hoppimike wrote:Here are mine!
Only small things
2) I change the shortcuts next to it to my three most used apps - Thunar, Firefox and Pidgin
(just drag them there from the Mint Menu and delete whatever you want too)
Yep, I made a shortcut to Firefox too, but also Thunar, with the exception that my Thunar shortcuts (there are two) open specific directories: 1. Videos 2. Music
Htpc, after all.
hoppimike wrote:
3) I stop the bluetooth app initializing so it disappears from the tray
Ditto, except I also did some other things to kill bluetooth. I'm always reading about new ways to eliminate Bluetooth from Linux. It is so integrated into modern distros that there's more than one setting to kill it, seems to me at least. I thought removing it from Startup would be enough but then I found all these errors in some log file about Bluetooth.
hoppimike wrote:
4) I install Electric Sheep as my screensaver as I'm really not too big on the default ones
I like slideshow since I have 14,ooo high res pictures in my collection.
hoppimike wrote:
5) I edit the ~/.gtkrc-xfce and change line 2 from:
Code: Select all
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
to
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XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 100
to give the icon text a nice translucent white border.
I wish there were a way to disable tooltips on the desktop in Xfce. Doesn't seem like anything works. So when the mouse pointer hovers over Firefox, a huge tooltip obscures one-fourth the screen (800x600) telling me the extremely important information that Firefox is an Internet browser and that the launcher was created on such-and-such a date and time. I spent a couple hours researching how to kill tooltips in Xfce, but nothing worked out so I just leave it for now. I hope a future version of Xfce either disables tooltips altogether or provides an option for it. I think that most people know what their apps are. They don't need reminders. Although that depends on one's age I guess. When I get to be ninety or so then I might feel differently.
hoppimike wrote:7) Some other minor tweaks like disabling some of the icon types on the desktop (like mounted filesystems)
Never done that one, because periodically I connect drives to perform a complete clone. Everyone should do this really; hard drives crash. I downloaded Clonezilla's little Linux distro recently--they came out with a new version a week or two ago--and plan to try it out tonight, now that I've got my Xfce desktop all nice and spiffy.
It would be a real heartache if the drive crashed after so many hours customizing the install. I always keep a couple drives spare just for cloning.
hoppimike wrote:
Is there anything you do? ^^
Yeah I was working on Xfce for about 20 hrs give or take, tweaking and customizing everything. You know Thunar requires customization if you want to open a file or a directory with your media player. For me, that media player is ---> VLC <--- for both music and video. I was surprised that Thunar did not have "Open With..." built in. I can't agree with those who say Thunar is slow though. It copied 1.6 TB in just 3 hrs. The only real beef I have with Thunar is when moving files
on the same partition, I suspect it actually does a delete and copy, rather than a real move, because moves take a long time with Thunar, whereas they are fast in Windows.
I like how Xfce automounts drives for me, that is nice. I don't recall installing pysdm either.
I got rid of the pop-up bottom panel. I know some people like it, but for me, the little tiny panel at the top of the screen is enough. I think the bottom panel is redundant, takes up too much space and also creates problems in applications like Firefox when you have a horizontal scrollbar.
One of the best tweaks I made was to add a "Show Desktop" shortcut to the top panel. That is such a time-saver. I was missing that, and I'm so glad I found out how to add it to the panel. Can be done through the gui, just click on Settings and Panel customization. Panel 0 is the top panel I think, and panel 1 is the bottom.
Took me a while to get the screensaver and slideshow configured on Xfce, as well, but at least it works.
Overall I'm sticking with Xfce because to me it seems the most stable, fast and functional option at this time. If you read the developer's notes, it is clear they didn't play games last release, they just polished and improved the product, which is what the users want, or at least that's what I want, stability and bug fixes, all the time. The most innovation I want in a desktop is hardware drivers and hardware support. I don't see anything wrong in "copying Windows" as it were, because Windows copied Mac, and Mac copied Xerox, and so on.
I could be wrong but I believe that htpc performance is better on an Xfce-based desktop. At any rate I do hope that Linux Mint Xfce continues as a flavor of Linux Mint, because I like the Linux Mint menu and other nice little features.