Trying Xubuntu 6.06

These last few days I have given a serious try to Xfce, the lightweight and fast desktop environment. I used Xfce4 as provided by Xubuntu 6.06.

It all started with being annoyed with Evolution crashes and sluggishness. I decided to give Thunderbird a serious try, and while I was trying to get the most snappiness out of my desktop, I temporarily abandoned Gnome for Xfce.

First the good things: Xfce is really snappy, it's not much in absolute numbers, but having everything respond in tenths or hundredths of seconds has a real effect on the overall feeling. For example, when browsing the Gnome menu, there is a small delay (a few tenths of a second) between the selection of a sub-menu item and the appearance of the sub-menu. In Xfce, everything feels instantaneous. I also very much liked the way the Xfce panel behaves.

I also liked Thunar a bit more than Nautilus. It was one of those things that felt really snappy and no-nonsense in small little ways that are hard to describe. There was also many things that just worked, or looked like they would just work if I needed them, but that I did not actually need during the trial period, for example CD burning.

One thing that bothered me at first was losing the calendar feature of the Gnome clock applet. Clicking on the clock applet displays a small calendar with information from the Evolution calendar. Happily, I was able to get the same feature using the "orage clock applet". Of course, it uses the calendaring information of Orage, the Xfce calendar application, and not Evolution. I will try to keep on using Orage in Gnome, even if only to keep Evolution at bay.

The system monitor applets of Xfce are not as pretty as the Gnome System Monitor applet. The network monitor applet does not provide a shortcut to the network configuration application. Xfce has a weather applet, but it is not smart enough to display the temperature on the side when in an horizontal panel, so enabling temperature display always significantly increasing the width of the enclosing panel. There also appears to be no way to bind a key to the activation of the Xfce panel menu, or to operate the panels using the keyboard.

Xfce tends to force the user to deal a bit more with system internal: for example, there is no UI to configure the keyboard switching applet, one has to use the infamous xkb directly. Also, except for the window manager, there are no canned desktop actions to bind to key commands, all desktop key bindings must call into shell commands (like with xbindkeys). Also, the inability to activate the panel menu from the keyboard forced me to use the "run command" much more often than I do in Gnome.

More troublesome were the window manager key bindings. I love to have excellent control from the keyboard, and only use the mouse when I really have to. Metacity has excellent support to resize and move windows from the keyboard. I was not really satisfied by the equivalent functionality of the Xfce window manager. It is not possible to resize a window by extending it to the left or top, only by extending to the right or bottom. Also, keyboard resizing and moving of windows does not snap to other windows and screen borders like the mouse operations do.

Serious annoyances begun when I was unable to use gnome-gpg. I tried enabling the "Run gnome services at startup" option of the Xfce session manager and re-logging in, but it did not help. So tried using gpg-agent, but gpg reported "gpg: problem with the agent - disabling agent use" and asked for the pass-phrase every time. I knew I could have dealt with the problem using quintuple-agent, but I postponed it.

But the thing that really made me switch back to Gnome was the lack of keyboard control for the sound volume. A lot of keyboards nowadays have special keys to control or mute the speaker's volume, and Ubuntu's Gnome comes with complete support for those, and even integration with my ThinkPad's BIOS-based volume keys.

Overall, I had a very good impression of Xfce. I loved the very pleasant snappiness feeling, and the non-nonsense panel behaviour. I could deal with the more "bare metal" aspects of the environment. I plan to give Xubuntu another try some day, and hope that they have found a way to improve their keyboard accessibility, and in particular the keyboard volume control.

11 Jun. 2006 — Trying Xubuntu 6.06 (4 comments)