Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

[MurphCID]

Good point. I might try it again in the future, I *really* WANT to like XFCE, and it is probably just me being spoiled.

To be honest, if those icons were bothering you, you might like Xfce even less when we get the 4.16 version. They've moved to Client Side Decoration (CSD) for all the Xfce settings windows so making them look similar to other windows of the apps you've installed will be very difficult. In other words, the Xfce Window Manager theme won't affect the windows of Xfce-specific apps. You'll be able to close-ish, but it's going to take work. This is probably going to arrive in Mint 20.2 in about 6 months.

That is very good information. I really appreciate it. To me, the icons look very 1990'ish which is off putting to me. I really hope the developers listen to feedback from hard cord XFCE users. It seems Mate has the same problems(?)

[Green man]

Hello. I've been doing some experimenting with various backup utilities, and since I had 3+ backups, I decided to experiment with manually installing XFCE 4.16 on my Linux mint 20 system. For what it's worth, here's my impression as a fan of the XFCE desktop in general.

I'm not a fan of the client-side decorations, but there also not really a thorn in my side either. I prefer the traditional window manager decorations, but XFCE is still my favorite desktop with or without CSD.

In terms of efficiency, 4.16 does feel lighter and snappier than 4.14, although the drop in RAM usage is only about 40 to 60 MB on average. So, if someone is looking for a return to the resource use levels of 4.12, they're probably still going to be disappointed. Also, on my hardware, while Mate and XFCE tend to start out with similar resource usage now, XFCEs resource usage seems to increase more slowly as I use the system (although your mileage may vary).

Lastly, with the exception of the CSD, I really like the other changes they've implemented; improvements to thunar, power manager, and the default application selector etc.

That said, no pressure from me, I'm a big believer in the, use what works for you, approach to Linux. Just thought I'd share my experience after testing the upgrade. Hope this is helpful

[MrEen]

I'm a big believer in the, use what works for you, approach to Linux.

Well said!

And thanks for reporting your experience. I was worried a bit about CSD at first, but came to realize it won't impact much at all. My biggest worry was being able to see the window controls (min., max. and close) as so many themes have them so tiny for my eyes. When asking on the Xfce forum about this I was assured I'd have enough control to get this to my liking. But I do know some people are really picky about the looks of things, and CSD is definitely a step in the wrong direction for those people.

And for those who don't mind adding PPA's and such, there is libxfce4ui-nocsd to hopefully work around the CSD issue.

[Green man]

I also have a little bit of visual difficulty. Some of the features in the accessibility section of compiz really make things easier for me. Although I could probably switch back to xfwm now that that desktop zoom function is more reliable than it used to be. If you go the compiz route, there is a weird little trick so you don't end up with teeny tiny window titles. Go into where you switch the compositor, (it's desktop settings in the whisker menu or mint-desktop if you're launching it from a terminal or the run dialog) then, temporarily switch the window manager to metacity. Check the box that appears and says "use system font for title bar." Then, assuming your system font is nice and big, when you switch back to compiz your title bar should be nice and legible.

[defonotme]

I am personally using Xfce, however I feel that Cinnamon is more configurable from the times I've used it. Would love to see a Gnome version of Linux Mint, though!

[rossdv8]

My biggest worry was being able to see the window controls (min., max. and close) as so many themes have them so tiny for my eyes.

You can do all sorts of weird stuff with Xfce.
Mine is running Compiz.

This is Mint 20.1 Xfce (and Compiz) with a few tweaks because I like playing with translucency.
Ignore the spare Panels at the sides. This is a 55 inch screen and I use them. For some reason Xfce does auto-hide, but it doesn't do auto-get-it-back-for-me on the side Panels

Also, Cairo-Dock at the bottom works nicely.

However the reason I chimed it this time was because I also have the 'need bigger buttons' and 'need wider borders to grab and resize windows' since I had a brain injury that resulted in bleeding into a previously excellent eye.

So I took one of those stupid, but pretty Window Decorations that have nice Title Bars, but Max, Min and Close buttons that can almost never be found.
I stole a set of buttons from something else, and modified them (the original ones didn;t light up or anything to let me know my rat was over them.
They do now!

It is easy to do, and quite fun to explore stuff. If you are interested I can do a post explaining how.

For now, here's Mint 20.1 Xfce with Big Buttons and grabbable borders (shrunk to size/quality suitable for inline - using Thunar right click menu):

[MrEen]

Thanks Ross.

My worry was about the CSD in 4.16. I don't know if Compiz can do anything with those, at least without the use of libxfce4ui-nocsd. Does the Calculator window look similar to your other windows?

