Feedback of Xfce booth at Chemnitzer Linux Days 2010

[Enrico Tröger]

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   :)

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
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