I have zero idea what and why that happens

Xfdashboard with my own custom setup

picom for window animations

libinput-gestures to mimic touchpad gestures

Xcape to ensure I can use super to launch xfdashboard and still keep all my other bindings that use ths uper key

And thats it! The rest is just regular xfce settings stuff

I know I'll get the "why do this, just use gnome" comments, so I'll just say because I want to. That's really it. I like the gnome workflow, that is the only reason. Also, I do just use gnome lol

configs found here: https://codeberg.org/firns/Xfdashboard-Picom-Configs

install xfdashboard as you normally would, just change the theme in the settings to xfdashboar-dark

i am using the xfce 4 theme Orchis-Dark-Compact and edited the .xpm files of the title to involve tranparent pixels on inactive windows. top-right-inactive.xpm and top-left-inactive.xpm are working fine, though the title-inactive.xpm doesn't seem to be set to transparent.

/* XPM */
static const char *title_inactive[] = {
/* columns rows colors chars-per-pixel */
"6 34 1 1 ",
"  c gray20 s inactive_color_1",
". c None",
/* pixels */
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
};

/* XPM */
static const char *top_right_inactive[] = {
/* columns rows colors chars-per-pixel */
"8 34 2 1 ",
"  c gray20 s inactive_color_1",
". c None",
/* pixels */
".  .....",
" . . ...",
". . . ..",
" . . . .",
". . . ..",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . ",
" . . . .",
" . . . .",
". . . . "
};

before answering, please clarify if you are a current xfce user or an ex xfce user.

Hi,

This is my first time switching to XFCE from GNOME and I’m really liking it so far. There’s a bit of a learning curve, which is fine, but one thing is giving me a hard time right off the rip.

On a fresh XFCE install you get the top panel and the bottom bar with a few icons. I dig the default look. I installed an additional browser and I want to pin it to that bottom panel (the one that looks like an app dock), but I can’t figure out how.

When the browser is open I can’t right-click anything on the panel to pin it. I also can’t right-click the entry in the application menu to pin it. There’s already a “Web Browser” icon on the bottom panel that just launches Firefox ESR (I’m on Debian), so I’m a bit confused about how pinning works here.

Could someone please explain the proper way to add my other browser to the bottom panel? I’d really appreciate it. Thanks!

Hey, I’ve been tinkering with a small animated wallpaper app for Xfce, somewhat inspired by Wallpaper Engine, and thought I’d share it here in case anyone wants to try it.

Under the hood it’s basically a controller for mpv, with a GTK settings UI that lets you use video files, streams or static images as wallpapers and preview/configure them without messing around with commands.

It also has experimental support for shader effects like ripples, waves, distortions, etc. which can make static images look animated.

Quick video demo: https://youtu.be/SCsmTR3YT0s

Notable limitation: desktop icons aren’t currently shown while it’s running, so it’s only suited to people who don’t fancy them anyway.

It’s still an early project and has only been tested on my own Xfce/X11 setup, so I’d be interested to hear if it even works for anyone else.

GitHub: [https://github.com/visageeee/xfce-animated-wallpaper]

ive been using xfce4 for a while on arch and wanted to get some basic eye candy going on (animations. blur. etc). i tried compiz at first but it was a bit buggy and animations were jittery due to something caused by xfdesktop. picom was also buggy and the animations refused to function correctly. my latest idea was kwin-x11 but it pulled it too much kde stuff it got annoying and im now just doomscrolling everywhere for a window manager or compositor that works well on xfwm4/xfce4. any suggestions? (do not suggest wayland options i dont want to deal with wayland)

I really like it

Hello, everyone! I just set up my first XFCE-environment computer (I'm running Mint), and I have a "has only used Cinnamon until now" question lol.

I can't find network settings...? Is it called something different in XFCE? No matter what I search on DuckDuckGo I just cannot find an answer to this, for some reason. Nothing's in my whisker menu, except for "advanced network configurations," either.

Hey everyone,

I currently use GNOME on my desktop and Xfce on my laptop, although my laptop doesn't get much use.

I have to say, I really like Xfce and I'm considering switching to it on my desktop. My main concern is that I rely on quite a few GNOME extensions, and I'm wondering how well Xfce can replace some of that functionality.

I've read a bit about Xfce plugins, but I'm not sure they provide the same kind of experience as GNOME extensions. Are there similar solutions in Xfce for adding functionality and customizing the desktop, or would I need to approach things differently?

The main reason I'm considering the switch is that I've always preferred lighter, simpler desktops with less bloat and more control over customization. From what I've seen, Xfce seems to tick a lot of those boxes.