I found Divinorum perfect for my needs on the titlebar as can be seen in the images at the link in my sig. The buttons are black for inactive windows making it easy to tell where I am.

P.S. What's a guy with vision issues doing using window transparency? That's the first thing I turn off in the terminal on any install. I admit yours isn't too bad. But it's still distracting to me if nothing else.

[rossdv8]

Does the Calculator window look similar to your other windows?

My calculator is a little different from most people's but obviously I have other options. This one does Scientific and whatever as well, but I don;t need sine cos etc any more so I leave it in simple mode.

I came from years of Mint KDE, so I like theming. I have a few tweaks that let me use my KDE apps in Xfce with my old Plasma translucency. The eye thing was only on one eye, but what I really hate these days is trying to find a tiny little Dot, Line or Cross, hidden on a Title Bar - that is supposed to be something to click !

Hence the Big Buttons.

Anyway, if you need them I'm pretty sure I can help you add them into whatever your favourite Window Decoration is.
You'll just need to back up a couple of themes folders, copy some image files I can send you, spend a little time renaming a heap of the images for each of the decorations.

You will also need a script for Zenity (usually installed in Mint already) that will let you switch quickly to the new Window Decorations in Compiz. You can just use 'Appearance > Styles' if you use XFWM or similar instead of Compiz. I just like Compiz because it lets me do interesting stuff, and I'm old - and easily bored now I am no longer a tech / teacher.

Ok - Here's my calculator. Obviously it is Kcalc (from KDE) with translucent theming and text modified so I can see it.

Oops !
I cut off the important bit - the big buttons. I'll do another screenshot and resize..

OK - Done. I did 2 views of the calculator just because:

[MrEen]

Yeah, that one looks the same, but what about the default gnome-calculator? I'm asking here because it's an app that already uses CSD. Most gnome games are the same. gnome-mahjongg, gnome-sudoku, etc. Many of the settings windows in 4.16 are going to be like this.

[rossdv8]

Using XFCE, fixed the Big Buttons problem and made my window borders bigger long before I tried it with Compiz.
I can't help with Cinnamon -

I have always disliked Cinnamon because I find it painful to modify. It is a wonderful thing - I just never liked it. Tried it again just before I switched to Mint 20, and still don;t like it.

I don;t like switching Window Managers, because for some reason I lose a couple of setting in Compiz - like always placing new windows in the centre of the screen - but for the sake of this exercise, I'll switch back to plain old XFWM+compositing and the standard calculator.

OK - Done:

I had to install a couple of non-kde calculators. The one with the tiny Title Bars and the little blue dots for buttons is the one that comes with Xfce (I have not managed to re-theme it).

Kcalc of course is from KDE.
The other two are Qualculator and Galculator (Gnome) that I just installed from Synaptic.
The rather UGLY wide borders and Big Buttons are from my early experiments at modifying a theme (by adding highlights to the buttons and making them bigger).
I have since found a simpler way to make the borders wider without the horrible thick lines.

Anyway, you can see that in Xfce's XFWM Window Manager, You can add Big Buttons to 'most' things. But not all

[MurphCID]

Using XFCE, fixed the Big Buttons problem and made my window borders bigger long before I tried it with Compiz.
I can't help with Cinnamon -

I have always disliked Cinnamon because I find it painful to modify. It is a wonderful thing - I just never liked it. Tried it again just before I switched to Mint 20, and still don;t like it.

I don;t like switching Window Managers, because for some reason I lose a couple of setting in Compiz - like always placing new windows in the centre of the screen - but for the sake of this exercise, I'll switch back to plain old XFWM+compositing and the standard calculator.

OK - Done:

I had to install a couple of non-kde calculators. The one with the tiny Title Bars and the little blue dots for buttons is the one that comes with Xfce (I have not managed to re-theme it).

Kcalc of course is from KDE.
The other two are Qualculator and Galculator (Gnome) that I just installed from Synaptic.
The rather UGLY wide borders and Big Buttons are from my early experiments at modifying a theme (by adding highlights to the buttons and making them bigger).
I have since found a simpler way to make the borders wider without the horrible thick lines.

Anyway, you can see that in Xfce's XFWM Window Manager, You can add Big Buttons to 'most' things. But not all

Screenshot_calcs.jpg

How did you solve the big button issue? I would love to know.

[MrEen]

The one with the tiny Title Bars and the little blue dots for buttons is the one that comes with Xfce (I have not managed to re-theme it).

And that was the point I was trying to make. When Mint uses Xfce 4.16, all the Xfce settings windows will be using the same CSD as that Calculator window. There had been talk of forcing it everywhere it's available, but they backed down on that. And over on the Xfce forum, some users have already gone back to KDE over this.

