I’ve used pretty much all of the DEs over the past 18 months and used them as my primary DE for a few weeks each, and regardless of what FOTM is, I always end up back on XFCE.
Gnome is lovely, is solid and features some gorgeous and buttery smooth desktop animations. But it requires extensions to be usable for me, which means the solidity of the entire system relies on if a few extensions are coded correctly.
Plasma is gorgeous, and probably the most configurable and widget heavy DE. Light as XFCE nowadays, but for me it still is problematic. Especially the compositor, which frankly is garbage and leads to screen tearing in games, regardless of compositor or game settings.
Budgie & CInnamon are both nice, but ultimately not very configurable or customisable outside of themes.
LXDE/LXQT are both too limited for me.
XFCE on the otherhand is simple, plain as all get out, but can be set up to precisely how you want it to be. A lot easier to configure than Plasma and adhering to the KISS principles. It may not be as “flashy” as Plasma, but it’s modular, lightweight, solid, reliable and gets the job done.
My only niggle with XFCE is how it treats panels while using fullscreen applications if you click something on another monitor, leading to the panel overlaying the fullscreen application. None of the other DEs do that, and rightly keep the panel below the full screen application.
I’ve found XFCE pretty darn close so far. Any chance you missed a setting? Could this affect your problem…
Don't reserve space on borders
Normally, maximized application windows do not
overlap the panel. Setting this option disables
this behavior and allows the windows to stretch
to the screen edge behind the panel. This option
is only available when the panel is set to
never hide.
It’s not that. It’s indeed an issue with the panel showing above else when a fullscreen app is losing focus. This is often the case with multiple monitors when you have a fullscreen app on a monitor, and want to do something on the other monitor.
Giving focus back to the fullscreen app returns everything to normal.
I’ve taken this to be a feature, instead of a bug
I guess I’d have to see it in action to ‘grok’ it correctly. It’s just that I keep finding things I didn’t know I could do ‘my way’ in XFCE… and knowing where to start looking…
Sorry to reply late (just saw now this post). In my case I can open and edit a root file with kate without issue. I just need to enter the root password when I SAVE the file. (Maybe it’s different if you didn’t install the Root actions service menu as suggested by @Archnoob , in my case those are installed, but I don’t think it would make a difference as I can open kate directly, not from Dolphin).
I understood that this capability was being added to the system, but it was not then implemented completely. I assume it is better now - but not soon enough for me I didn’t (and don’t) want to work that hard at things I do so often. A simple alias handles most of it for me - or Thunar kindly opens as root for me if I’m in GUI…
That was maybe the case 3-4 years ago. Nowadays, both Dolphin and Kate use polkit and can perform actions as root. They just ask you for your user password and if you are a sudoer, you can do anything. This is no longer an issue (and hasn’t been in quite a while), so it makes no sense to bring that up regarding KDE.
You never need to use sudo (or kdesu, or whatever it is called) with either Dolphin or Kate, which was what some people used to do, a terrible idea in general.
It wasn’t that long ago I was trying it, and it didn’t work (few months?) but all the searching I could do said that was being added in - and that it was working (at that time) in one of them (kate?) but not yet the other. There may have been some other work-around available, but it sure wasn’t easy to find if so. Doesn’t matter now, anyway… I’ll just leave it to those that like it! Only thing I appreciate from there is kolourpaint Isn’t it wonderful we have so many choices??
If I want to edit /etc/fstab, I can’t save it without sudo, which is correct. But unlike Dolphin, Thunar does NOT ask me for the password. It just doesn’t work. Then use sudo nano for it.
Thunar has an option “open as root” in the context menu. You can open any location as root, type your password, edit the files you want as root, save and close the “root” Thunar.
When i was a newcomer to LInux, diversity of approaches for root actions in different file managers (or sometimes even lack of them) made me crazy
It’s jungle out there
Polkit seems to be best option, also i like separate “Root file manager” approach as well, since it requires password only once…But it’s hard to support for developers, at least that was case with Deepin
Looking into it in more detail, it seems I was wrong about Dolphin (but not Kate), regarding polkit. Fortunately the fix is easy: if you want to use Dolphin to perform root actions, simply build and install the following package from the AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/kde-servicemenus-rootactions
It implements the kdesu wizardry automatically, but you need to enter the root password, not your user (sudo) password.
On Manjaro KDE Edition, it comes installed by default (and it is in Manjaro’s community repo), so I incorrectly assumed it was a feature of Dolphin, but now on my EndeavourOS install I noticed it missing, but after installing it from the AUR, everything works the same as on a Manjaro KDE install.
Kate has fully implemented polkit to do privileged stuff, which is the proper way to do it. It is planned for Dolphin, too, but in the meantime the package above works well.
Hope that this also solves the problem of Timeshift and browsing the snapshots with Dolphin (Timeshift is opened with superuser = root?).
Which is not a problem under Xfce/Thunar.
Depends on the exact permissions, if the user does not have the execute permission on the directory in question, you won’t be able to browse it in Dolphin regardless of the this plugin, since Dolphin does not allow you to run it as root.
When there is a situation like that, this tells me that I should probably not mess with it in the GUI and just use the terminal.
My copy orgy is over, faster than it was displayed, then I will switch to KDE and test it, thanks for the info
(connection)' failed
Executing Dolphin with sudo is not possible due to unfixable security vulnerabilities.
xdg-open: no method available for opening '/run/timeshift/backup/timeshift-btrfs/snapshots/2020-08-10_03-28-04'
You should never run GUI applications with sudo. It can mess up the permissions of config files, and it’s just not safe in general.
Also, Dolphin will not work if you run it with sudo. It has a check for the EUID of the user who is running it and if it is 0 (root), it will print an error message and exit.
I didn’t know about it affecting config files, - I’d assumed running it as sudo would be session based and not a permanent change. Good to learn something!
Could this affect your problem…
).
