my first 12 hours with svn xfce4

Carol Spears carol at gimp.org
Tue Oct 18 19:53:16 CEST 2005


hello,

after making an idiot of myself with libtool-bugs, i removed a lot of
debians software and built xfce4 from glib on, everything except cairo i
think is from cvs or svn and it is surprising how stable everything is!

reviewing the user interface options really mangled my gimp toolbox, but
that was easily fixed.

Things about the panel:
if i hadn't been reading the thread about the panel, i would have been
very confused.  even with reading it, i created a new one and still it
took some time to figure out how to get rid of the first weird one that
installed itself.  (the svn xfce4 and kin seemed to try to use my old
settings and it succeeded in many but not all ways)  

if i hadn't read about dnd in that thread, i would not have understood 
it.  i might be unusual this way, however because my first experience 
with gtk+-1.2 and dnd on the 486 was terrible, frightening and etched 
in my memory so strongly that it will take years and years of
smooth/working/not-so-picky dnd to erase that experience.

changing the panel properties via all menu's in the panel is not good.
i am going to suggest an option to put it there if you are a developer
though, as i can see how it is useful if you are doing more than using
the panel.  personally, i like having choices like this to modify things
if i am going to be more than an average user.

on the otherhand, as a user, i have to be forced to see new things the
developers are doing so i can see where making it easy to remove your
panel can in the long run be helpful....

right now, i am missing things in the panel.  the system tray.  the
netload and cpu/memory and whatever else that one thing had.  heh, and
my build of the toys failed and i decided to start the desk without them
so i am missing the very silly eyes :)  date/time in the panel as well,
but as i mentioned, it is still the first 12 hours of using it and i got
some sleep within that time as well, so....

i miss the setup icon in the panel.  i was glad to see the setup palette
still accessible via the menu.

the expander things on the panel, for when you have more than one
launcher per button -- i do not like them only being available to the
side of the button.  this world seemed to hit me with a lot of phalusies
about what that says about me as a human being.  they are wrong, it was
just nice to have a choice that expanded in a logical direction.  enough
said about that.  the way it works now, i really do not want a
Description of what will be launched there with the Name.

Things about the Taskbar:
now that the little push-me pull-me corner is gone, i seem to be
thinking about removing it and using the iconbox the same way i had my
fvwm2 configured to work.  if you could make little cartwheeling windows
that seem to collapse into the icon box, that would be really really
neat.

All and all, it is really cool, this bleeding edge desktop environment i
have here today.  thank you.

carol




More information about the Xfce4-dev mailing list