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May 1, 2009

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty xfce gripes (, )

by fluffy at 9:57 AM
So, on both my netbook and my work system I've updated to Ubuntu 9.04 as of a few days ago, and I have a few gripes about some of the changed packages. Actually, I think all of my gripes are about the current version of xfce:
  • I really don't like the new window menu. The old one was nice and tiny and concise, with one- and two-word options like "stick" and "shade" and "send to." The new one is very wordy and verbose with a HUGE list of options, and the aforementioned ones have become "always on visible workspace" and "roll window up" and "move to another workspace." Who the hell thought this was a good idea, and more importantly, is there any way to change it back?
  • Why do new windows always pop up underneath existing windows? I always end up having to look at my taskbar to see if something actually happened as a result of my action (like opening the settings manager) and then click on it there to make it visible. Apparently the devs have a hard time understanding the issue, too.
  • Why can't it be consistent about new windows getting focus? If I press ^N in Thunderbird, the new message window pops up right under my cursor but the window isn't focused, and my typing still goes to the main Thunderbird window (which, by the way, does not handle random typing very well, since apparently every unmodified key is a shortcut in it). If I do ^X-5-f in Xemacs to open a file in a new window, the new window gets focused (and of course pops up beneath everything else). Basically, between the focus behavior and the window layering, I get a very inconsistent and annoying experience.
  • The xfce-panel notification area only allows square (in the "1:1 aspect" sense, not the "non-curved" sense) icons. Workrave uses a rectangular "icon" for its timer. So it breaks badly.
  • Of course I gave Gnome another shot but I still don't like it.
Oh, and while we're on the subject, I tried using Xnest to audition some alternate desktop managers, and found that many, many Linux apps now seem to have issues with running on anything other than the primary display, or having multiple instances on separate displays. The most hilarious bit was when I had gnome running on an Xnest, I killed Xnest, and then that instance of gnome decided to reattach itself to my main screen, so suddenly I had two conflicting desktop environments running on the same display. So much for X11's original encapsulated/instance-transparent design. Sigh.

I really wish it were feasible for me to just use a Mac at work. (I did for a while but some of our platform-specific tools don't really like running under VMs, and aren't quite portable enough to work well in OSX. Some people here have enough tenacity to get it working well enough for them but I'm not that patient.)

I seem to recall pwm had perfect focus behavior, plus a few other nice things (e.g. being able to bind any key to any action, which I used with my xmousekeys hack). Maybe I should see about running a bastardized pwm-plus-gnome-panel environment. (Of course it would have to be the older version of pwm before it got merged with ion, which was and always will be shit.) Or maybe fvwm2 (since pwm's tabs stuff is useless nowadays, even though it's the best tabbed-GUI implementation I've ever seen), or even twm.

Comments

#11981 05/01/2009 10:48 am
Argh. For now, Gnome's brokenness seems less bad than xfce's brokenness. Sigh.
#11982 05/01/2009 03:18 pm
What about KDE?
#11983 05/01/2009 03:41 pm
KDE3 was pretty decent and I liked it a lot better than Gnome, but KDE4 feels bloated and cumbersome, like they decided that Windows Vista would be the best thing to imitate.

Although I haven't tried it in a while (I think I last tried 4.0 which by all accounts should have never been officially released, and certainly shouldn't have been the official DE of Kubuntu 8.10 which was how I first tried it), so I'll install it now and see if I feel better about it now.
#11984 05/01/2009 04:08 pm
Well, KDE 4.2 is a lot more stable than 4.0 was, but it's still slow and obnoxious and unresponsive. Guess I'm sticking with Gnome for now (and then will probably try to get pwm working again, if I still have source for the last good version around somewhere).
#11986 05/02/2009 12:37 am
Have you thought about trying a tiling WM (other than Ion)? To avoid KDE 4 i switched to xmonad, and while if you want something that "just works" it would be terrible, it is lightweight and infinitely configurable and handles multiple monitors perfectly. It's also very keyboard oriented, which is may be good or bad for you i don't know.
#11987 05/02/2009 01:48 am
I'm rather liking Awesome myself.
#11988 05/02/2009 09:21 am
I'm not a fan of tiling WMs at all. Different apps need different window sizes. Sometimes I deal with transitory windows. Sometimes they overlap. There is nothing wrong with that. Not to mention that the mouse is an EXCELLENT device for selecting and rearranging elements on a flexible two-dimensional surface, and tiling WMs seem to want to remove that.

Also I have a strange screen geometry because I work on a laptop with an external monitor attached. (Another gripe is that X11 doesn't seem to have any way of cleanly dealing with it. Xinerama just barfs, and nVidia's "TwinView" thing works by making a virtual space of which a big chunk is inaccessible. Unfortunately I don't expect this to change anytime soon.) Also, some of the things I run (especially VMWare) really dislike a windowing environment which tells it how large to make its window.

In any case, whatever I do use, I need the ability to run at least a minimal gnome-panel for just the notification area, since there is legitimately useful stuff that runs there and which nothing else seems to do nearly as well on Linux these days.

(Also, to use xmonad it looks like I'd have to learn Haskell, and I left lambda calculus behind when I finished grad school.)
#11989 05/02/2009 01:46 pm
Heh OK, though just using Haskell for messing with the config file is less troublesome than it sounds. It's easy to use Gnome panels, and flexibility about how specific windows get treated is one of the best things.
I'm in the same boat screen geom wise (in the end i settled for TwinView -- yeah having the pointer wander out of sight is v. annoying).
#11990 05/02/2009 06:24 pm
Meh, gnome and xfce both seem to do so much impenetrable stuff in their startups that do very important things for the rest of the system. It's ridiculous that things like networking are dependent on the GUI. Meh.
#11991 05/03/2009 09:01 am
I've been running an unholy mix of kubuntu 8.04 and ubuntu 9.04, but various little things (like bluetooth, and then printing) have been broken at one time or another.