XFCE, Lxde & Other, alternate, Window Managers

[mikeslr]

Hi All,

The 'standard' Window Manager which is 'built-in' to most Puppys is jwm. But with some hard work and dedication other Window Managers can be created enabling a Puppy User to change his Puppy's 'Look and Feel.' Peebee has been kind enough to put in that work and publish some for our benefit. Among them are LXQT, links to which are here, viewtopic.php?p=2419#p2419 and here, https://sourceforge.net/projects/lxpup/ ... /Desktops/.
On the latter link you'll find XFCE, LXDE and MATE window managers packaged as ydrv.sfses.

Cautions: --But first note that I have no actual experience from having used these ydrv.sfses. My experience is having spent 30+ years as a practicing attorney whose job often involved asking the question "What can go wrong?" and figuring out how to avoid that. Among businessmen attorneys are known as 'Deal killers'.
ydrv.sfs is among what I refer to as an ‘alphabet.sfs’: See, viewtopic.php?p=9804#p9804 for its definition and contrast to an application SFS. You locate a ydrv.sfs adjacent to your Puppy's "main" SFS, e.g. puppy_slacko_xxx.sfs. They will automatically be copied into RAM on boot-up and can NOT be unloaded. You can not use more than one SFS named ydrv.sfs. AFAIK, they will not function properly if renamed as an application SFS and SFS-loaded. Except for taersh’s ArtStudion64, AFAIK currently the only ‘alfphabet SFSes’ Puppys can use must begin with the letters a, z, f, or y. But you can combine several ‘alphabet SFSes’ whose files do not conflict. For example, a zdrv.sfs only holds hardware drivers and an fdrv.sfs only holds hardware firmware. As nicOS has developed an application which enables you to convert your SaveFile/Folder into a ydrv –enabling you to always boot from a pristine, READ-ONLY, system-- you might want to combine any zdrv and fdrv into, say, a zdrv and rename one of peebee’s window-manager ydrvs to fdrv.
I may be mistaken, but I think peebee’s ydrv.sfs window-managers are a bi-product of his development of slackware-binary-compatible Puppys. I don’t know –and do not recall reading any posts regarding-- the ability to use them OOTB with Ubuntu-binary-compatible or debian-binary-compatible Puppys. [Post if you know ]. As these ydrv.sfs will automatically load on boot-up and can NOT be unloaded, if your Puppy is a ‘Ubuntu’ or ‘debian’, I strongly recommend that you proceed with caution. Window-managers are fundamental parts of an operating system. It is possible that you will discover that you’ve booted into a non-responsive system and will have to ‘pull the plug’ to get out of it. Turn off your Automatic Save and/or backup your SaveFile/Folder before trying them.

But do try them. Being a Puppy software tester is the job you volunteered for, the price you pay, to have the most versatile operating system and maintain it as such; and to be a member of a community which responds to your interests. Report your experience, good or bad. And if something isn’t fully functional, and you have the time, help to make it so.

Other window managers:
josejp2424’s openboxplus64 for modern 64-bit Puppys, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 99#1033699
vicmz’s Openboxplus with choice of lxpanal or tint2 for various older 32-bit Puppys, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 730#703730
vicmz’s Openboxplus-p, a lightweight openbox with only fbpanel for various 32-bit Puppys, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 479#704479
radky’s FbBox, both 32-and-64 bit, for various Puppys, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 018#769018
battleshooter’s XFCE 4.12 for XenialPup 64bit, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 759#966759

Links to many alternate window managers by musher0, Jejy69 and others can be found on the ‘old forum’s Desktop Section beginning here: http://murga-linux.com/puppy/index.php? ... C&start=30

Don’t hesitate to post about your experiences.

