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Not to be that guy, but what bugs have you experienced in XFCE? I've been using XFCE since Fedora 14. With the recent upgrade to Fedora 30 (from 28), I noticed

Not to be that guy, but what bugs have you experienced in XFCE? I've been using XFCE since Fedora 14. With the recent upgrade to Fedora 30 (from 28), I noticed they addressed my only beef with the environment by adding a greatly-improved GUI for managing multiple displays. It can save profiles for work vs home displays and (almost always) toggles between them correctly. That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release. Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")

rhinoceraptor 7y ago
I don't even think it's bugs that Linux desktops have a problem with. The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.
- wayneftw 7y ago
  > The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability. That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API. That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux. If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.
dsego 7y ago
I was trying out xfce recently. When you orient the taskbar vertically and the clock stays vertical instead of changing to horizontal. This sort of stuff pisses me off so much. But I'm OCD like that.
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  It is quite impressive how far things have come. Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities. If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
  - dsego 7y ago
    That's true, but it's like a lot of little things add up. Windows 10 for example lost some of my files I was copying over from a linux drive, because ntfs is not case sensitive (by default?) and it didn't see there were two directories. So now the fear of losing more files is keeping me away from Windows.
    - diffeomorphism 7y ago
      Losing files is definitely not a little thing.
Hitton 7y ago
I've been using XFCE for about 8 years and one problem I had since beginning is how sessions (don't) work (restoring open windows after reboot). I have experienced it not saving session at all, not saving Thunar at all and saving Thunar only if it was started from Applications Menu, seemingly completely independently on settings. I have never managed to debug what was causing it. Currently it works correctly on my work computer and is buggy on my home PC, even though they are both same distro and version and I'm not aware of changing any setting that could affect that. That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.

rhinoceraptor 7y ago

I don't even think it's bugs that Linux desktops have a problem with. The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.

wayneftw 7y ago
> The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability. That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API. That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux. If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.

dsego 7y ago

I was trying out xfce recently. When you orient the taskbar vertically and the clock stays vertical instead of changing to horizontal. This sort of stuff pisses me off so much. But I'm OCD like that.

diffeomorphism 7y ago
It is quite impressive how far things have come. Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities. If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.
- dsego 7y ago
  That's true, but it's like a lot of little things add up. Windows 10 for example lost some of my files I was copying over from a linux drive, because ntfs is not case sensitive (by default?) and it didn't see there were two directories. So now the fear of losing more files is keeping me away from Windows.
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    Losing files is definitely not a little thing.

Hitton 7y ago

I've been using XFCE for about 8 years and one problem I had since beginning is how sessions (don't) work (restoring open windows after reboot). I have experienced it not saving session at all, not saving Thunar at all and saving Thunar only if it was started from Applications Menu, seemingly completely independently on settings. I have never managed to debug what was causing it. Currently it works correctly on my work computer and is buggy on my home PC, even though they are both same distro and version and I'm not aware of changing any setting that could affect that. That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.