Not the best Friday…
Today, nothing from what I’ve read via the RSS subscriptions, but only a few thoughts on a temptation: what I miss at times (except for when I miss GNOME, or maybe Nautilus) is either XFCE, or the elegant way it was themed and customized in Linux Mint XFCE CE edition. Now, the problem is that Linux Mint 6 XFCE CE was recently released, and I’ve downloaded it “just in case I’ll feel like trying it”, but it’s still XFCE 4.4.2, whereas…
…whereas Xfce 4.6 Final is released! It’s indeed 4.6.0 this time!
The Changelog is less than impressive, but I’ve went through the visual tour.
It’s great news that
With Xfce 4.6, the Xfdesktop manager finally implements this feature: you can select multiple icons, move them, remove them, etcetera…
but they’re stubbornly attached to their Win95-ish style (or was it 3.1-ish?) of not being able to draw the icon labels transparently! OK, if you really want, you can make the text drawn on a transparent background, but you’d rather not do so, because the text can’t have any shadows, outlines, or any other way of making it visible on a wallpaper!
Maybe the typical XFCE user is not interested in a feature that’s available since ages in GNOME, KDE, and Windows (and more desktops), or maybe the developers are more stubborn than a herd of mules! I don’t understand how can they have a compositing window manager (hence an advanced piece of software), yet to ignore completely the way the text is drawn on the desktop!
Well, there are a lot of changes over XFCE 4.4, according to the visual tour. I can see improvements in Thunar, yet I can’t see any bigger thumbnails à la Nautilus. Definitely, my wishlist and their wishlist have nothing in common!
Don’t tell me I am wrong, because I can also be right in my complaints: they have repeatedly refused to integrate officially the Xubuntu/Mandriva hacks, because they claimed they won’t work on the BSDs, yet in recent times… they reversed their opinion!
The session manager also includes a new long-awaited feature: support for suspend and hibernate “out of the box.” The logout dialog now has two additional buttons which offer to suspend or hibernate your computer.
Nowadays, the Xubuntu-Xfce ties are stronger than in the past, but is this the right explanation for their new stance?
A rather good desktop environment, with a messy governance (if this is not too big a word).
Minty-wise, there is also the main flavor (GNOME), and here’s a “green tech girl” having some complaints about Linux Mint 6: Felicia:
I’ve been using Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu for a while, and overall I’m pleased with it. However, since upgrading from Linux Mint 5 (Elyssa) to 6 (Felicia), I’ve actually been a little less happy with it. A few irksome problems:
Flash: Seemingly minor but not really when a lot of your work requires you to be online a lot: Flash is screwed on Felicia. I’m not sure why, but there have been reports around the net from frustrated users who went to great lengths to reinstall the operating system just to get this minor feature to work. I did find that Flash in the Opera browser seems to work, but the browser is not very stable. This is enough of a hindrance that I find myself sticking to (ugh) Vista for most daily tasks. Waiting for an upgrade for this to be fixed.
New Software Manager: The new software manager actually removes features that made me prefer Mint to Ubuntu. Notably, I’m disappointed that I can’t use the graphical “apt-get” feature anymore. Bummer.
Umm… I suppose these flaws are affecting the XFCE CE too?
Maybe it was not such a big mistake stop using Linux on my desktop (laptop)… but it’s still hard to tell 
Feb 28, 2009 at 15:01
Regarding:
“Don’t tell me I am wrong, because I can also be right in my complaints: they have repeatedly refused to integrate officially the Xubuntu/Mandriva hacks, because they claimed they won’t work on the BSDs, yet in recent times… they reversed their opinion!”
That may have been the case of earlier patches, but newer ones used HAL (which is supposed to be platform-independent and works on BSDs), and the show-stopper was dbus-usage. See http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2672 for details . There’s no change of opinion.
Mar 3, 2009 at 18:12
You can have transparent labels for the desktop icons by editing the ~/.gtkrc file.
Take a look at mine as an example:
style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
XfdesktopIconView::selected-label-alpha = 150
XfdesktopIconView::text-shadow-color = "Black"
XfdesktopIconView::selected-text-shadow-color = "White"
XfdesktopIconView::shadow-x-offset = 1
XfdesktopIconView::shadow-y-offset = 1
XfdesktopIconView::selected-shadow-x-offset = 0
XfdesktopIconView::selected-shadow-y-offset = 0
base[NORMAL] = "#436032"
base[SELECTED] = "#dcffc7"
base[ACTIVE] = "#dcffc7"
fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
fg[SELECTED] = "#000000"
fg[ACTIVE] = "#000000"
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"
Mar 3, 2009 at 18:15
hmm it looks like I'm not allowed to use the "code" tag. Oops…
Mar 3, 2009 at 21:58
Hi, i just wanted to tell you that in fact you can change the Win95-ish style (or was it 3.1-ish?) icon labels, i just posted a solution in:
http://jeromeg.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2009/02/28/Xfce-4.6%2C-what-do-they-think-about-it&pub=1#c20338
I hope it helps…