[Wiz57]

Just to let everyone know...I am using peebee's LXDE sfs at the moment with ScPup32. I also use it
In ArchPup32. In ScPup I load it as you noted, as a ydrv.sfs, and it works well. However, in ArchPup,
attempting to load it this way results in a hang, not able to start X. BUT, all is not lost! I renamed
the ydrv.sfs to lxde.sfs, loaded it on the fly, and VOILA! It works. I also use an older version of LXQT
via ydrv in ScPup. The newer versions of LXQT don't like the "tray area" applications, such as
network connection, making it difficult to activate them via mouseclick...have to hover pointer at
the bottom and click real quick! Peebee's excellent work with these alternate desktop environments
even include a DE switcher, you can change back and forth to JWM/Rox from LX...handy!
Wiz

[peebee]

Just a few notes of caution......

The LXDE, LXQt and Xfce ydrv's are the most up-to-date and are built using individual components.

The MATE ydrv was built differently (from a Porteus module) and is older.

There are ydrv's (32 & 64bit) for ScPups, UPups and LxPupScs but also BionicPup64 and FossaPup64 and just recently Slacko64-8.0Alpha

Agree with @mikeslr - always try a ydrv in a pristine frugal install first!

Both LXQt and Xfce are moving away from the traditional Puppy GTK2 base - and some of the GTK2 systray items - and this needs "workarounds".

There is a very strange Thunar crash in Xfce 64-bit.

[pp4mnklinux]

I used all of them, and my vote directly goes to XFCE

Hope u like.- Use it and u will discover a new puppy,.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ExCComEXAAI ... name=small

[Geek3579]

I have been using Bionicpup64 + LXDE ydr for some months now, and it has run perfectly with one exception: PCMANFM frequently crashes making it effectively unusable. I quickly installed CAJA from the PPM, having seen it working well in dpupbuster64, and it runs flawlessly in Bionicpup64.

I highly recommend Bionicpup64 + LXDE ydr as a fast, stable and efficient desktop environment.

[mistfire]

XFCE was rock solid and more reliable than LXDE. The only problem was the stock icons included on the packages, lack of file search tool, lack of screen locking, Bluetooth management, and the warning message on Thunar when the Thunar ran as root

[mikeslr]

XFCE was rock solid and more reliable than LXDE. The only problem was...

If I had bacon I could have bacon and eggs; if I had eggs.

The truth is that XFCE is a great Window Manager: "If you build it, they will come." But getting one from a JWM-Rox Puppy (or building from woof) takes knowledge and experience not possessed by many mere Puppy users; at any rate something above my pay-grade.

What I like most about XFCE is it's Whisker-Menu. Which is why on a couple of occasions, following fredx181's advice that it could be done, I added xfce-panel. Although any xfce 'widget' could have been used with it, I only used Whisker and one other. This worked best with an Lxde desktop as the widths of both Xfce-panel the bottom lxde panel could be adjusted so that both fit and appeared to be one continuous panel on the bottom.

But TBH, creating xfce-panel, itself, was more trouble than I thought it worth after radky published FbBox.

[peebee]

I have been using Bionicpup64 + LXDE ydr for some months now, and it has run perfectly with one exception: PCMANFM frequently crashes making it effectively unusable. I quickly installed CAJA from the PPM, having seen it working well in dpupbuster64, and it runs flawlessly in Bionicpup64.

I highly recommend Bionicpup64 + LXDE ydr as a fast, stable and efficient desktop environment.

@Geek3579:
I have uploaded a new version of the LXDE ydrv for BionicPup64 - I cannot get PCManFM to crash on my desktop - please try it - thanks.

[pp4mnklinux]

Here u can find and download the XFCE desktop and much more resources.

https://archive.org/download/Puppy_Linux_Xenialpup64

Have a nice week

[Geek3579]

"I have uploaded a new version of the LXDE ydrv for BionicPup64 - I cannot get PCManFM to crash on my desktop - please try it - thanks"

Hi Peebee.

Loaded up the new LXDE ydrv into a pristine frugal installation of Bionicpup64. No crashes at all...GREAT !!.

