Salix 14.0 Xfce install

So I went for childrens' version of Slackware, sue me.
Why Slack? Because it seems to be most stable and conservative (compared to nowadays mad-rush Linux developments). No systemd or pulseaudio or Mir or perverse experiments with GUI. Not yet at least. And they avoid even GTK3, it seems. Which is good - I definitely prefer 'less modern' look to broken porridge after every Gnome update.
As of preparations - a partition for installing Salix was made before install.

Install:
64bit stright-install image (means, not Live) was written with Unetbootin to USB. The process (and probably structure of image) was different of usual - in meaning that it was continuous, without huge main file. Not that I care...
There is only two 'options' in boot-screen: 'default' and 'huge.s' ... Default seemed to be the same as 'huge.s' so, here we go:
Installer loaded quite long and is old-school ncurses-based - pure terminal, no bling, no frills. Installers' structure is different of Debians', Suses', RHELs' and even Archs' installer.
Now, what to keep in mind: In partitioning - have to select correct disk where your premade partition is. Then it's possible to pick it for Root. You can also mark already (if) existing swap for use. No separate home for me anymore, I keep all important stuff of my distros on separate 'common' partition. And I do my backups with FSArchiver - so Home (confs only) gets backed up together with Root.
The most problematic part of installation was a question 'where is your install-data': No, USB-stick is not a 'CD' or something other 'movable' - USB stick is a 'hard disk'. At least you can browse partitions and pick the right one. The table there doesn't show partitions' sizes... so I identified my USB (from about 15 choices) as only one having fat32 filesystem. Then installer wants to know the folder name...&^%$#... to cut it short, it's 'salix'.
Then you can make password for root and also create your common user - and define users' parameters to all details. By the way, there is no problem with using the same password for root and user...
And at the end there is choice of install-packages: I picked Full (desktop and 'one app per task').
There were, of course, the usual things (keyboard etc), and also an offer to install Lilo (bootloader) - which can be skipped entirely (which I did).
It installed successfully.
I rebooted, logged to Wheezy, update-grub, and rebooted to Salix. There was a lot text flying by (quite different-looking of Debian, and it took a little longer too), then Gdm-greeter for logging, then desktop and then you can admire 'a flying rag'... - screensaver kicked in an instant after desktop appeared. Fancy. I have no idea if this bizzarre behaviour goes with every boot - I removed xscreensaver from startup.

Desktop
I think it's first Xfce desktop (I have tried) what comes panel-at-bottom and no dock. What a pleasure! Especially after quick swap of wallpaper...
First I did some fast clean-up and pimping: removed some startups and daemons, deleted some apps, changed themes and icon-set, tweaked panel a bit... the usual. And sure, I installed my favourite file manager - SpaceFM - and threw Thunar out. I downloaded Spacefm installer and whole thing went without any hitch, dependencies and all.
Ah, by the way, I had also one mysterious crash when I left Salix running. When I returned after some 2 hours, it appeared to be in console and frozen. No idea why.

Then came serious part - updating (minor) kernel and installing Nvidia driver. No automation here, no smxi script either. There is almost perfect tutorial for Nvidia, though. In nutshell, it went like that:
1. Get kernel source: slapt-get --update && slapt-get -i kernel-source
Update kernel: ls /var/log/packages/kernel*
There are some 4-5 files, all has to be updated separately, like this:
slapt-get -i kernel-modules (no version numbers needed!). Then (re)create initrd file - see howto in /boot/readme.initrd .
2. Download Nvidia driver.
3. Blacklist Nouveau. And here I found difference with tutorial. There is no such file as tutorial says. I solved it with Gslapt, searched for 'nouveau' and found 2 packs, and installed blacklist-one. It's name was the same as of driver.
3. Reboot. Log to console, init 3, cd wehere-your-driver-is, sh NVIDIAdrivername.run (and answer questions it asks), init 4.
Done. If you said 'yes', it even created conf. And DO NOT let Nouveau to be updated afterwards, or you loose your 'blacklist'!