Again, I was convinced I'd be able to comfortably use my machine with CSD, so my fears are gone. But visual consistency will also be gone, which I know matters a lot to some people. And some people aren't even going to notice, as they don't play with system stuff. Their browser and such will still look the same.

Anyway, I'm glad our discussion has lead to MurphCID asking for your Big Buttons solution. You might want to consider writing up a little tutorial on it eventually as I'm sure there are others that want the same. As I said, my theme is perfect for me, but it's an extremely simple Xfwm theme, and Xfwm themes don't work with CSD, they are simply ignored on CSD windows.

[michael-hi]

And that was the point I was trying to make. When Mint uses Xfce 4.16, all the Xfce settings windows will be using the same CSD as that Calculator window. There had been talk of forcing it everywhere it's available, but they backed down on that. And over on the Xfce forum, some users have already gone back to KDE over this.

Like everyone else I was wondering about the new Xfce 4.16 because I too dislike the CSD header bars and cannot see why they are pushing this Gnome look onto Xfce. So I've been trying out 4.16 on Xubuntu 20.04, and also on PCLinuxOS. The latter distro has already rolled it out to users in its regular updates and there don't seem to be any complaints in its forum (maybe because they have gtk3-nocsd installed by default!).

It's actually quite easy to get things looking the same as the previous version, bearing in mind some applications like Disks already had CSD anyway. One good thing is that Thunar appears to have escaped being subject to CSD in 4.16, although that could change in future of course. As far as I can tell, the only three adjustments needed to make 4.16 look OK are:

(1) Install gtk3-nocsd to add back the traditional-style title bar. Fortunately, this still seems to work in 4.16.

(2) Install the new libxfce4ui-nocsd to do the same for the settings windows which now have CSD in 4.16. When Xfce 4.16 comes to Mint, I hope they will make this package available in Mint's repositories.

(3) Untick the option DialogsUseHeader, which in 4.16 is a new line in the Xfce Settings Editor under xsettings. This reverses the unnecessary change in the GTK Open and Save dialogs whereby the Cancel and Open/Save buttons were switched from the bottom of the dialog to the header at the top.

So while I am still not impressed that Xfce is pushing CSD so hard, I am no longer concerned about 4.16. If you ignore the CSD aspect, 4.16 does have improvements in other respects. To sum up, I still prefer Xfce to Cinnamon.

Regarding Gnome Calculator, I installed this on Xubuntu with Xfce 4.16. As expected, provided you have gtk3-nocsd also installed, you get a title bar above the header.

[MrEen]

Awesome!

Thanks so much for that michael-hi! I was planning on building 4.16 from source to test this all out, but now I don't need to.

Regarding the libxfce4ui-nocsd package. I can't speak for the Mint devs about whether this will be available, but there will always be PPA's and sources available I'm sure such as here.

[rossdv8]

Looks like that would solve my Big Buttons problem without all the messing around.
I still haven't found a solution to that damned Calculator and a few other things that are copping a hiding from the forced CSD thing.

The no-csd solution isn't in the Mint 20 repos, nor in the Xubuntu Experimental PPA, so it looks like there's no 'lazy' solution yet..

[MrEen]

The no-csd solution isn't in the Mint 20 repos, nor in the Xubuntu Experimental PPA, so it looks like there's no 'lazy' solution yet..

It is in the PPA: https://launchpad.net/~xubuntu-dev/+arc ... /+packages

EDIT: A better link: https://launchpad.net/~xubuntu-dev/+arc ... perimental

[rossdv8]

Aha, thanks. I must have missed that somewhere.

The one that installed when I followed the earlier link was:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xubuntu-dev/ex ... tal/ubuntu focal main

and that one definitely won't install.

I'll try to purge it and start again with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/experimental
sudo apt-get update

Which is on the link you just posted and see if it makes a difference D)

Hmmm, that just installed exactly the same PPA.
I rolled back through some of the things that failed earlier (after apt-get update) and got:
E: Unable to locate package libxfce4ui-nocsd
gtk3-nocsd is already the newest version (3-1ubuntu1).

and this one that looks promising:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libxfce4ui-nocsd-2-0 : Depends: libxfce4util7 (>= 4.15.6) but 4.14.0-1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I say promising, because there were no broken packages before ! so it suggest I might be abe to fix something

Hopefully if nothing works I will still have my manual Big Buttons (Me being me I'm not taking a 20GB system snapshot again... )

UPDATE:
I fixed the broken package, but still got some errors. So I started manually removing some conflicting packages every time I got an error (mostly complaining because something with a 4.14 was going to be installed and something with 4.15 or above was needed).
That meant I finished up installing various packages using synaptic, that showed they were version 4.16, and deleting some others.

