Linux Mint Forums

Hey all
I have been using mint about a year know.
I am using Mint 8 Gnome.
What would the benefits of going to XFCE be.
I have been wanting to try a different flavor of Mint.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks Reahjw6

reahjw6,
I'm a Mint Gnome user too.
I'm also very interested to see what XFCE is like.
Best thing to do,I think,is to download the ISO,check the MD5 sum,if all is well,burn the ISO to a CD on the slowest speed you have.
Then boot from the CD for a risk-free trial.
Enjoy

Thanks Oscar799
Did that about a week ago and very impressed.
I am not worried about any eye-candy although i built a fairly good speck PC a year ago that can handle it.
I have all eye candy i can turned off.
So XFCE looks a good choice.
It is amazing the choice given by Mint.
THANKS for your reply.
Reahjw6

Or you can always just add Xfce to your existing installation and then you'll have a choice of which desktop environment to log into. It certainly doesn't have to be one desktop or the other, you can keep your current desktop and add other desktop environments/window managers and try 'em out, of course. There's no reason why it has to be "either this desktop or that desktop."

I'm currently using Xfce in Mepis -- had it installed for a couple of months now alongside the default KDE -- but I've also used it in the past with Mint and with Ubuntu.

reahjw6 wrote:What would the benefits of going to XFCE be.

Xfce is considerably easier on system resources than Gnome is. In addition, the default app selection is easier on system resources as well. This essentially equates to having a system that's faster and capable of running on less than stellar hardware. It's important to note that Xfce still places a lot of emphasis on usability and is generally much better featured and easier to navigate than minimalist environments such as Fluxbox and LXDE. A good many people prefer Xfce to Gnome regardless of the performance benefits.

Thanks all for your fast replies.
MALsPa Cheers for that.
I have a look in synaptic and give that ago.
Reahjw6

I was speaking earlier with another user about the current "controversy" over at Ubuntu about the placement of the minimize/maximize/close buttons at the top of the window. It's actually not all that difficult to change the placement of those buttons in GNOME, but if you're familiar with Xfce you already know that Xfce has an easy GUI for moving those window buttons around (in the Window Manager Settings).

Another thing I like about Xfce is that you can choose to have "floating" panels that you can drag around the window to whatever position you want them to be in. I don't know why I like that so much, but I do.

I also like setting up and personalizing the Xfce menu. I like to edit it manually with KWrite or another text editor (here the file is ~/.config/xfce4/desktop/menu.xml) but there's a nice GUI for editing it, too.

I know some folks who were KDE users but who didn't want to make the move to KDE4, and instead decided to go with Xfce, and are happy with the change.

Just adding XFCE know.
Looking forward to playing around.
Thanks all

Using XFCE now.
Very slick I like it a lot.
Only problem can not open up anything with wine.
Have no problems in gnome.
Any suggestions.
Reahjw6