Xfce Default Configuration

[Wes Gregg]

User installs a distro and either dislikes its DE or it mercilessly tortures his/her hardware (Cinnamon), so the user asks about alternatives - or complains and receives a suggestion to try a DE that doesn't want accelerated graphics even to just display the desktop. User, as directed, looks in Synaptic Package Manager (etc.), finds XFCE, and installs it. But either the distro doesn't provide a "customized" experience or else the user missed the meta-package that would have provided it.

Or maybe the user's friend set up the computer. User knows just enough to run the distro's updater and run apps from the DE's menu. Then an update changes his mountain landscape background to "an ugly-*** mouse, and not even a real mouse, something that looks like it was used on a computer 30 years ago" and calls me to rant. No big deal, and when I finished laughing at his rather brutal - but, I suppose, brutally honest (looks great as an icon-sized graphic, say, as a button to open the menu, but increased in size enough to become the desktop's background? Not so much, lol.) description, I was able to quickly explain how he could get his preferred desktop background back. However, it might not be a bad idea to consider adding some text beside the mouse that explains how to change the image. Especially if future updates will also have a chance of including whatever bug it was that changed people's desktop backgrounds, lol. (To be fair, we're using Mint 14
 XFCE - with the XFCE 4.10 & 4.12 PPAs added to our sources list - around here, so it could have been a Mint (Ubuntu?) bug that only annoyed a certain set of XFCE users instead of, well, all of them. IDK.)

Regarding changes to XFCE: I'm pretty happy with it and would generally say it's the best "interface" I've encountered since first using computers back in the days of Osbournes, Kaypros, and Commodore Pets. But I realize that some might be less satisfied with the user experience and clamor for change. All I ask is that you not follow the Firefox developers' example - making changes that appear to be "just for the sake of change" when they're not (apparently) actively trying to poleaxe the app.

Best regards!
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

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