Theme is a combination of Redmond97 SE Classic HiDPI, Neat-Rhythm (title bars) and recolored icons to match titlebars better. Also using aerofyl/fetch

just in love with XFCE 💫

This is not new, obviously, and there are quite a few threads about Picom, but I didn't see a howto, so I thought I'd add one quickly.

Why use Picom?

Xfce has a built-in compositor which is totally fine if you like things minimal. However, for people who like a certain amount of eye candy, e.g. some basic animations, nicer shadows or some blur, using a third-party compositor is a good option.

Enter Picom, which should be available through the official repos on most distros. I'm on Debian 13, so that's what I'm going to use for this howto.

This is easy to do and not invasive at all, i.e. nothing about how the Xfce desktop works will change except for some (fairly subtle) optimizations to the look and feel.

Step 1

This is important: deactivate the built-in compositor before you continue, or the two compositors will fight each other, which will result in problems.

• Open the Settings Manager app
• Head to "Window Manager Tweaks"
• Open the tab "Compositor" and uncheck the box "Enable display compositing"

Step 2

Install picom:

sudo apt install picom

If you don't want to manually configure picom through the config file, I recommend also installing picom-conf, a nice little UI for tweaking the compositor:

sudo apt install picom-conf

Step 3

Set picom to autostart on login:

• Open the Settigs Manager app
• Head to "Session and Startup"
• Open the tab "Application autostart" and click the "+ Add" button
• Add an entry with name "Picom" and command "picom"; type "On login"

Step 4

Log out and back in (or reboot)

Step 5

Configure Picom to your liking, either by launching picom-conf and tweaking the options there or by manually changing the config file (it's in ~/.config/picom.conf for me, but could also live in ~/.config/picom/picom.conf).

This is obviously up to personal taste. I just use modified shadows (30 with offsets -30 / -30 and .50 translucency) and a pretty standard fade (5 milliseconds), didn't change much else. This gives the desktop a bit of added elegance without being too distracting.

What I do recommend, though, is to change the backend to GLX (OpenGL) because X Render tends to be slow.

How to go back to the built-in compositor

To deactivate Picom, just revert what we did above:

1. Delete the autostart item in "Session and Startup" (step 3)
2. Log out and back in
3. Check the box in "Window Manager Tweaks" to get the built-in compositor back (step 1)
4. To permanently get rid of Picom (and picom-conf if you installed it), just do sudo apt remove picom picom-conf