Then I wondered if I could swap the older ydrv for the newer version, which I did in a"spare" installation of LXDE Bionicpup64. Again no problems that I can note at this point, all installed changes seem to be there - apps, workspaces, desktop images, etc.

Thanks for your prompt help !!

[JASpup]

A great draw to the LxPup series is co-existence with JWM.

I've yet to find a workable JWM co-existing with XFCE in the 32 X-series, the 64 puplet, or by manually installing XFCE from the PPM.

In the manual XFCE I use in Tahr, both the firewall and audio notification applets slam the cpu at 100%. I can kill them, but those are the kinks I don't see in LxPup.

Manual XFCE works, but it's a lengthy customization with compromises and technical demands.

Switching in the Lx series, JWM looks nearly identical to its Mainline counterpart. You'll notice slight differences.

I'm typing this in Lx in JWM. LXDE is on-tap. The sum is greater flexibility.

In LxPup Xenial jwmthememaker is neither installed nor in the default repository database:
https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/downloa ... f0df7bdc80

It's needed to improve upon the given JWM theme choices.

[peebee]

A ydrv to add Xfce4 to FocalPup32 (UPupFF+D) is now available.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/lxpup/ ... XFCE-ydrv/

[tosim]

DistroWatch has a comparison summary of XFCE, LXDE, LXQT for your interest.
Can be viewed here: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20211115#news

[JASpup]

DistroWatch has a comparison summary of XFCE, LXDE, LXQT for your interest.
Can be viewed here: https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20211115#news

I have a very different opinion:

If LXDE were the only Puppy DE I would say, "Nice, this works."

But after experience I slightly prefer Xenial-era JWM and XFCE is a league above as a DE.

The main reason is the rich refinement of the XFCE gui at minimally compromised efficiency.

Is JWM slightly more stable in Puppy? Yes, but relative the amount of energy put into it, probably not.

LXDE also has better menus than JWM, but JWM's pre-Bionic window crispness is at least as important. What is that, GTK+2 or Openbox? Mainline Bionic windows look too much like an LxPup.

Biased shop here and I am in it, but LXDE looks slightly better in Lubuntu than it does it Puppy, while LXQt on 32 puppies may not have any competition, as Lubuntu doesn't even support LXQt 32-bit.

What bloats XFCE over LXDE is distro developer intentions, not DE resource demands as I have been posting recently: http://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=4470

LXQt, in my tests, is smaller than Xfce, but requires about 50% more memory than LXDE while offering approximately the same features as its sibling.

XFCE itself does not appear to require 50% more memory than LXDE.

Summarily if a DE is supposed to be 'heavier', I want to feel it. With 2GB ram the difference is nothing compared to, say, browsing.

You can see the size of the DE we're loading into ram as a file, and Task Manager usage is not reflecting vast discrepancies in memory usage.

[user1111]

cwm can be nice window manager for laptops and those that are more keyboard heavy users. Loads to just a blank desktop.

Very bland, awkward at first but such few command keys that you soon use it instinctively.

I leave a few pixels at the top of screen to provide quick/easy access to the "desktop" that when left clicked shows/switches to existing windows (or you can use alt-tab or alt-down arrow to step between them).

l.png (284.94 KiB) Viewed 4328 times

Right mouse on the desktop shows your command menu, in which I also store bookmarks. I've bound alt-spacebar to alternative show that, so for instance alt-spacebar p <enter> opens Puppylinux, or r opens rox.

r.png (318.85 KiB) Viewed 4328 times

alt-? opens up a command selector, type the first few characters of a program to be shown a list of available choices to select from.

For a clock/time, opening a browser tab to a online clock page has the time displayed in one of your tabs.

I use that in a full screen (Xephyr) container and have it set so that the desktop colour is blue when hostgrab is locked, red when unlocked (toggled via ctrl-shift). When locked for instance alt-tab just steps between windows in the container, when unlocked alt-tab steps between container and main system windows.

