After almost a full day of tweaking configurations and swearing at both Gnome3 and KDE4, I decided to follow my brother’s advice – try Xfce4. Â This is yet another desktop environment available in Fedora 15. Â I’ve heard a few good words about it, but never actually tried it out. Â Today was the day.
The first look around after a quick installation showed that most of the things I’ve been fighting with in Gnome3 and KDE4 just work. Â Xfce4 uses a lot of configuration from those other desktop environments, but somehow it actually understands what the user wanted to configure, even when neither Gnome or KDE do.
Xfce4 has a very simplistic tough to it. Â It feels at firs that something is missing. Â And maybe something is in fact missing. Â But after working with it for a couple of hours, I still didn’t realize what it is. Â Maybe it’s not as polished or as wow-ified as other desktop environments. Â But it works!
All I needed and wanted for my daily routine is there – desktop icons, panels with application shortcuts and widgets, keyboard switcher with flag icons, useful workspace switcher with application thumbnails and windows drag-n-drop support.
Even more surprising was the fact that Xfce4 picked up my font preferences. Â Gnome3 was configured with nice fonts. Â KDE4 was configured with nice, but other fonts. Â And they didn’t want to recognize each other’s font configurations. Â Xfce4 got with no effort on my part!
After losing almost a full day to configuration and tweaking I finally have a desktop environment which I can actually use. Hooray!