Good point; in theory, a lot of the Gnome applets should work, should they not? Still, since they're not components of XFCE, and XFCE doesn't make use of them (as it rightly shouldn't, since that would assume Gnome was installed), the problem does remain in that XFCE is very lightweight in more than one way. The main issue with XFCE, in my opinion, is that it is meant to look more or less like Gnome, but has far less functionality--so unlike with WMs like Flux, you feel a bit cheated. Yes, the functionality of Gnome comes at the price of a little speed, but let's be fair: the functionality, now, is *good*; Gnome is a very solid gui in my opinion. And the speed tradeoff is not significant--Gnome runs fine on my P3 500 with 256 MB RAM. Not as snappily as it could, but not slowly enough that I ever find myself getting annoyed (although I do use the console a lot as well to be fair). With window managers like Flux or even Enlightenment and its kin, they're used very differently, so you can't really compare them with Gnome/KDE. Unfortunately for XFCE, it seems to target the same users as those of Gnome/KDE, relying basically on its speed to make up for lack of features--and in my opinion, it doesn't really stack up. Just my opinion though :) Daniel Lawson wrote:
XFCE is nice, but it lacks a number of handy Gnome features from what I've been able to tell. It's so stripped down that it feels like a toy gui, lacking in a number of solid tools. It doesn't have, for example, any method of even changing screen resolution or refresh rate--traditionally a rather weak point with Linux guis, but one which is important in my opinion since 1280x1024 at 60 Hz is horrible, and I don't want to have to mess about in XFree86.conf just to change something like that.
"traditionally weak" is an understatement. Until recently, there was no way at all of doing this within the GUI. Have you tried running 'gnome-display-properties' under xfce? This is the gnome applet which makes use of the xrandr extension to set your screen resolution. The fact that you're not running 'Gnome' (and metacity) shouldn't matter.
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