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I've been skipping all the Unity drama by staying on Xubuntu which is really snappy and stays out of your way.

Also, Gnome on this laptop (Dell Inspiron 15 7000) gave me (and several others users, as per forum post https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2358975 and some bug reports I found on the internet) a freeze or stutter every 10 or so seconds. So instead of having to start debugging shit from a fresh Linux install like I used to do in early 199x linux days, I chose to install xubuntu and just get to work and be productive.

Try XFCE today, really (and install all gnome apps should you need to run something from that desktop environment: they integrate great with xfce).

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I have been using XFCE for 5 or 6 years, the _best_ thing about it are it's developers, they don't keep updating it.

XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update available. If you don't update they will eventually block older versions.

I've been a big Xubuntu fan for quite a while myself. I recently put 18.04 on a VM to give it a test drive, and found that they've tweaked XFCE so that you have to be ridiculously precise at moving the mouse to a lower corner if you want to resize a window. The margin for getting a lower-corner drag cursor seems to be one pixel at best.

Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over the years, as if they don't want me resizing windows.

Is there any way to tweak this? I'm not at all liking it. My 16.04 installations are much better in this regard.

Press Alt when you're near where the window handle would be and then you don't have to find the 1 pixel border.

"Apparently this problem has been around for years, and one bug report has been closed "won't fix". The issue has been reopened with Bug 11808 - Xfwm: Increase the resize border of window.

The width of the grab area is controlled by the theme." 1

Most people appear to circumvent the problem by using another means of resizing windows.

"As soon as your keyboard-shortcut (in Xfce upstream its Alt+F8) is hit, you can then resize the window by either moving your mouse (no need to click or drag) or use your keyboard arrow keys." 2

1 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156435/how-can-i-ma...

2 https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...

This isn't a solution but `a just in case you are not aware` You can press alt+right click and hold then drag near the corner of the window to resize it (alt+left drag moves it).

I understand that there are times when that isn't work so it's nice to have both options. ( I wrote a browser based windowing system and have experimented with having the bezels on the windows be quite large and/or auto-expanding when the mouse nears them to make resizes as easy as possible since hard to hit pixel thing annoys me so much)

The tweak I found was essentially learning a new way to resize windows. Hold ALT and right-click-drag from anywhere inside the windows at the lower right corner and it'll grab the window and resize it as you move the mouse.

I know it's not a fix, and it is still cumbersome if all you have at the moment is a laptop trackpad. But it beats having to update your destkop environment's chrome and all that jazz. I find XFCE's window chrome pleasing and minimal, the only issue is exactly that, you only have 1px of hot area at the borders.

Doesn't this depend on the theme you choose in Window Manager settings? Kokodi or Moheli might give you more pixels to grab than whatever theme you're using now.

Just curious, how these Devs develop immunity to the "plague"?

In this particular case, the small team size and the multi-year effort to upgrade the DE to GTK+ 3 is likely a strong contributor.

I would not say they are immune, simply that they have the "metabolism" of sloths. In other words, a small team of volunteers rather than a big group of full time developers working for a big name corporation.

There are two reasons as you probably know. In the mobile sphere you can't really afford not updating your app because it will fail to comply with the newer standards and eventually it will be removed from the app store. It's unfortunate, it's against the interest of conservative mobile device users, but there's nothing we can do about it.

that's one good thing about opensource software that is not sponsored by corporations, they don't need to waste money just because they have a bunch of engineers on their payrolls

Huge fan of xfce here but couldn't get hidpi to work properly... Any hints?

Windowmaker perfects this ;-)

Ubuntu with MATE works as well.

I used Xubuntu for a while but I was always fascinated by how bad a couple aspects of XFCE are. They maintain documentation [1] on oddball ways of resizing windows instead of just giving people what they want. I suspect MATE just does what most people want out of the box.

[1] https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...

To their credit, the Alt+RMB method for resizing windows is, along with Alt+LMB for moving windows, really amazing. I get annoyed when I have to go back to the old way on my Mac and Windows systems.