There are quite a lot of conf available in menus. For installing codecs there is a launcher. Packages can be managed through Gslapt, sources through Sourcery (both are GUI frontends). There is even update-notifier...
Package manager is 'slapt' - works like this: slapt-get -u
for example, is the same as debian 'apt-get update'. Nothing difficult here, do read Salix (or Slackware) wiki etc.

It has been pleasant experience. After first flurry of tweaks I find it hard to spot next 'urgent' tweak... because it's already OK. Salix is super for everyone looking for traditional distro + desktop. It's also very fitting for newcomers to Slackware - it really is Slack-made-easy. Recommended.

Vsido, overview and tips

I happened to visit the blog of IgnorantGuru. I followed a news-lead to IGurus' article about the current state of Linux. It was quite illuminating reading, especially, because I myself had started to think quite similar dark thoughts about how Linux development is being strangely rotten last two years or so.

And when clicking around there I found myself in place called vsido.org.
It is rather unpretentious home of very fresh Debian Sid distro called Vsido. It compares itself to Crunchbang (a scary thing to n00b like me). Despite that I downloaded, made USB (Unetbootin) and installed - successfully.

Install was kinda usual, maybe a bit longish, but nothing overly scary.
I installed Vsidos' grub to its' root, updated my master-bootloader  and booted smoothly to Vsido. Lightdm is for login.
First-time desktop greets you with more-than-nice script with various options: system updater, installer (printer, java, LibreOffice, dev-packs, OpenSSH, LAMPStack, and couple of other things).
There are three sessions installed:
- Xfce session has Conky ribbon on uppper-edge and tint2-dock bottom-edge. Main menu opens from desktop right-click or from launcher in dock.
- Openbox looks exactly the same.
- Fluxbox looks also the same - but with graphical glitches and strange behaviour. Removed it promptly. (Edit: Fluxbox in next mini-release ISO didn't have those problems.)
- And there is 'default session' - Openbox again (which changed to Fluxbox in later releases). When exiting from there with 'Restart' it totally froze...
It's impossible to install some Xfce panel plugins... and trash plugin simply didn't work | Edit: Trash didn't work because I replaced Thunar with Spacefm and Xfce trash plugin is connected only with Thunar. But Spacefm has also its own trash-plugin) Edit |.
Then there are currently three upgrades which doesn't upgrade because of dependency problems... That's Sid, alright.

First things - get into virtual terminal (CtL+ALT+F1), sudo su, and run smxi script. And READ what happens, and respond correctly (or else!).
OK then, everything installed, including new freshly installed video driver. Awesome script!

After that, I did the following:
- Removed Tint2 from Xfce (and 'kill panel script') - took them off from 'Startup'. Created new xfce panel, confed it.
| Edit:  And afterwards changed back to tint2. Retaining uniform look over your various desktops is actually a good thing. Edit |
- Shortened Conky info-strip - deleted some things in ~/.conkyrc.
- Synaptic 'Quick Search' field was missing. I had encountered this before and always thought its 'silly Synaptic different-version thingy'... But, it's not.
What you need to do is:

sudo apt-get install apt-xapian-index
#after that might need also
sudo update-apt-xapian-index -vf

Open Synaptic after that and it sprouts new nice quick-search field!
Additionally: If your Synaptic suddenly is NOT starting from Menu (and when starting it in terminal with the same command, asks USER-passwd): Change launcher command (synaptic pkexec) to gksudo synaptic.
- Make Spacefm to your default File Manager in Xfce too. It trumps Thunar by - maybe - ten times? By the way, it's made by the same already mentioned IgnorantGuru. And no - you can't remove Thunar, it's like Internet Explorer of Windows to Xfce, very integrated, yes, sir.
- What aliases we have preinstalled? Type 'al' in terminal and you'll see.
- How to make your terminal more colorful? See here.
- A BUG, or something: new Xfce Panel whines sillily every time you login: delete .cache/sessions, logout without 'save session' checked, login and no more whining.
- Iceweasel, the bastard Firefox, didn't have 'add new tab ' after tab... you can add general one from 'cutomizing' menu. Bookmarks Toolbar didn't work... | Edit: as of 20.03.12 upgrade, both issues seemed fixed... then after some days, Bookmarks Toolbar failed again. So I 'removed' Iceweasel and installed Firefox. And strange is - evil Firefox has no problems with working. Iceweasel problems, of course, are not Vsido problems.) Edit |

... I like Vsido. It's definitely a place for finding new exciting things - like there IS thing called 'virtual terminal' and such... :)
If you are an outgrown n00b craving new challenges - after Ubuntuland, Vsido is more than interesting, but not overly complicated place to proceed ones' education in.  
Recommended!