Configuring cwm (.cwmrc) is very light, literally/typically just 20 or so lines. No window decorations, you move/resize windows with alt left/middle mouse drags, toggle minimise/maximise with ctrl-alt-M.

Not really a fan of multiple windows alongside each other and mostly I have each window maximised and just flip between them. Excepting when comparing or copying two windows contents. cwm also supports having the focused window behind another window, so you can for instance have a small sized vlc window still being visible when you're in/using a maximised spreadsheet document or browser window (watching vids whilst your working on documents)

w.jpg (175.27 KiB) Viewed 4328 times

cwm is all configured in the single ~/.cwmrc file, mine looks something like ...

.cwmrc

Code: Select all

gap 6 0 0 0
borderwidth 1
color inactiveborder "#726B57"
color activeborder "#ffc100" 
color groupborder "#01a252"
color urgencyborder "#3d9751"
color selfont "#0034A9"
color font "#FFFFFF"
color menufg "#49F6F6"
color menubg "#333333"
fontname  "News10:size=12:antialias=true"

# Default of ctrl / to show menu-cmd
# default ctrl shift / (ctrl ?) for exec
# are easier with Ctrl-space Alt-space and WIN-space
bind-key 4-space menu-exec
bind-key C-space menu-window
bind-key M-space menu-cmd
# instead of having to right mouse pressing desktop to show menu
# I set my commands to include both bookmarks and programs

# Bookmarks
# I prefix bookmarks with a single space and programs with double space
# so we can alt-space space to show just bookmarks
# i.e press alt-space to activate the menu and then tap <spacebar> again
# to show entries starting with a single space i.e. bookmarks
# and then if we type G it will highlight Gyro bookmark entry
# I strive to keep different first character names for each entry so we can
# for instance we can launch puppylinux.com with alt-space space p ENTER
# or run rox with alt-space space space r ENTER
command " " ""
command " YAHOO" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox -d https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/"
command " NEWS-BBC" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox -d https://news.bbc.co.uk/"
command " PUPPYLINUX" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox -d https://forum.puppylinux.com"
command " DRAUGHTS" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox -d https://draughts.github.io"
command " CLOCK" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox -d https://clock.onlinealarmkur.com/en/"
command "  " ""
command "  rox" rox
command "  edit geany" geany
command "  galculator" galculator
command "  spreadsheet" "libreoffice --calc"
command "  writer" "libreoffice --writer"
command "  tetris" "gtktetris"
command "  chrome" "/opt/google/chrome/chrome --no-sandbox --start-maximized clock.onlinealarmkur.com/en/"
command "   " ""

[peebee]

The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 1.1.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

Binaries already available for ArchLinux

This bit looks of interest....
LXQt Panel:
Legacy tray icons are shown inside Status Notifier when the System Tray plugin is enabled.

[peebee]

This bit looks of interest....
LXQt Panel:
Legacy tray icons are shown inside Status Notifier when the System Tray plugin is enabled.

Is indeed improved.........

ydrv for LxPupSc32-22.02+3 ...........
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code ... Ej7XQF4XWV

ydrv for LxPupSc64-22.02+3 ............
https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code ... BLBRhGGkrk

ydrv for JammyPup32-22.04 ............
https://sourceforge.net/projects/zestyp ... s/download

Screenshot.png (207.38 KiB) Viewed 4064 times

[peebee]

LXQt-1.1.0 ydrvs for both LxPupSc32 and LxPupSc64 now available.

+ JammyPup32

[JASpup]

I booted Lx 16.07 yesterday thinking it was Tahr when it's Slacko and all my browsers wouldn't run.

All I have seen to run in Puppyland for my full-time 64 future is Battleshooter Xenial and Mainline Fossa, but I cannot devote to one distro for some odd feature or lacking.

