[SOLVED]Gnome packages in MintXFCE?!?

[phredbull]

Hi all,
After a bunch of updates, I noticed some weirdness, particularly, that my terminal is gnome-terminal, and when I open it, it starts out looking normal, but then the window shrinks itsself to a small size. But that's not my main concern. When I looked in Synaptic to uninstall it and replace it with xfce-terminal, I found a large number of Gnome packages, as seen here:

while many equivalent XFCE packages are not installed:

Is this how LinuxMint XFCE is set up, or are the Debian updates "Gnome-izing" my XFCE install?
Should I replace all possible Gnome packages with the XFCE equivalents for a more lightweight, "pure XFCE" experience, or would that be undoing the Mint-ification?
(I also found that it's not always easy to simply remove the unwanted packages, you have to pick through the web of dependencies.)

[cpatrick08]

Hi all,
After a bunch of updates, I noticed some weirdness, particularly, that my terminal is gnome-terminal, and when I open it, it starts out looking normal, but then the window shrinks itsself to a small size. But that's not my main concern. When I looked in Synaptic to uninstall it and replace it with xfce-terminal, I found a large number of Gnome packages, as seen here:

while many equivalent XFCE packages are not installed:

Is this how LinuxMint XFCE is set up, or are the Debian updates "Gnome-izing" my XFCE install?
Should I replace all possible Gnome packages with the XFCE equivalents for a more lightweight, "pure XFCE" experience, or would that be undoing the Mint-ification?
(I also found that it's not always easy to simply remove the unwanted packages, you have to pick through the web of dependencies.)

it wont undo the mint-ification if you replace gnome packages with xfce ones and yes he wanted it to be more like gnome
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1725
the last part on the blog post states
Enjoy!

Mint Xfce isn’t “trying” to be lightweight anymore. It’s snappier and uses less resources, while becoming more mainstream and offering more popular applications. We hope you’ll enjoy this new release. Thank you for using Linux Mint.

[phredbull]

Thanks for the clarification, I'll keep on with the updates! (That gnome-terminal thing is really weird though , never seen any window do that...)

[SimonTS]

It's not just me!!

I recently installed XFCE as I like the look of it and am not convinced by the way that Ubuntu is going and its impact in Mint 'Main'. I have exactly the same issue with terminal windows - they seem to shrink towards the tops left until they are about 8-10 characters wide. It is easy enough to expand them manually afterwards, but this is really annoying and it mucks up the messages that i love seeing.

[gavinhc]

After a bunch of updates, I noticed some weirdness, particularly, that my terminal is gnome-terminal, and when I open it, it starts out looking normal, but then the window shrinks itsself to a small size.

The issue with gnome-terminal shrinking is caused by the recent upgrade to the terminal from the 2.x branch to the 3.x branch. However since the themes included in Mint are still based on GTK2, the terminal window doesn't know how to properly size itself when it starts up. If you are opening the terminal from a launcher on the xfce-panel, you can give it command line arguments to tell it what size to open as, but I don't know how to do this off the top of my head (although I'm sure Google could help you).

The alternative is to replace gnome-terminal with xfce-terminal, which is what I have done. If I remember correctly, it wanted to replace a gnome meta package (gnome-core maybe), but you should be able to safely do that without harming your system.

[phredbull]

@Simon: Lol, when I saw your reply, I also thought, "It's not just me!"

@Gavin: Thank you for clearing this up, it's unsettling seeing the OS act weird and not knowing why! I'm going to switch to xfce-terminal now...