Xfce manual menu editing

(Things described here are Xubuntu-based)
As was said some tens of times: first - copy your bloody menu  files!
/usr/share/applications --> ~/.local/share/applications
/etc/xdg/menus --> ~/.config/menus
In principle, manual menu editing is a piece of cake, or also might be said - simple as shit... But - IT TAKES TIME. What you can do in 5-10 minutes in editor, takes 1 to 1,5 hours manually.

How to: ~/.local/share/applications is a folder with all .desktop files, those files get dragged into your Menu, automagically.
Example (of only .desktop file I made in current installation):

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=SpaceFM Settings
GenericName=File Manager
Exec=spacefm --show-pref=1
Icon=spacefm
StartupNotify=true
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Categories=GTK;Settings;DesktopSettings;
X-XFCE-SettingsDialog;X-XFCE-PersonalSettings;

This one is settings-window of spacefm which goes to Settings Manager. And important items here are:
-- exec runs the app, (with or without additional parameters, depending on case).
-- Icons can be changed from right-click on launcher, pick 'Properties', click icon and pick the favourite. Or - the right icon can be searched out and added here manually, of course.
-- Categories: Items are sorted by categories. Very importnant! I am not going to write exhaustively how to... You have to experiment. For example, 'Top level' means that the item is in first, open menu, Graphics goes to Graphics ... and so on - have a fun.
Basically, things can be re-oriented to different categories. Shitty thing is, occasionally they are defined quite cryptically - it's hard to understand what the hell it means... that's why we have to experiment.
Two important additional commands to write into .desktops:
-- NoDisplay=true - hides item, but it still will be available to mime-types;
-- Hidden=true - this is like a delete.
Now, when doing your shit - changes should be seen at once. If not, do
xfdesktop --reload
or login/logout if writing command line seems overstreched effort.

One, err - should we say - most entertaining parts is 'Settings' menu, which displays items in two places: in Settings Menu category and also in Settings Manager. Adding 'hidden' into .desktops hides things in Manager too - so, different methodology is required. Modifying xfce-applications.menu file is needed here.

To remove item from Settings Menu, but retain it in Settings Manager. Open aforementioned file, and quite at the beginning of file, ADD something like that into your file:
 <Include>
            <Category>Settings</Category>
        </Include>
# added part goes next, here:

    <Exclude>
    <Filename>xfce4-accessibility-settings.desktop</Filename>
#and here goes the next one, and next...
    </Exclude>

If you want something to <include> into Menu, do it... but remember - if it's item outside of thematic folders, 'Top Level'-category has to be added.

Whole thing is a balancing act between those two - desktop-files and menu-file. And DO NOT forget to look into Xfce wiki.

Recommended to-do after install

To-do list after successful install (Xubuntu).
Some things here are Xubuntu-specific, others generic, and some are specific to my installation.
Also, about half of following content is already mentioned in posts-before. But, as I myself found out - it's hard to remember everything about installation after 1.5 month of happy Xubuntu-ing.
For things before and during install - look into numbered posts in February.

