XFCE desktop on XQuartz ?

James Linder jam at tigger.ws
Wed Apr 17 00:58:56 UTC 2019



> On 16 Apr 2019, at 8:00 pm, macports-users-request at lists.macports.org wrote:
> 
> 
> I switched from a Linux-PC to a MacOS Mojave laptop.
> So now I wish to switch from my old Linux Desktop to a brand-new full-screen desktop running on  MacOSX/XQuartz.
> The reason is that I need a REAL unix-like desktop when I am at work (I am an engineer, I work on remote machines via ssh + Xterminal + remote programs written in Motif/QT)
> 
> I successfully installed KDE 4 with Macports, but unfortunately you cannot use it in this way (I confirmed it with the maintainer): the KDE desktop, I mean the KDE Windows Manager, has not been ported to work in XQuartz: you can just open several standalone applications (KTerminal, Konqueror and so on) but only on the Mac Desktop: you can have Apple Mail and KMail in the same window -- I couldn't care less :(
> 
> So I installed XFCE with Macports. The installation finished successfully.
> Do you have any idea if I can start a XFCE desktop on XQuartz ?
> I added:
> exec startxfce
> to my .xinitrc, like I did on Linux, but XQuartz refuses to start ...
> I am afraid it's incompatible, too ...

Henry I too (long ago) tried XFCE desktop only to find it once worked but no longer does.

IMHO (and I use XFCE lots every day) there is no need at all to change your desktop.
iTerm works quite well.
macports provide most of the stuff I need.
VirtualBox provides most of my linux machines, which is where I do most of my development.
one of the tools I missed is lsusb. Someone wrote a script. Mail me if you want a copy.

I’ve an iMac 27 it (but all the mac hardware I’ve looked at) runs osx much better than linux. So VMs suit me.
I know people on the list strongly disagree but I find OSXs menu bar a pain. I use QT lots and it is easy to get a ‘real’ menu (appologies)

I cannot think of a single item that XFCE provides that is not easily available on the mac desktop. I find the biggest pain to be the general anti X11 sentiment by people who don’t use what it provides. EG I wish QT made an X11 version of their app.

James

PS a tiny bit of fiddling and remote X programs work just fine
eg on most ‘servers’ set X11LocalOnly to no
[haycorn] /Users/jam [97]% cat .ssh/config
ForwardX11 yes
ForwardX11Trusted yes
StrictHostKeyChecking no
CheckHostIP no
ClearAllForwardings yes
UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null


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