This might seem painful, but ir was far less painful than what I would have faced when initially Synaptic tole me it needed to delete most of Xfce4 (including Thunar, XFWM and almost everything that makes Xfce work !

Anyway, a reboot once it was don - it didn;t take all that long, it weas just fiddly - and I opened that pesky default Calendar..
And got MY Walnut themed Title Bar, and my nice BIG Rectangular Buttons.

Mark another success for the way this forum works. I chimed in simply to show that it was possible to get Big Visible Title Bar Buttons relatively easily, then Michael-hi suggested the Xubuntu Experimental PPA (I wouldn't have thought of looking there).

Now I've benefited Also - Thanks Heaps

Michael-hi's suggestion and getting it to work once I ironed out the mess in dependencies, meant that I could get some big button themes working using the
COMPIZ-Theme-Selector script
(for choosing Metascity Window Decorations and applying them across more or less everything running in Compiz)
meant I got something like the stuff below without having to manually edit themes

NOTE:
The Big Round Buttons GLOW a restrained sort of frosted Amber, Green and Red when a Window is ACTIVE.

My pet project will be to make them glow a nice bright Amber, Green and Red when the mouse cursor hovers over them.

[MrEen]

Thanks for that update rossdv8.

The confirmation I had received on the other forum was simply getting CSD windows to remain workable, but your stuff shows I don't even need to use it if I don't want to, which given the choice is now my preference.

I understand some people wanting "modern" layouts, but a lot of us old farts like title bars we can read and can give us a visual indication it's the active window, and menus we can click on (the hamburger doesn't count here) as we've worked with these for decades. We're not using phones here, so why the need to make a desktop look (and almost act) like a phone? I guess it's motivated more by trying to bring the younger generations over and/or the need to feel relevant, making changes just to be able to say, "Look, we did stuff!"

Xfce had a glacial pace of development for several years, and I liked that mostly. The new crew is far too gung ho for my liking. After 4.14 was released they jumped right in on getting 4.16 ready. And it appears they're making changes that can be for no other reason than making changes itself. Changing menu orders for example. Right clicking on the Desktop has always had Open in New Window at the top. Now they've moved it down. Thunar's sidebar had Devices, then Places, then Network. Now they've reversed the first two. And while that change actually makes sense in this case, it's really something that should have been done years ago, if ever.

Anyway, enough griping. As of now, I still prefer this DE on my system. I do look forward to the day I can try Cinnamon and expect decent performance though. I've never had luck with it so far.

[rossdv8]

Here's a quick screen shot with the default Gnome calculator you asked about, and the metacity theme changed to
Gradient-black-DP128-1.1 (downloaded from gnome-look.org, I think from memory)

Except even with its standard Big ROUND Buttons, and a more subdued title bar than my Wallnut with Rectangular Big Buttons, there was no difference when a button was selected.

So I modified the theme and made the Round buttons turn into Rectangular buttons when the mouse is hovered over them D)

Now I can have a subtle delicate coloured title bar, OR my walnut (like the wood trim in my old Humber Super Snipe I had in 1972) at the click of a mouse.

And I have learned a little more about modifying a Metacity theme. I thought I had fun modding GTK themes lol.

Left to Right:
Default Xfce calculator Window is background - unfocused
Kcalc (calculator from KDE) transparent theme, Window is background - unfocused

Default Gnome calculator (Galculator) Window is foreground - focused,
so the round buttons show their colour, and Minimize button and Close button are not focused,
but the middle Max/Restore button has gone Rectangular on mouse hover, to show it is Focused ready to press.

That the buttons only gained an almost invisible black cross when focused annoyed me, so making a button turn from Round to Rectangular was the simplest way I found to make focus really obvious D)

Michael-hi's help suggesting the PPA addition, then a bit of luck (and sideways thinking) working out why the PPA made no difference, and it all seems to have come together

For MurphDID and MrEen, if you like the subdued look and the large round buttons with the mod to make them actually do something when hovered over - and want a copy of this theme, the whole thing is about 57 kilobytes, and I'd happily send it to you. It's just a folder that needs to be copied into /home/.themes and into /usr/share/themes.

You'll have to get the Xubuntu experimental PPA stuff and libxfce4ui-nocsd worked out to make it work across all decorations. But even on the ones that simply pick it up, it looks ok.

[MurphCID]

But the taskbar icons are still huge.