[gentoo-user] Re: Recommend a good replacement for XFCE?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2016-09-23, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:

[need to pick new desktop environment -- which could just be a window
manager with a couple extra bits]

So far I 've looked at windowmaker <https://windowmaker.org/> and LXDE
<http://lxde.org>.

Windowmaker seems a bit too oriented towards "icons on the desktop"
which isn't how I want to work.  It's possible that I could coerce
windowmaker into acting more like I want it to. But, in my experience,
you can tell by the default configuration how the developers think and
how they intend something to be used.  The further away that is from
what you want, the more of a struggle it is (even if in theory you
should be able configure it do what you want).

LXDE looked good.  After a few minutes playing with Lubuntu, I had a
single-screen screen setup I was happy with.  I also built lxde-meta
and tried that on a single screen machine. That worked fine.

However, when I built lxde-meta and tried it on a 3-screen machine, it
fell over pretty badly.

All three screens had wallpaper, but that's all that two of them had.
Two of them had no window manager, no panels, no root menu -- nothing
other than wallpaper and the defult X11 "X" cursor.

I knew that the openbox window manager (used by LXDE) uses a separate
instance for each screen.  It seems that the LXDE startup stuff
doesn't know that.  I started openbox manually on the two "extra"
screens and it seemed happy.

However, I was still without panels or root window stuff on two of the
three screens.  When creating a new LXDE panel, there's no way to
specify what screen it goes on.  I tried manually starting instances
of lxpanel on the other two screens, and lxpanel just complains that
there is already a running instance and quits.

So, no panels for screens 2 and 3.

AFAICT, under LXDE, pcmanfm is what's supposed to own/manage the root
window. It was equally (if differently) broken: I could run it on the
other screens, but it always opened windows on the screen 1.

I liked openbox though, so if LXDE refuses to handle multiple screens
I may stick with openbox and try to find some other panel program that
does work with multiple screens.

I may try MATE next, but I'm not optimistic.  All references I can
find to multiple screens in the MATE docs are not actually talking
about multiple X11 screens.  They're talking about a single X11 screen
spread across multiple monitors using twinview or xinerama or xrandr.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I'm wearing PAMPERS!!
                                  at               
                              gmail.com