April 4, 2018

Fedora -- switching to XFCE

Nobody in their right mind would use Gnome 3. I like XFCE. I tried "mate" and/or "cinnamon" for a while, but after a fiasco with trying to delete NetworkManager, I lost my mate/cinnamon setup and decided to go with good old XFCE.

Install the packages

You can use either of the following (or so it seems). I used the first, but I think the second is what is actually recommended. Either seems to do the same thing. 
dnf groups install "Xfce Desktop"
dnf install @xfce-desktop-environment
This installs all the packages, but now comes the hard part, making Xfce the default session. This is always nearly impossible, but let's try and see if things are any better.

Try "switchdesk" (it does not work)

Advice for how to change your desktop seems to change on a regular basis. "The way" used to be to use switchdesk, then this was deprecated, but now it seems to be back!! 

su
dnf install switchdesk-gui
switchdesk
All very nice, it offers me the choice of xfce, but after I log out and back in again, I am still running mate.

Switch back to gdm

For whatever reason, my system is running lightdm not gdm, so I don't get offered a choice of desktops before I log in. So, let's switch back to gdm. 
dnf install gdm
Ctl-Alt-F3
login as root
systemctl disable lightdm
systemctl enable gdm
systemctl stop lightdm
systemctl start gdm
Ctl-Alt-F1
This works like a charm. Now when I login, on the same screen where I type my password, there is a tiny gear like thing that brings up a session selector. It offers me XFCE as one of my choices. Bingo!! However, it seems that it needs to be chosen every time I log in.

Focus follows mouse

Go to Settings -- Window Manager -- Focus

Stuck now in Gnome

After making the above change and logging in and out, I can no longer start Xfce. So we are stuck trashing with Gnome 3 horrors while we sort this out. To get gnome to do focus follows mouse, we have to type the following at the command line (there seems to be no menu option for it): 
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode mouse

Just lock the screen instead of logging out

So, it seems that after a reboot I can start xfce once. After that trying to select xfce will just throw me back to gdm over and over. So an alternative is to lock the screen rather than logging out. I can type xflock4 at the command line. I don't find this in any menu, but a hot tip is that I can type Ctrl-Alt-L and it locks the screen! Who would have known??

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]