1.|Xfce| Create your own menu items and menu-tree for future customization: Copy contents of /usr/share/applications to ~/local/share/applications (menu-items of Xfce main menu);
Copy /etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications-menu file to ~/.config/menus/xfce-applications-menu (see Xfce wiki page, and page here).
2.|General| Install proprietary drivers.
Go to 'Software sources / Additional drivers'. My video card is Nvidia, so I pick Nividia and wait it to install (If you have some other types of drivers present there, install them). Now, type in terminal: sudo nvidia-xconfig (not sure - maybe it will be created automatically when rebooting...). Do not reboot yet.
Now is good time to do some other things which also require reboot. Reboot comes after (4) Update software is done.
3.|My bug, but maybe a known bug| Mounting wallpaper folder - for avoiding that Manager forgets added wallpapers every time when its closed.
Mounting description is in this post.
3a.|Grub2| Remove Memtest entries from Grub2' boot menu (if you do not love them for some reason). How to description is here.
3b.|LightDM| Remove un-needed sessions from greeters' menu: About that go here.
4.|Quite General| Your Xubuntu is already whining persistently about updates. Magnamiously say Ok and let it dowload & install ... like - a lot. Probably it also had kernel updates...
4a.|Xfce| During updates: Windows tweaks - check compositor 'on'. Look what you really need to start in 'Startup and Sessions', adjust mouse-double-click speed=400, ... Move panels around, do some preparations - make separators visible, drag some launchers to panel and delete some from panel...
Updates done, REBOOT NOW.

Arriving back to desktop.
5.|Xubuntu| Install Synaptic from 'Ubuntu Software Center'. Open it and get 'xubuntu- restricted-extras' (Mind - you have to say 'yes' once in this process, or installation stalls and waits...)
Stay in Synaptic. Change search mode to 'Status', pick uninstalled, use queries in type like: xfce, xfwm4, samba, font-manager, ...
Or whatever you fancy if you have enough time to spend: artwork, theme, engines (murrine, unico, pixbuf, nodoka, aurora, equinox...).

And continue now as you wish:
- Copy back Your Things from backup you wisely created before crapping out your previous Linux install...if there was one.
- Make .gtkrc-2.0 file into ~/yourusername-folder. It would be the last instance of gtk-preferences file which overrides gtk from themes - so you don't have to hack themes themselves. Look for clock-bit here, or maybe the following below is useful:

# Desktop-icon-text to white #
    style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
    XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
    fg[NORMAL] = "#FFFFFF"
    fg[SELECTED] = "#FFFFFF"
    fg[ACTIVE] = "#FFFFFF"
    }
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"

# xfce-panel background and text color, minimalistic #
style "panel"
    {
bg[NORMAL] = "#3685d5"
    fg[NORMAL] = "#ffffff"
    }
widget_class "*Panel*" style "panel"
widget "*Panel*" style "panel"
class "*Panel*" style "panel"

- Add 'lock screen' item to Menu: Command (exec) is xflock4.
If available, use menu editor, if not, make new .desktop file manually and add entry to 'xfce-applications-menu' file (the same which should be now in your  ~/.config/menus/ folder.
- remove unwanted stuff from Menu.
- Bling: Search xfce-themes, xfce-icon, artwork, xfwm, goodies in Synaptic.
Take into account when installing packages automatically, everything goes to root. When dowloading separately from web art-sites (example) - choice of place is yours. Things in ~/home are, of course, yours and editable without 'sudo'. NB! Themes installed only to ~/home probably are not accessible to some apps...
Install Compiz - if you really are in for eyecandy.
Docks: Plank dock is real simple. Docky is more fullsome - but brings along all kind of Gnome crap (inc zeitgeist), Once-favourite AWN is dead. Cairo is ultimate available bling - sparky and jumpy.
- Install apps you like - short description what I like is here.
Some apps I (maybe) didn't mention:
Blender - 3D tool like 3DMax. Geeqie - another thumbnail viewer. Easytag for organizing tags of mp3-s. Geany - more advanced text and programming editor. And Cdemu - cd emulator like Daemon Tools.
- When first fever of installation is over, install Bleachbit - and clean up useless languages, temp files, archive backups and so on and on. Bleachbit is quite helpful, gives warnings when appropriate and lets you preview changes before commit.
Do whatever.

Themes, icons and Xfce

With every (user-friendly) distro comes some DE and some theme and icon-set. It doesn't have to be specially created or DEs' default – it might be some existing theme, tweaked, and hopefully full icon-set added to it.

Xubuntu, for example, has 'elementary xfce' icon-set – which is 'elementary' set tweaked for Xfce.

You can get themes etc in three ways:

1. Download & install as a package from repository – like 'xfwm4-themes' or 'xfce-artwork' and so on. In this case you get bunch of something, installed to root. Available for every user. But it also means – to hack them is a bit hassle.

