to fix your screen tearing.

The thing GNOME Shell is good at, is that it’s running wayland (well, if you’re on a new enough release), so screen tearing is basically non-existent (same for other wayland WMs, like KDE plasma_wayland session, sway, hyperland, river, enlightenment and so on).

At some point, I really liked the workflow of Plasma with Latte-Dock, which allows you to use the win / super key with 1 through 0 and z through . in order to switch between programs (default plasma task manager / bar only allows you 1 through 0). Combined with workspaces, it gets really productive.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for your informative reply.

I will see how it goes. I’m comfortable with all of the flavours to be honest. It’s nice to get others perspective on them as there is always something you miss or discover that ends up being useful!

I found a setting in settings editor under xfm4 you set the value from auto to glx if I recall and that has sorted the screen tearing.

Need to work out how to install a new font now as featured in the Linux guys video. Got the .sh file but got a bit stuck late last night!

4

Hello,
As per me XFCE is known for being lightweight and resource-efficient, making it ideal for older or less powerful hardware. Yes, customization options through themes, panel configurations, and plugins, allowing users to tailor their desktop experience extensively but it renowned for its stability and reliability, making it a popular choice among users who prioritize these qualities over cutting-edge features.

5

Thought I would talk about my setup.
I have a laptop, with 25kWh battery, 512 GB SSD and 8 GiB ram (out of which only ~6GiB is usable for some reason).

So for me power consumption and memory consumption are important factors, power being the most important.

What I have done is install a full blown debian desktop (I chose lxqt, but it’s better to get gnome, I will get in to why soon) then make a another user with sudo group (called it dwm) then setup dwm (window manager, gnome is a different window manager for example).

Now I have set the the default to multi-user.target instead of graphical.target, which simply means it boots into console instead of the default window manager, then I run startx with dwm.

If you like tinkering, this is a great option, there is alot of documentation and forums dedicated to this stuff, for most stuff I do (working in terminal, programming, etc.) you don’t need all the stuff provided by the defaults, but in case you need it set the default target back reboot and you have 'em all.

The reason I suggest installing a fullblown debian and gnome in perticular is because of it’s popularity, it will have the best working stuff, the lxqt’s network app doesn’t work few days after installing for me, I had to install NetworkManager (app used by old gnome).

You get convenience and efficiency, at the cost of storage, for me it’s a pretty great deal.

I have never used xfce, it seems pretty popular, you should try it and see how it goes. Use it for atleast a week, install it besides your existing system, it’s a lot easier than it sounds.

6

Some laptops dedicate a certain amount of RAM for the graphics card. I’m not sure how to tweak this, though.

For those running Debian and looking to try other desktops just for fun, I can very much recommend going through this playlist:

2 Likes
7

In the bios settings usually (sometimes that’s locked out).

XFCE is more “feature-full” than LXDE / LXQt, with the latter not having a lot of GUI options for a lot of stuff. XFCE also has more programs under its umbrella, while LX* makes much use of already existing lightweight programs (of course, you can still use these on XFCE, but XFCE will come with more lightweight options bundled), e.g. xfce-notes, mousepad, ristretto etc.

You can use these under LXDE, but under LXQt you’d need to find either lightweight qt alternatives (although you can do GTK theming in LXQt), or install the really lightweight stuff (notepadqq, qalculate or maybe qalculate-qt, sxiv etc.).

2 Likes
8

I love XFCE. Its my main choice. I deploy this DE to almost all of my machine. However when I do chose to do so, I make sure the distro Im on rices it out of the box. So I could never use xfce on debian. XFCE right out of the box is horribly windows 95 imagery. If the maintainers of the distro have modified it to look sleek and nice, then yeah, i’ll choose it. If not, i’ll simply opt for a different DE simply because vanilla XFCE is sooo outdated looking.
I was a kde guy but they eliminated workspaces and opted to use a different method I forget what its called. So xfce was the go to. gnome has very little options to fine tune it to your workflow, or any workflow for that matter unless coupled with extensions, which would be halfway decent if the extensions simply didnt break per update.

9

Welcome to the forum!

I don’t think Plasma ever got rid of workspaces. They added the “Activities” tab, which is an addition to workspaces. It’s basically an overlay, you have “work activities,” which sets your workspaces, programs and even available menus in a way you define, then “play activities,” which removes all the work programs from the workspaces and rearranges the workspaces and your available programs (enables the games menu entry in the launcher for example), then you have “web activities” where you get your email, calendar, browsers and other stuff presented to you on your workspaces and so on.

The idea is actually a great design choice, if you need such a workflow. But it’s massively overkill for most people.

You can theme XFCE easily. Just get themes like XFwaita (adwaita for xfce), McOS / CTLina, BaZik, Flat Remix GTK, Pop Xfwm and my favorites Arc / Arc-Dark / Arc-Darker. There’s other non-flat themes, but these are probably what most people would look for (they’re pretty modern).

Disclaimer: I don’t use either plasma or xfce, I use a window manager and don’t theme anything besides my status bar and desktop background that I rarely get to see anyway (basically on startup and shutdown and sometimes when I launch a program on a new workspace).