I started using Kwin with Xfce (“KFCE”)
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Vít Šesták
Jul 26, 2015, 9:53:11 AM7/26/15
to qubes-users
After some time of trying both Xfce and KDE, I decided to mix them.
Xfce is somehow usable desktop with a WM which seems to be unsuitable for Qubes with my type of usage. That is, Alt+Tab in XFWM is annoying with Qubes when I have multiple windows from the same VM.
KDE has some better features and great KWin window manager. I like the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts for some parts of the panel. KDE has also activities, which are a great replacement of virtual desktops. However, there are two things that disappoint me at KDE:
1. Some parts of KDE look unfinished. For example, activities are a great idea, but some of the GUI was so terrible that I decided to rewrite it to Bash (using dmenu and zenity) in order to make it more user friendly. For example, activity switching allows searching by typing text. That's good. But when I want to switch to a particular activity, I have to use touchpad.
2. Some parts of KDE are buggy. Seeing notifications twice is just funny. Power manager ignoring low battery events is annoying, but it could be replaced. Suddenly disappeared icons from notification area are not much funny. They disappeared suddenly and reboot did not help. (In all these cases, I checked if this is my fault. It does not seem to be my fault in any of these cases. And even if it was my fault, the environment is very unfriendly for me.)
So, I decided to mix them:
* The base for me is XFCE
* However, I use KWin instead of XFWM. It is more configurable and gives me a much better Alt+Tab menu. I disabled all the effects of KWin.
* I use KDE activities. Some of the implementation of the Activities is in KWin and some is in the Plasma Desktop. But I don't need the part that is in Plasma Desktop, as this part is hard to use. I just use the KWin's dbus API for activities in some my bash scripts. So, I can use those scripts with Xfce+KWin.
* I have disabled some unneeded parts of Xfce like Thunar on the background.
I have done nothing complex for that. The howto for KWin of XFCE can be found there: http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce . Well, there is one catch: If KWin is run through
Xfce is somehow usable desktop with a WM which seems to be unsuitable for Qubes with my type of usage. That is, Alt+Tab in XFWM is annoying with Qubes when I have multiple windows from the same VM.
KDE has some better features and great KWin window manager. I like the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts for some parts of the panel. KDE has also activities, which are a great replacement of virtual desktops. However, there are two things that disappoint me at KDE:
1. Some parts of KDE look unfinished. For example, activities are a great idea, but some of the GUI was so terrible that I decided to rewrite it to Bash (using dmenu and zenity) in order to make it more user friendly. For example, activity switching allows searching by typing text. That's good. But when I want to switch to a particular activity, I have to use touchpad.
2. Some parts of KDE are buggy. Seeing notifications twice is just funny. Power manager ignoring low battery events is annoying, but it could be replaced. Suddenly disappeared icons from notification area are not much funny. They disappeared suddenly and reboot did not help. (In all these cases, I checked if this is my fault. It does not seem to be my fault in any of these cases. And even if it was my fault, the environment is very unfriendly for me.)
So, I decided to mix them:
* The base for me is XFCE
* However, I use KWin instead of XFWM. It is more configurable and gives me a much better Alt+Tab menu. I disabled all the effects of KWin.
* I use KDE activities. Some of the implementation of the Activities is in KWin and some is in the Plasma Desktop. But I don't need the part that is in Plasma Desktop, as this part is hard to use. I just use the KWin's dbus API for activities in some my bash scripts. So, I can use those scripts with Xfce+KWin.
* I have disabled some unneeded parts of Xfce like Thunar on the background.
I have done nothing complex for that. The howto for KWin of XFCE can be found there: http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce . Well, there is one catch: If KWin is run through
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml , it is not connected to dbus, so activities are disabled. I don't know a clean solution of this issue, but the kwin --replace autostart approach is a working workaround (despite being ugly).
When someone is interested, I can share the bash scripts for activities I mentioned.
Disabling some parts of Xfce (e.g. Thunar) can be done through /etc/xdg/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml.
Regards,
Vít Šesták 'v6ak'
Vít Šesták
Sep 7, 2016, 1:11:22 AM9/7/16
to qubes-users
For those who are interested in this:
* I've replaced the kwin --reload hack with dbus-launch kwin.
* Patch for 3.2 not decorating windows: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-devel/TCUsdyevoxI
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