2. Download them from xfce-look.org, Ubuntu-Art or some other (trusted) site. In this case you have to install them yourself (read install-hints).
a) To root – if you have more users in your Linux, and you want eyecandy to be available to others too. Generally, every theme-folder have to be copied to /usr/share/themes/ and icon-folders to /usr/share/icons/. Then they should automagically appear in Settings Managers.

b) To /home/your_user_name/.themes/ and to /home/ your_user_name/.icons/ - if you are only user or do not want to share, or want to tweak the stuff.

Not everything is compatible! Read notes (usually added) by author.

For example, when using Xfce and LightDM, it's silly to get themes for GDM (Gnome Display Manager). Both GTK 2 and 3 are OK. Metacity (Gnome) is not so OK, because Xfce has xfwm4 as a Window Manager. Sooner or later you happen to download something which doesn't fit and looks odd and broken.

3. You can create your own artwork. More about that later.

Themes use engines to run, that is, certain theme-families share the same engine, or theme may have several in use. Engines have to be installed for theme to work (theme-packages have engines included, separately downloaded ones – not always). When your Appearance Manager whines (hopefully it does - as opposed to simply displaying broken crap), use Synaptic and install the missing part. Just for a fun of naming some engine names: murrine, unico, pixbuf, nodova, aurora, equinox. There are more.

Xfce Window Manager uses specific xpm format, files sit in /xfwm4 folder (in themes' folder). Those files are used to build frame of every window. The process to create those files is not difficult, but it certainly takes time. Complete tutorial is here in xfce wiki. Not-Xfce themes doesn't have this xfce-specific part, unsurprasingly.

Settings Manager (xfce4-settings), includes appearance settings.

Xfce accepts both GTK 2 and GTK 3 style themes – gtk scripts create environment inside of every window. This is a bit more complicated – and I am not competent enough to give tweaking advice here. But, there are tutorials available in web, of course.

Gtk parts of theme live in gtk-2.0 and gtk-3.0 folders.

If you are adventurous and want to build your own theme, then a must is an app called thewidgetfactory (command is twf – it doesn't appear into menu, you have to create launcher yourself). Twf shows you how your buttons, sliders, check-boxes etc etc appear to look at current moment of scripting (or png-making). Gimp helps with png-s (tutorial page).
Gtk script is pure txt - use your text editor (in Xfce, Leafpad), or if you want to feel a bit more sophisticated and pro-looking: Geany or Bluefish might fit.

Icons are not part of theme, strictly speaking. Even more – they are not commonly added into theme-packs. Have to get them separately, then.

Icons are either png (standard format), or svg (scalable vector graphics, a format simply widely used) - for tweaking/creating those, use Inkscape. Icons' conf is described in index.theme file which sits in every icon-sets' folder. Icons are either fixed or scalable. There are hundreds of them, thematically grouped. Very common is to make symbolic links when the same icon is used in several places.

Changing those icons … can drive one almost insane, and it's marvelous to have more than 10 windows open at once... very business-like.

And here are some standards to muse over - when drinking evenings' Earl Grey and nibbling bisquits: Icon theme and Icon naming.

Looking back to past action ends here.

Xfce customization, less obvious

We are dealing with Xubuntu here

- Moving things on panels. Right-click on item, pick 'move'. Obvious, yes – but what wasn't so obvious to me, is how items align and stay in groups. There are invisible separators on panels, and you can add more or delete them, according to need. Easiest way to find default ones is: Right-click a panel, open 'panel/panel preferences/items. All things on panel are listed there, also separators – double-click and change 'transparent' to something else. And now you can see it on panel. 'Expand' means that separator pushes items away on both sides. That is, separator in center of panel makes items go to both ends. Do experiment, it's frustratingly educational.

