On Mon, 7 Mar 2011 10:58:43 +0100 Martin Sourada <martin.sourada(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Hi all, > > as some of you might have noticed (on fedora planet) I have switched > from gnome to xfce and I like xfce very much. However, IMHO there are > issues that need to be addressed to make xfce a first class citizen. I > put together an initial list of them in my wiki space: > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mso/XFCE > > Feel free to chime in and edit the page (or its Talk: page) if you > feel something is missing/wrong. Since next major release of xfce > (4.10) is scheduled for next January we're probably talking here > about Fedora 17 time frame. So let's join forces and make XFCE rock > in Fedora 17. Thanks for working on this Martin! :) Happy to look at ideas and work to improve Xfce in Fedora.

What are you thinking for panel layout? In the past we have just stuck pretty close to upstream as this is very much a personal thing, but perhaps we could look at re-arraging things if enough people expressed interest or had rationale for changes.

> More suggestions? Let us hear them! NetworkManager.

On Wed, 2011-03-09 at 00:00 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote: > Am Dienstag, den 08.03.2011, 13:49 -0500 schrieb Justin St. Marie: > > > > More suggestions? Let us hear them! > > > > NetworkManager. > > nm-applet is not a panel plugin but a trayicon, means if we have a > systray (and we all agree on that I guess) we have nm-applet. well, at the moment. It's being re-done to be a GNOME Shell...thingy...at present, AIUI. I don't know if the fd.o notification icon version will stick around for non-Shell usage, but it strikes me that it'd be a good thing to ask dcbw about ahead of time, so CCing him :) Dan, what's the plan for non-GNOME desktops? Is nm-applet just gonna stick around for them?

lately, systemtray tends to expand exponentially (volume control, ibus, network, power, various apps that can hide there, ...). This almost calls for having it on different panel than tasklist, IMHO.

Am Dienstag, den 08.03.2011, 21:00 +0100 schrieb Martin Sourada: > On Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:43:34 +0100 > Christoph Wickert wrote: > > Nevertheless I feel that upstream's panel layout still has room for > > improvement, especially the bottom panel: It takes way too much space > > but only has little use. > > > > Some toughs: > > * Hide it automatically so it doesn't waste so much space. > I believe that would confuse some users. It's probably better to not > hide it be default, IMHO. +1. One more reason: The hide function didn't work properly, at least in Xfce 4.6 the panel often remained on the screen after clicking a launcher. > > * If we leave the height as is, we should at least add ore > > buttons so it becomes more useful. > Yeah, currently it is mostly nothing more then space eater. I think we all agree on that. > > * Only have a single panel. > Only if there are not too many applets. I hate it when there is too > little space left for tasklist. Plus, lately, systemtray tends to > expand exponentially (volume control, ibus, network, power, various > apps that can hide there, ...). This almost calls for having it on > different panel than tasklist, IMHO. Let's see how much plugins we have. > > MUST have plugins: > > * applications menu > > * tasklist > > * systemtray > > * pager > +1 for all > > > * a clock, I suggest datetime > Personally I prefer orage. What we IMHO need is: short weekday + short > date + hh:min displayed, in tooltip long date (with weekday) and on > click calendar. I don't think we can ship these tweaks because they are in the panel's rc files while we can only modify the default.xml file. Means we can decide what plugins to use but not necessarily their configuration. Another reason to go with the default config is the fact that time and date formats differ a lot based on the user's locale. We should just on the plugin using proper defaults from the system. > Datetime seems to almost support this, but the layout > is horrible (two lines are just too much for small panel). Orage on the > other hand does not open the calendar beside the applet but in the > centre of the screen. The position should be saved be xfwm4. I can put it where I want it, but frankly speaking I dislike orage and never use it. > > * mixer > Don't we have volume control (pulseaudio) in systemtray already? this is gnome-sound-applet and we want to get rid of it for several reasons: * it lacks the icon (bug 678696) * it's GTK+3 and we don't have a fitting theme * it's not supposed to be in the spin, in the latest nightly it's no longer their because dependencies on the GNOME side have changed. > Either > way, since sound in fedora is best handled by pulseaudio, whatever > mixer applet we have, it needs to be able to work with pa nicely, not > just show master control for it... I think xfce4-mixer-plugin is ok for the panel where you only do Master channel. The command to launch the mixer on click can be configured, so we can even call pavucontrol from xfce4-mixer-plugin. > > SHOULD have plugins > > * some launchers: browser, filemanager, terminal, mail client > +1, maybe add music player and instant messaging to the lot These are problematic because we are configuring xfce4-panel not only for the spin but the package itself. We cannot be sure if pidgin or quodlibet are always installed. The launchers for browser, mail client, filemanager and terminal on the other hand call exo-open, which is always there and will open the apps set in exo-preferred-applications. > > * actions: lock screen, log out > +1 we also could consider the session menu for this, it combines all the commands and some more. For me the session menu didn't work really reliable! I would go for two