I agree! I started using alt+rmb because I couldn't resize windows the normal way, because of the minimal xfce windowing chrome. Found this way as a workaround and now I can't really live without it. I agree, Windows/Mac window resizing now feels like handling a cumbersome dinosaur :-)

I get where you guys are coming from on this. The problem is more acute for those of us who switch between two or three different OSes as a matter of course and spend the least amount of time in Linux. That's where something like MATE really shines.

BetterTouchTool can do moving and resizing on macos, I've got them set to "FN+control" and "FN+control+option". Still haven't found anything good for Windows.

https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

I've used this when I need to use Windows. Works well enough.

I just ended up making a bunch of keyboard shortcuts with the Windows-key.

  Win+R -> Resize
  Win+M -> Move
  Win+A -> All desktops
  Win+Q -> Stay on top
  Win+H -> Hide
  Win+Arrow -> change workspace
  Win+Shift+Arrow -> Carry focused window to workspace

etc.

This works so well for me that I completely removed all the buttons from the window manager since I no longer need to access them anymore.

Another keyboard-only method which I haven't seen mentioned yet, that I learned in Windows but seems to work well even in Linux, is to press alt+space and then

  'm' followed by arrow keys to move the window around, or
  'r' followed by arrow keys to resize the window

For people like me on laptops with trackpads, these keyboard shortcuts work really well.

Fortunately gnome 3 people fixed this by removing all mnemonics, so you can only use the arrow keys to navigate the window menu.

XUbuntu is great, and the distro I use for my desktop, but I'd also suggest checking out Ubuntu Mate 18.04. It's "old school" similar to XFCE, largely without animations to slow things down, and the 18.04 version replaced the old menu with brisk-menu which is fast, super key activated, and has search (basically it works a lot like XFCE's).

Ubuntu Mate uses gtk 3 and probably in general more modern technology than XFCE, with a similar style. Definitely worth considering.

I've been running a customized version of Mate for a few years. It's sleek and efficient. Had some screen flicker issues at first, but switching window managers to Compiz (I think) fixed it.

I even brought an old Macbook back to life by throwing Mate on it in place of MacOs.

Using xubuntu now. You're right. It does just stay out of the way, and that's what I want.

The applications delivery the value on the desktop, not the desktop environment. The DE vendors (Gnome/Unity in particular) need to work that out and just get out of the way.

Exactly my approach. Periodically I ask what are the advantages of an environment like Gnome that would make it worth it for me to put up with the resource usage. I haven't heard anything compelling yet.

Many years ago I used to use light weight window managers. I remember using icewm after I got fed up with enlightenment, but I think it was Fluxbox that I kept for a long time -- up until about 2010.

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

Same.

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.

LXDE/LXQt is what I think of when I read your descriptions.

It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.

Thanks - will definitely take a look at that over the weekend. The lighter the better for me.

This is somewhat orthogonal to what window manager you are running though. Most tiling WMs (e.g. xmonad) combine nicely with xfce[1], giving you all the convenience features you mention while still not having to mess around with moving and resizing windows. I've been using that combination for years and wouldn't want to switch back to either plain xmonad or plain xfce.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

You can have those with a window manager too, but in this case you need to do more fiddling

I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.

I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.

[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen

> However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.

I have all those things with spectrwm and dmenu.

I run Xfce on Debian, I have Gnome 3 in reserve. And occasionally try it out. I quite like the notification area/panel under Gnome. Font clarity seems a little different (better). Workspaces are okay, plug-able drives are handled well, network manager is pretty good these days, as it now has a CLI alternative. But I don't like the application launcher. Not a fan of scrolling through loads of icons.

Nautilus has got increasingly shitty. So there's less Gnome now in my Xfce.

I tried Win 10 recently, it was horrible.

In conclusion they all have warts. But Xfce is okay in a Win95 kind of way. It could be better.

Simple UI seems to always elude distros/desktops.

Xubuntu at least has the whisker menu system, which gives you search bar in menu. Without it one can remove system menu and replace it with Xfce app-finder launcher. Then it's best to change a setting to place windows near the mouse pointer.

