[Tutorial] Easy Setup: Endeavour XFCE + i3 tiling window manager

Lounge EndeavourOS development
101

Hi all. Used this tutorial on a fresh Endeavour install and worked great for the most part, but having a few big issues with displays and workspaces.

Originally (with just laptop screen) the XFCE panel workspaces feature was super messed up; if I switched it to the mini-icons it worked okay, but I prefer the dots / numbered workspace setup. After trying to fix this for a while, I found a plugin for XFCE panel that was hooked into the i3wm system. It worked okay, but was really buggy for me.

Next I removed the xfce-panel and reverted to i3blocks panel. This works a little better (as in, workspaces are numbered and switchable like normal i3wm), but as soon as I added in a second monitor; everything got wonky. Assigned workspaces don’t work properly most of the time, and switching workspaces via i3wm shortcuts sometime skip to random numbers.

Tried polybar as well, and same issue.

Does anyone have this setup working with multiple monitors? It’s almost unusable unfortunately as it is.

I have a feeling it is something to do with XFCE’s workspace settings GUI competing with i3wms internal setup. XFCE’s display settings also may affect this. I much prefer the XFCE display setting though, as opposed to use i3wm config settings.

Any ideas here?!

102

I have no idea honestly and I’ll hand off this thread to someone out there who may be using it still. I have deviated quite far away, so I can’t help much with this anymore. Life is too busy and other DE+tiling just kinda work.

103

I followed the gist of this tutorial with Fluxbox, and it works great.
With Fluxbox, there can be a lot of minute configuring for very mundane stuff, which is taken care of with the Xfce as “backend” approach.

As a bonus, it actually uses less ram than if you set it all up with Fluxbox exclusively with seperate components.

And as an additional bonus if you like to keep it minimal, from an Arch install (or “no desktop” EOS install) you only need a couple Xfce packages.

sudo pacman -S xfwm4 xfce4-session xfce4-power-manager xfce4-settings

and you’re good to go, or to add more xfce stuff if you like.

The Xfce panel is very slow with FB, which is why I didn’t add it. Tint2 is a capable replacement, set it to autostart in xfce settings.

So thanks for the guide!

2 Likes