Lx has some cool features like lxterminal displaying the desktop background even above other windows, but it's not worth Slackware for a user.

computing bliss to all the worthy

[peebee]

Xfce-4.18 has been released....

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Xfce-4.18-Released

[TurtleX]

The best part of Xfce (in my opinion) is the xfce4-panel when combined with the xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin. Topping it off with a complete icon set, so that there are no missing icons in the menus will allow for great customisation and a more polished look and feel. You don't need the entire suite of Xfce packages or even it's window manager. Just run the panel at startup alongside your preferred Window Manager or Desktop Environment using the command

Code: Select all

xfce4-panel -d &

I prefer this method with openbox, since it has more features and more window decoration theming options than Jwm. But it will also work just fine with Jwm.

[mikeslr]

The best part of Xfce (in my opinion) is the xfce4-panel when combined with the xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin. Topping it off with a complete icon set, so that there are no missing icons in the menus will allow for great customisation and a more polished look and feel. You don't need the entire suite of Xfce packages or even it's window manager. Just run the panel at startup alongside your preferred Window Manager or Desktop Environment using the command

Code: Select all

xfce4-panel -d &

I prefer this method with openbox, since it has more features and more window decoration theming options than Jwm. But it will also work just fine with Jwm.

fredx181 taught me the above a couple years ago and it works great with openbox +lxpanel. You can resize lxpanel leaving space for xfce4-panel at its end. But I've grown lazy and just install xfce-AppFinder into any Puppy, and a launcher for it on the 'taskbar'. Either way, I recommend installing the App so that Whisker-menu or AppFinder will properly categorize applications written for jwm. See this post, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 369#p21369.

[peebee]

Xfce-4.18 ydrv addons for LxPupSc

see below

Screenshot-xfce.png (122.04 KiB) Viewed 3317 times

[peebee]

LxPupJammy32 Xfce ydrv also available - https://sourceforge.net/projects/zestyp ... XFCE-ydrv/

[peebee]

Xfce-4.16 is available for S15Pup 32 & 64

Xfce-4.18 update is available for LxPupSc 32 & 64

LXQt-1.2.0 update with Qt-5.15.8 is available for LxPupSc 32 & 64

https://sourceforge.net/projects/lxpup/ ... Sc/addons/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/lxpup/ ... 64/addons/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/spup/f ... 32/addons/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/spup/f ... 64/addons/

[peebee]

Xfce-4.18 update is available for LxPupSc 32 & 64 - now as Xfce-bdrv - rename to either bdrv or ydrv.

[Geek3579]

In the last couple of days I have experimented with using XFCE with F96-CE-4. I downloaded XFCE from the Package Manager and was pleasantly surprised to see a desktop switcher icon in the menus. I changed from JWM to XFCE , saved the changes and it boots into XFCE every time.

So far it has behaved itself fairly well, but I needed to install the whisker menu separately. And I needed to mount the hard drives using pmount as thunar otherwise opens to a blank directory.

Its a great desktop environment with a huge scope to change settings and I hope to further test it later this year . I know JWM is a great DE, but I need to quickly save files on the desktop a lot of the time, which XFCE allows. Its a great addition to Puppy Linux usability.

[hundido]

Has anyone ever tried Awesome Window Manager or sxmo as an alternate?
https://awesomewm.org/
https://sxmo.org/
If you did, how did you do it, and how did it go?

[williwaw]

Awesome is installed in this expermental KL based on void repos.
viewtopic.php?p=98347#p98347
I think it would be easy to install on other flavors using void repos. It seems to be supported in other repos also, and has good documentation at its home site.
https://awesomewm.org/download/

[geo_c]

Awesome is installed in this expermental KL based on void repos.
viewtopic.php?p=98347#p98347
I think it would be easy to install on other flavors using void repos. It seems to be supported in other repos also, and has good documentation at its home site.
https://awesomewm.org/download/

KLV-Awesome runs pretty well from my couple of tests. @Sofiya made it real pretty.