Feedback of Xfce booth at Chemnitzer Linux Days 2010

[Doug Laidlaw]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010 08:53:53 am Enrico Tröger wrote:
> Hey guys,
> 
> as you might know, we (Fabian Nowak, Christoph Wickert, Dominic Hopf,
> Michael Spahn, Simon Wesp and me) spent the last weekend at the
> Chemnitzer Linux days and provided a Xfce booth to represent the Xfce
> project.
> 
> The Chemnitzer Linux Days are an annual big Linux event in Germany, one
> of the biggest and most important ones actually.
> This year, there was also a Xfce booth in the exhibitors area. It was
> organised by us (see above) to represent the project.
> 
> After all, it was a great success I'd say. There were lots of people
> asking quite general questions like 'how is Xfce better than Gnome' and
> some asked about new features in the coming Xfce 4.8 release. Others
> asked specific questions about problems they had with their system or
> how to improve things. Generally spoken, there was a high interest in
> Xfce at all. Some visitors even told how bad the new KDE 4 is (in
> their opinion) and that they are about to switch over to Xfce :).
> 
> To make you believe we were there, here is the evidence :).
> http://www.christoph-wickert.de/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/clt2010-xfce.jpg
> 
> Don't wonder, the photo has been taking on Sunday evening after we
> dismantled the booth. Before, we had two posters [1], one designed and
> printed by Fabian, a bunch of Xfce stickers [2] and a couple of live
> and installation CDs/DVDs sponsored by Fedora (thanks).
> Additionally, we had two notebooks, one for visitors to get in touch
> with Xfce (i.e. visitors could just use it to get a feeling) and the
> other one showing a presentation[3] about what makes Xfce the best
> desktop environment.
> 
> Oh, and we had nice looking t-shirts with the mouse on the front and
> the whole Xfce logo on the back. Again, organised by Fabian, thanks.
> 
> 
> We wrote down some of the questions, suggestions and feature requests
> we got from visitors. They don't have to be commented on by anyone, they
> should just be seen as users' comments and can be used as directives --
> or not used as such.
> 
> - resolve Nvidia-Xrandr-Xfwm4-Maximizing problem with different cloned
> screens in presentation mode
> - actions in the desktop corners: show desktop/all apps; expose
> - tabs in Thunar
> - more keyboard shortcuts: in xfce4-quit dialog and other dialogs
> - zoom or jump icons in panel when hovering
> - make applications dockable into systray by some click or directions
> - if not already possible: indicate desktop/display to start windows on,
> such as "DESKTOP=3 thunar"
> - xfce4 menueditor (actually asked for quite a few times)
> - window decoration in appearance settings -- or at least a hyperlink
> - more setup possibilities such as more key-press functionality (sorry,
> don't remember exactly what the user wanted to have available, seems
> like pressing more than one second and obtaining functionality?)
> - more dark themes -- Fabian's proposal: direct link to xfce-look.org
> from the appearance settings?
> 
> Another important issue is that due to this flat panel setup in a
> windows-like manner without using the launchers as menus, people are
> completely unaware of the capability of the launcher to emulate menus.
> We made some people happy by telling them; older users told us they
> liked the old default setups with the big panels, one reason being that
> it differentiated Xfce from the other desktops.
> 
> Finally, people like the patch obtainable from
> http://xfce.fabiannowak.de/xfce4-panel/ for the launchers because it
> gives much more freedom and heavily improves on the launcher dialog; it
> might even be packaged in some distributions.
> 
> Just to let you know :).
> 
> [1] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/poster06.png
> [2] http://uvena.de/tmp/xfce-laptop-sticker.svg
> [3] http://fabiannowak.de/CLT/beamer_presentation.pdf
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> The Chemnitzer Linux Days Xfce crew   :)
> 
Congratulations and well done!  

Doug.