> > * show desktop > I'm not sure, I've never used it, and people seem to complain both when > it's there and it isn't :-D It's in the default config for quite a while, I think we should not remove it. > > * folder menu > Maybe too complex, does not integrate with bookmarks. Does not include > mounted volumes. There does not seem to be a way to show text > instead of/alongside the folder icon. I believe Places would work > better. Ok, but ATM places unfortunately doesn't handle removable media correctly either (bug 678432). > > * thrash > Again, I don't incline either way here. I personaly use it, but it > feels a bit like duplicating things when it's already present on > desktop. Same as desktop I think. > > More suggestions? Let us hear them! > Remove frames all the applets. It looks soo oldish. Not sure if we can do it. We'd have to patch all plugins because we cannot provide the configuration for them and new plugins should also be borderless by default. > Use start-here > (themed) icon for applications menu, that's what they're people used > from gnome and kde and maybe change the label (I don't recall from the > top of my head what was there, but I changed it to Applications) to > better suggest what it does. Good point, we had this in 4.6 and need to bring it back but I think it requires a change in the fedora-logos package (because the icon we use is in there and must be for legal reasons). > Consider weather applet, I don't have usability studies regarding that, > but most people I know use something like that. Would be nice if the > location could be synced with timezone like in gnome but that's a > harder goal. The way it is now it wouldn't probably work out of box so > maybe fix this issue first and then consider adding it. xfce4-weather-plugin uses the IP address to determine the location of the user. But it doesn't really work 100% reliably and exact of course. > Plus, we *could* consider theming the panels a little instead of using > just plain color, all the above listed applets seems to work with it > nicely. I think this should go into the theme, just as the changes for the desktop icons we proposed. The theme should provide styles for them in it's gtkrc. Thanks for all your input, Christoph _______________________________________________ xfce mailing list xfce(a)lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce

Am Dienstag, den 08.03.2011, 21:00 +0100 schrieb Martin Sourada: > On Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:43:34 +0100 > Christoph Wickert wrote:

>> * mixer > Don't we have volume control (pulseaudio) in systemtray already? this is gnome-sound-applet and we want to get rid of it for several reasons: * it lacks the icon (bug 678696) * it's GTK+3 and we don't have a fitting theme * it's not supposed to be in the spin, in the latest nightly it's no longer their because dependencies on the GNOME side have changed.

I put together two sketches of possible panel layouts (they are made in inkscape so in reality the rendering would look most likely different), one is sporting the one panel approach, the other one plays with two panels. Both contain the applets we (more or less) agreed upon. The basic ideas for the applet separation between panels is this: * clock, desktop switcher, and lock screen+log out should be in corners (I think it is more compact and improves their accessibility) * menus and window buttons in panel are like menus and tabs in windows, so they should be in top panel * launchers, trash, show-desktop, system tray, mixer are all represented by icons so optically they're similar + they could in theory profit from being slightly bigger * both system-tray and window-list tend to grow big so it's good idea to have them in different panels, if possible The sketches and some more comments are available on the following wiki page: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mso/XFCE/Panel

1. single panel layout, containing all the widgets we agreed upon as must have, designed from ground for best usability, proposal for that is Layout A on [1] 2. two panel layout, containing all the widgets we agreed upon, designed from ground for best usability, proposal for that is Layout B on [1] 3. Adopt the former Gnome 2 default two panel layout.

I think we all agree though, that the current XFCE default layout is suboptimal.

> as some of you might have noticed (on fedora planet) I have switched > from gnome to xfce and I like xfce very much. However, IMHO there are > issues that need to be addressed to make xfce a first class citizen. I > put together an initial list of them in my wiki space: > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Mso/XFCE > > Feel free to chime in and edit the page (or its Talk: page) if you > feel something is missing/wrong. Since next major release of xfce > (4.10) is scheduled for next January we're probably talking here > about Fedora 17 time frame. So let's join forces and make XFCE rock > in Fedora 17. Thanks for working on this Martin! :) Happy to look at ideas and work to improve Xfce in Fedora. What are you thinking for panel layout? In the past we have just stuck pretty close to upstream as this is very much a personal thing, but perhaps we could look at re-arraging things if enough people expressed interest or had rationale for changes.