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Sérgio Araújo
Sérgio Araújo

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I regret not using Xfce4 before

Gnome3 takes a lot of memory and is intrusive

It is very difficult to disable tracker, I even spend a time using windowmaker to save my old laptop, but I felt I was missing something...

Make your xfce4 look better

Install plank, an elegant simple and clean dock, just search on google: "plank dock", or in case you, like me use voidlinux:

doas xbps-install -Sy plank
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After installing you can run...

plank --preferences
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... then you can disable the native xfce dock.

Add a new Applications Menu (WhiskerMenu)

Just follow this great article that explains everything your need to do:

Add some themes:

To make it easier install ocs-url, void users can run:

doas xbps-install -Sy ocs-url
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But what the hell is ocs-url?

An install helper program for items served via OpenCollaborationServices (ocs://).
You can just click on install on sites like xfce-look.org.

Tweak your xfce4-terminal

Install a good programming font, nowadays I am using jetbraisn mono. Another great thing in many cases is enabling compositing, which will make possible use tranparencies, this can be turned on: 'Enable display compositing' (Settings -> Settings Manager -> Window Manager Tweaks -> Compositor (tab).

My terminal looks like this:

Alt Text

After some tweaks my desktop looks like this:
Alt Text

Final tips:

Most users know enought "sudo" but you have seen in this article the "doas", so to know better what it is: OpenDoas: a portable version of OpenBSD's doas command doas is a minimal replacement for the venerable sudo. It was initially written by Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD project to provide 95% of the features of sudo with a fraction of the codebase.

To make easier writing this article I had to search a good screenshot tool.

doas xbps-install -Sy xfce4-screenshooter
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Hide firefox tool bar:

Right click on the menu bar > customize > disable the check box on the bootom of the window

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