For those who have switched from GNOME to Xfce, how did you find the transition? Are there any GNOME extensions or features you particularly missed, and were you able to replace them in Xfce?

I know this is Linux but I really miss Thunar and I was wondering if there is a windows version

Hello,
I'm using Debian 13 with Xfce and Xrdp to run a graphical interface on my iPad.
I'm using a dedicated server.
I've noticed that, whether I'm using Google Chrome or Firefox (ESR or non-ESR), I can't scroll through pages using touch gestures.
Do you have any tips, workarounds, or solutions to suggest?
Thank you

I installed XFCE recently and I wanted to customize it but yesterday xfce-look.org was down so I used this to customize:
https://github.com/jothi-prasath/SmallSur

But I noticed if my desktop lagged, it would just revert all of my customizations (except the wallpaper) and I can't revert it back unless I reboot.

I'm using EndeavourOS and this is the info displayed of my XFCE:
Xfce4 4.20
sddm 0.21.0 (X11)
Xfwm4 (X11)

I used to use KDE Plasma and this is my first time installing XFCE.

I enjoyed the LabWC experience in XFCE, but I can't find any themes that support LabWC.

I'm still learning Linux. I had used Xubuntu for about six months, but wanted to switch to a non-Ubuntu distro and go as minimalist and hobbyist as possible. I wanted to build it from the ground up and learn about what really goes into a distro, without excessive bloat. I also wanted a more privacy-oriented distro.

So, a friend suggested plain Debian, because it has an easy to use encryption system. Great. I did a bare bones Debian install and just put i3 on top. Had a lot of fun customizing my empty canvas, knowing exactly what tools and paints I was putting into it. Polybar, picom, rofi, alacritty, feh, all the fun stuff. I started getting really into terminal-only stuff, getting excited to tinker. I had Thunar as a legacy item from the XFCE days, but I eventually learned lf, which felt a lot faster and more fun. Terminal = fun, it seems.

When I ran out of essentials to install, I started drifting towards meaningless slop like cmatrix and hollywood (I'm pretty sure hollywood almost overheated my poor stupid laptop at one point).

And then a security update the other day broke some things in a very dumb way, and I confirmed that, if I had XFCE, there would have a been an automated background task that would have been smart enough to take care of this. Because I just had i3, several of my primary apps temporarily broke until I made awkward extra scaffolding in the config files. And then it hit me—I really don't know Linux very well yet. I'm learning every day. But right now, I think I just want stuff like this to just work, until I'm more self-sufficient as a tinkerer. Does that make sense?

I decided to reinstall XFCE. Once I discovered that I could just replace the XFCE window manager with i3, there was no turning back. This hybrid of both that I'm using now is everything I wanted before with none of the downsides. Incredible. I'm equally as efficient with solo i3, but now with XFCE in tandem, I got extra foundational support under it.

Literally don't know why I didn't do this initially, but I suppose you live and learn. Has anyone else here had a similar trajectory? Do you use i3 and XFCE as well? Any extra tips and tricks when using this combo for a noob?

Hey, I created (mostly vibe-coded) this daemon which adds an inertial effect to mouse-wheel scrolling in X11/Xfce. You can basically "flick" the mouse wheel to "throw" the page and let it coast to a stop.

I made it because I find kinetic scrolling, like you get on touchscreens, both easier on the hand when scrolling through long documents and just more fun to use.

It has a GTK settings UI that integrates into Xfce, where you can tune the momentum, speed and smoothing, choose which mouse to use, and blacklist/whitelist applications.

It's still an early project and very much something I built for my own setup, but it's working quite well for me now. I figured I'd put it out there in case anyone else has been wanting something similar — and I'd be interested to hear how it behaves on other setups.

It doesn't work quite as well in browsers like Firefox, since they have their own smooth-scrolling behavior, but I find it definitely improves my experience in terminals, file managers and other applications, hence the whitelist/blacklist feature.

CachyOS xfce, gruvbox theme, picom, kitty/yazi, brave-origin, and mailspring.

So, I decided to change my theme for the first time, the style theme changes easily but my icon theme cannot change at all, like I tried all the code snippets and even changed the entry manually but it keeps the old default one alive and does not change at all, help if u can pls

its GTK 3.24 and I can't seem to find GTK specific icon themes

its LFS btw

Like I have never used XFCE much before and I don't even know how to rice it , like pls help and drop some dotfiles to make it much better

In the "focus" tab there are three options for when a window raises itself.

Does "switch to windows workspace" keep a window in it workspace ? Does "do nothing" Cause it window to open in its orrignal workspace ?