Am I the only one around here who uses XFCE with Trisquel?
I had some hickups with my xfce experience lately and I am not sure if it is my fault or if XFCE generally performs poorly on Trisquel.
I am running Trisquel Aramo and except for long (~20 seconds) startups of firefox based programs (which I reported in previous post) I am having freezes where whole GUI (Xsession it is called I guess???) is unusable and requires complete reboot. This happens randomly or at least I weren't able to find any particular pattern to be able to reproduce it.
These freezes happen usually when using Abrowser but once it happened with Thunar too. It is only the Xsession freeze I guess because I am always able to switch with Ctrl+Alt+F2 to another session (tty2 it is called?? I have no idea I am new in GNU waters...)
Anyway, I am not seeking help as much I want you experiences with XFCE because I have a bad feeling that I the last sad boy on the Earth still using this awful display manager. (Which I like the most)
Thank you.
EDIT:
I've read this topic
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/x11-close-session-when-opening-file-or-browsing-web#comment-171662
which deals with very similar issues that I have, but my kernel is updated to v 6.2.0-32-generic x86_64 and the problems persist. Also I use GTX GeForce 710 with
libdrm-nouveau2:amd64 2.4.113-2~ubuntu0.22.04.1
xserver-xorg-video-nouveau 1:1.0.17-2build1
...so I am not sure if Intel GPU fix will work.
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If you mean "GeForce GT 710", this is what I have on my desktop, but it needs some repair that I did not have time to do, so I can't use it now.
Trisquel 9 and 10 were hardly usable due to several errors in nouveau freezing the whole computer (not only the X session), I never managed to find a solution. On Trisquel 11, I think the most frequent issue was terminating the MATE session brutally, but it isn't that frequent, so Trisquel was usable again. I remember some freezes of the session though.
On Trisquel 9 and 10, I did try alternative kernels but it did not help. On Trisquel 11, I have been using the default kernel of Trisquel. I will check more after I have repaired my desktop.
I use XFCE and I love it. But I also use Mate, and I mainly use a lightweight DWM window manager. I don't recall any freezing issues, although XFCE is a large and heavy desktop environment. If you have an aging CPU you'll probably have a harder time with XFCE. Depending on the age of your CPU you may want to try Trisquel-Mini with the much lighter LXDE desktop environment. Or at least try using Mate which is lighter than XFCE.
This is first time I hear that xfce is heavier than than Mate... But anyway, I have AMD FX3850 and before this I used Debian 11 where firefox based programs opened within 1 second. Also other heavy programs like Gimp or Libre office open immediately, so I dont think it is the lack of processor power.
Do you have Mate and XFCE installed as well?
I have Mate, XFCE, and the DWM window manager installed.
Here's my program opening times (in seconds) in each environment on Trisquel 11:
Mate - gimp 3, abrowser 3, libreoffice 4
XFCE - gimp 3, abrowser 3, libreoffice 5
DWM - gimp 3, abrowser 3, libreoffice 4
So for me, Libreoffice on XFCE is the slowest to open.
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> Here's my program opening times (in seconds) in each environment on Trisquel 11:
Is there a convenient way to measure that precisely?
Someone gifted me this hourglass. I usually fall asleep before time is up, but I heard it is quite precise if you can keep turning it over. So maybe if you keep launching an app and divide the full passing time by the number of launches, you can get enough precision to detect a split-second difference between two desktop settings.
I only keep settings for which all apps open before I fall asleep. I believe this includes all default Trisquel/Mini/Triskel settings.