Note: I'm currently not using Xfce at home, but I use some older version at work.

Second this, have been running Xubuntu on my primary work laptop without issue for the last 4 years.

Almost the same, but i3-gaps instead of XFCE. Ubuntu update is just a `do-release-upgrade` and reboot. Nothing changes.

The only thing I don't really like in the Ubuntu's model is the bi-yearly updates and the PPA system. Every time you upgrade the distro the PPA's get disabled and there's a lot of work enabling them and fixing the packages.

That being said, I installed NixOS to my other laptop and after two days got a configuration that just installs and configures everything I need. I might overwrite this Ubuntu installation with it and go rolling with the master.

Why gaps, though? I'm not looking to pick a fight at all. I'm only curious. I just don't understand gaps.

I've been using i3 for years, and I tried out gaps when it first started popping up in the ricing forums (like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ [please note, it's not actual porn]).

Do you use gaps so that you can see little bits of your background image? Is it purely aesthetic? I can understand beefing up the borders so that there's some space between tiles, but the gaps seem like unnecessary waste of space.

Same story as most here; XUbuntu for the past 7-8 years. Mostly run it in a VM from Win 10 for Dev work. I really need to get that global menu bar installed after I upgrade to 18.04 though.

We have exactly the same setup, then :-)

I need Win10 for low latency music work and for the odd game, all development work happens in Xubuntu VMs.

Windows is essentially a shell where I juggle vms when I need a dev environment for a specific client.

I use VirtualBox as my virtualization solution and what I found was that using Xubuntu made the whole "linux in a vm" experience much more snappier, and since I basically work with 'text' and don't fiddle with music+video inside the vm, I often forget I'm inside a VM when it's fullscreened. With Ubuntu/Unity the whole VM experience gets slowed to a crawl because Unity wants to XDamage/Composite everything and virtualbox's "accelerated drivers" aren't that good to make it perform good.

When I was rolling on company hardware(MacBook Pro) I got incredibly frustrated with the experience of running even Xubuntu in VirtualBox; the OSX Virtualbox experience is beyond abysmal :| This lead me to purchasing a personal VMware license for OSX.

Back on Windows 10 I re-evaluated VirtualBox, Hyper-V with the new linux enhanced session support(poor experience TBH), and VMware workstation player. VMware ended up being the best experience in terms of responsiveness IMHO. You may want to give it a go. It's free for personal use, but unfortunately workstation pro is quite expensive.

Thank you, I'll give it a run!

I've used XFCE for years, then moved to LXDE.

I find it smoother, much more intuitive, and about the same with regards to memory footprint

Did you have to do anything special to get it installed? I had a ton of UEFI trouble trying to install linux at all on that model, and Xubuntu would lock up at the splash screen if installation completed. Ubuntu works well after a similarly painful installation though.

In essence there shouldn't be a difference between installing Ubuntu or Xubuntu. But if you encountered that hurdle, here's how you can get xfce on 'ubuntu': install the "xubuntu-desktop" package from apt and it'll be available as an option on your session chooser at the login screen. this is a virtual package which installs the whole xfce desktop environment. it is essentially what xubuntu does :)

XFCE is nice, but I've been using Window Maker since before Ubuntu even existed, I've carried my basic GUI across multiple distros, and I use it on Ubuntu to this day.

https://windowmaker.org/ -- Really, though, it's in the package repos of just about any distro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_Maker

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_Maker

Does XFCE suffer with the Gnome3 affliction of having a top menu bar and a program menu bar underneath? I am left looking through a letter box at my software. Unity was good at this...Gnome3 is not

Nope! You can configure the bars as you like.

Indeed. Remember Gnome 2? It's pretty much like that.

You can y remove it in gnome too https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/

Love Xubuntu! Just want to mention there's also an Xfce flavor of Mint for any Mint fans: https://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=249

Had the exact same issue, ended up switch from Wayland over to Xorg to get it working. However this isn't anywhere near as nice of an experience.

Been using Xubuntu since 14.04 - couldn't be happier. It's my default distro now.

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