- Xfce menu lacks 'lock screen' option. If needed, it's easy to create: Open your menu editor and add new item to right place, name it, and add exec command: xflock4. Pick an icon. Save, done.
- Xfce has such a nice thing as mime editor (in Settings). Means, you can make certain apps to handle certain files (can't change system defaults, though). If some file is opened in freaky way – like jpg with Firefox, and you can't find jpg at all in mime editor – then open this jpg with app you want to be default. Entry should now appear to mime list. Double-clicking on entry opens edit. There might be occasional need to fix entries which point to app that you removed (but mime didn't notice that). Or something...
- Xfce can have only one wallpaper over all workspaces. Compiz and KDE, for example, can have different ones. There is app called 'wallpaperoz', it has to be downloaded from web and manually installed. This app enables different wallpapers, and also changes them as frequently as you want. BUT, it's slow and lagging when you change workspaces. So, I tried it and I removed it.
- Docks. I am not sure what for they are good – as Xfce lets you make several freely customizable panels and fill them with launchers, drawers, widgets and whatnot. But anyway – there you have some names for googling: Plank dock (simple), AWN (it's not developed anymore), and most famous currently – Cairo dock (looks very pimpy and mac-ish).
- Themes and icons. Next post will be about this. Here I say only - well, obvious: for a simple tuning, look into 'Appearance', 'Window manager' and 'Window manager tweaks' and play around.

Configuration editors: There are occasions when some settings need to be tweaked manually. For that there are configuration editors. If in need or simply curious, take a look. Proper caution should be exercised, clicking like a blind moron is not advisable!
Xfce has a package 'xfce4-settings' which contains xfce4-settings-editor.
Gnome-specific settings come through gconf-editor, Linux Mint uses dconf-editor. Mate desktop one is called mateconf-editor. And so on. Depending on distro, an editor might be already installed – or not.

Tweaking of Grub2 - Not recommended without extensive pre-research!
For serious tweaking DO READ tutorials before, experimenting with bootloader IS dangerous!
One overview is here... googling 'tweaking grub2' gives a lot more.
Here are three less risky things (provided that no errors are made):
- Some easily changeable (and commented) parameters (wait-time before booting OS, for one) are in file /etc/default/grub
- To remove memtest entry from boot menu (if it is there). There is file /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+
Go there and simply make this file non-executable, in terminal:
sudo chmod -x 20_memtest86+
- If using Ubuntu there are 'Advanced options' entries in boot menu. Those folders contain entries to boot older kernels. If your new updated one works (reboot is mandatory, so you will know if it works) then there is no especial need to keep those older kernels (they take disk space too).
Check which is your last, working one. Type in terminal: uname -r
and you get number of current version. Rev up your Synaptic and find all 'linux-image' and 'linux-header' packages. 'Completely remove' those that are OLDER than your current one (lesser ver number). Be very careful NOT to remove the newest ones. And after all that, type in terminal:  
update-grub
Done.

Xfce – the first glimpse

Xfce site has very nice and understandable tutorials, a must read.

Both distros (Mint and Xubuntu) I am talking here about, come in traditional Xfce appearance: main panel on upper edge, and 'launcher panel' on bottom of screen. Xubuntu 12.10 has 'all drives are double' bug on desktop but it goes away after updates are applied.
I moved main panel to bottom, launcher-panel to left side and removed all desktop icons. So, almost nothing remained like it was in vanilla form. Point of mentioning this is, that everything on Xfce desktop is tunable. How vanilla looks – visit Xfce, Mint and Xubuntu – there are screenshots to look.

First Xfce I installed was Xubuntu 12.10. Because there are several reviews singing praise to it - do google if interested.

First things to do - as usual: Software sources/additional drivers = change video driver to proprietary one, if there are more available drivers, change those too. Update Manager wants to update, let it do that. Install 'xubuntu-restricted-extras' from repository. (Longer description of those first things is in post named 4. Cinnamon!).

Synaptic wasn't even installed, and menu lacked almost everything that should be in System folder. Settings were presented only through Settings Manager. That's in 'Xubuntu session', 'Xfce session' menu is more "open".

Not liking that very much and just for fun, I decided to try out Mints' Xfce version. All aforementioned nags were nicely absent there, BUT – to my big surprise – there wasn't any menu editor present. To my even bigger surprise I found that Xfce traditionally doesn't have a menu editor! One is supposed to hack menu manually. Or – as advised somewhere – to use menu editor of Lxde 'which works alright'. Well it worked, but only half-way, part of menu was simply missing. So it boils down to manual method – which is really quite simple, but takes time to do.

