Make xfce better for touch screens?

General system Newbie
1

Probably install gnome later, but have just a quick off-line install of xfce on a Teclast X4 (CCC - Cheap, cheerful and Chinese!!).

Some quick questions:

  • How can I make the title bars bigger?
  • Can the window scaling be set to higher than 1 but lower than 2?
  • Can I make the whisker menu dark?

There will probably be more - it has been a long time since I used xfce :smiley:

2

a quick google (or whichever search engine you use) will answer such things for a specific DE! Enjoy .

3

If only life were that easy :smiley:
Whisker menu was a pebcak problem - it was set to Arc Darker, needed to be Arc Dark.

Cannot find any info on the other two though. Will try gnome when at home, wifi is dreadful at work.

4

Using a different theme with larger title bars, or modifying the theme AFAIK.

I suppose you might mean the monitor/screen scaling, as I don’t recall xfce scaling windows…
If you mean with standard Xfce settings, it’s what it allows in the GUI. Usually, it is as you described (x1, x2, etc).
For practical scaling in decimal values, you may try xrandr scaling feature, which is proven to work, but may need some fine-tuning, finding the best values to have a clean outcome. I would read Archwiki on this (I always forget these tricks :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: )

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5

OK. This is what I have learned:

  • Gnome - supposedly more touch screen friendly isn’t really:
    1 - Cannot change the size of the buttons, makes them impossible to touch.
    2 - Can set keyboard shortcuts to make things “better”.
    3 - Scrolling is problematic, having to grab tiny scrollbars in most cases.
    4 - Mouse pointer disappears, a lot.
    5 - GSConnect - couldn’t get it to work (prior to installing KDE, so not the cause).

  • KDE is much better:
    1 - Can increase the size of the buttons.
    2 - Less reliance on keyboard shortcuts.
    3 - Scrolling works.
    4 - Pointer never disappears.
    5 - KDE connect works.

Why is KDE/GSConnect important? - So I could use my phone as a touchpad :smiley:

Firefox - Had to make a change in about:config as per:

The keyboard I got “free” is really good quality, but has no touchpad and is really heavy, have purchased a cheap one (£15) from Amazon, it has a touchpad and is half the weight.

Didn’t play with XFCE as not a fan.

Lightdm really pissed me off, it would randomly select a different DE, without being told. GDM was better, SDDM was best.

Cannot get the sound to work, but Bluetooth to my speaker does, may post about it if it becomes and issue.

6

You have also dashboard plugins basicly sort of menu like gnome can putin the panel with movement from the panel corner. Big title bars probabny spme grl hacks :smile:

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