XFCE avoids the plague which affects rest of the software industry (me included) - dedicate design, marketing, and development teams who constantly have to add something to justify their jobs and bonuses. Look at the number of app updates on mobile phones, every freaking week there is a update available. If you don't update they will eventually block older versions.

Argh. I've seen this problem over and over on a variety of Ubuntu versions over the years, as if they don't want me resizing windows.

Is there any way to tweak this? I'm not at all liking it. My 16.04 installations are much better in this regard.

I understand that there are times when that isn't work so it's nice to have both options. ( I wrote a browser based windowing system and have experimented with having the bezels on the windows be quite large and/or auto-expanding when the mouse nears them to make resizes as easy as possible since hard to hit pixel thing annoys me so much)

The width of the grab area is controlled by the theme." 1

Most people appear to circumvent the problem by using another means of resizing windows.

"As soon as your keyboard-shortcut (in Xfce upstream its Alt+F8) is hit, you can then resize the window by either moving your mouse (no need to click or drag) or use your keyboard arrow keys." 2

1 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156435/how-can-i-ma...

2 https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...

I know it's not a fix, and it is still cumbersome if all you have at the moment is a laptop trackpad. But it beats having to update your destkop environment's chrome and all that jazz. I find XFCE's window chrome pleasing and minimal, the only issue is exactly that, you only have 1px of hot area at the borders.

I used Xubuntu for a while but I was always fascinated by how bad a couple aspects of XFCE are. They maintain documentation [1] on oddball ways of resizing windows instead of just giving people what they want. I suspect MATE just does what most people want out of the box.

[1] https://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce...

I've used this when I need to use Windows. Works well enough.

  'm' followed by arrow keys to move the window around, or
  'r' followed by arrow keys to resize the window

  Win+R -> Resize
  Win+M -> Move
  Win+A -> All desktops
  Win+Q -> Stay on top
  Win+H -> Hide
  Win+Arrow -> change workspace
  Win+Shift+Arrow -> Carry focused window to workspace

This works so well for me that I completely removed all the buttons from the window manager since I no longer need to access them anymore.

Ubuntu Mate uses gtk 3 and probably in general more modern technology than XFCE, with a similar style. Definitely worth considering.

I even brought an old Macbook back to life by throwing Mate on it in place of MacOs.

The applications delivery the value on the desktop, not the desktop environment. The DE vendors (Gnome/Unity in particular) need to work that out and just get out of the way.

However having access to things like a network manager to join wireless networks, a battery indicator, a volume control, etc is essential in today's world, which is why I now run a heavyweight xfce environment.

You don't need to run a full DE to have tray icons. I'm running i3 and the network manager applet + other tray items work just fine.

[1] https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

I use xmonad with stalonetray [1] (which as you may guess from the name is a standalone notification tray) and dzen2 [2] as a notification area for basic information ( battery / cpu / temperature / wifi status ). With them I cover enough of my needs and I don't feel the need to anything more complex.

I think that it would be nice to have some middle ground between a full desktop environment and bare-bone and manually configured window manager though.

[1] http://stalonetray.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://github.com/robm/dzen

If they did a simple non tiling WM that had those little things in it and wasn't a piece of crap, I'd be there like a shot.

It's Openbox (which is a really capable, lightweight non-tiling window manager) plus a panel plus Xfce Power Manager and similar applications to handle the desktop environment stuff.

Nautilus has got increasingly shitty. So there's less Gnome now in my Xfce.

I tried Win 10 recently, it was horrible.

In conclusion they all have warts. But Xfce is okay in a Win95 kind of way. It could be better.

Simple UI seems to always elude distros/desktops.

Note: I'm currently not using Xfce at home, but I use some older version at work.

The only thing I don't really like in the Ubuntu's model is the bi-yearly updates and the PPA system. Every time you upgrade the distro the PPA's get disabled and there's a lot of work enabling them and fixing the packages.

That being said, I installed NixOS to my other laptop and after two days got a configuration that just installs and configures everything I need. I might overwrite this Ubuntu installation with it and go rolling with the master.

I've been using i3 for years, and I tried out gaps when it first started popping up in the ricing forums (like https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ [please note, it's not actual porn]).

Do you use gaps so that you can see little bits of your background image? Is it purely aesthetic? I can understand beefing up the borders so that there's some space between tiles, but the gaps seem like unnecessary waste of space.

I need Win10 for low latency music work and for the odd game, all development work happens in Xubuntu VMs.

Windows is essentially a shell where I juggle vms when I need a dev environment for a specific client.

I use VirtualBox as my virtualization solution and what I found was that using Xubuntu made the whole "linux in a vm" experience much more snappier, and since I basically work with 'text' and don't fiddle with music+video inside the vm, I often forget I'm inside a VM when it's fullscreened. With Ubuntu/Unity the whole VM experience gets slowed to a crawl because Unity wants to XDamage/Composite everything and virtualbox's "accelerated drivers" aren't that good to make it perform good.

Back on Windows 10 I re-evaluated VirtualBox, Hyper-V with the new linux enhanced session support(poor experience TBH), and VMware workstation player. VMware ended up being the best experience in terms of responsiveness IMHO. You may want to give it a go. It's free for personal use, but unfortunately workstation pro is quite expensive.

I find it smoother, much more intuitive, and about the same with regards to memory footprint

https://windowmaker.org/ -- Really, though, it's in the package repos of just about any distro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_Maker

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Window_Maker