HOW-TO: First, copy contents of /usr/share/applications to your home folders' .local/share/applications. Those .desktop files represent all possible menu items and contain their configurations (type, where to appear, exec, icon and so on).

Also copy etc/xdg/menus/xfce-applications-menu to ~/.config/menus/ xfce-applications-menu. It's xml file containing whole architecture of menu tree.

Why to copy? To avoid sudo-ing every time you change something. And to make sure those files stay exactly like you change them (being now owned by you).

What to do, how to change various options, is very nicely described in this official tutorial.

Fancy that after successfully hacking Mints' menu etc, I decided to switch back to Xubuntu – because Xubuntu has menu editor alright (alacarte) and it seemed somehow important to me in those still n00bish times.

When Xubuntu installs, it creates two sessions: Xubuntu and (pure) Xfce.

As 'Xfce session' has all settings and system things available by default, I picked it as my default and removed Xubuntu session from login screen selection altogether.

Bugs, errors:

I have installed Xfce now four times. In all those desktops I had couple of identical bugs and errors. Difference here is that I call a glitch I see a 'bug', and 'errors' are those listed in .xsession-errors after every system-start. Not sure how they correlate... Anyway, all 5 errors seem to be known but unfixed. One bug – which creates useless 'outputstream'-files into home folder, is also known and unfixed (these files could be deleted without problem).

Two bugs I couldn't find any reference to. One prevents me from editing autostart apps (option grayed out). No clue what to do about that (Edit: Not a bug at all - it appears you can edit only entries you yourself have made. So, simply a silly 'feature').
The second is this: I can add wallpapers to wallpaper folder, I close Manager – and the fucker forgets all of them except this one I have on desktop (and two ugly default wallpapers). Plus – I can't delete them, button is grayed out. And no – it doesn't appear to be permissions issue...

For this I used this workaround: I mounted my custom wallpaper folder to folder where Xfce keeps its default wallpapers. And now they stay, and I can add or delete them in my home folder without any hassle (still can't delete in wallpaper manager).

HOW-TO mount a folder permanently:
Create folder ~/Pictures/wall (or whatever-name) for your wallpapers.

Open terminal, type: sudo leafpad /etc/fstab
Add to the end of file:

#wallpaper mount 
/home/myhomename/Pictures/wall /usr/share/xfce4/backdrops none defaults,bind 0 0

Save, reboot. Should be mounted now.
#is a comment line, first address is what you are going to mount, the second is where are you going to mount. And don't loose parameters that come after that. Line should be spaced the same table-like way as are previous entries. And DO make backup of fstab before.

As an environment, Xfce scores 9/10.

Distro-hopping: Intro

January 2013
Distro-hopping has started. Bored with Mints, I am. And current Mate (1.4) is somewhat buggy.
I searched around and got more and more convinced that Xfce might cut my beef better.
It's one of these 'big four' desktops. I am quoting: 'Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly'.
It is lean and mean alright, but also quite 'full' desktop – more so than Lxde, but a lot less bloated than KDE and Gnome. It is keeping nice traditional look – things are in right places for desktop, there is no tablet-oriented bastardization. Also seems that devs are busy creating new versions.... which means – the thing is alive and kicking.
Xfce has multiple panels, compositing manager (tunable transparency for panels and windows) and classic main menu. And yes, it takes very little of your computers' resources. It depends of course, but something like 200 Mb of memory is used in my machine when no apps are running. Compare that to KDE-s 600 Mb, or Gnomes' 400 Mb.
I killed Mate and installed Xfce as my permanent system.
At the same time-period – I tested or tried out various other distros.
- Because then I was already really boss in making bootables and installing (30min, whole thing);

- Because, when I made room for Linux, I unallocated 50 Gigs. And my 'permanent Linux' takes approximately half of it. So I had 25Gb to play around;

- And because I was simply curious.

Not one of the distros tried remained as a second install – but some of them got earmarked for repeated testing in coming spring-summer – when new releases are scheduled to appear.
Next 2 posts will be about those tests.