How to Use i3 with XFCE

[@TheLinuxCast]

I release a weekly patron only podcast! This week's was all about Pywal. Check it out by supporting me, patreon.com/thelinuxcast

[@varunr1524]

Pls upload mate+ i3 combo

[@themroc8231]

Lxqt is great for switching window managers. It's just a menu option in the setting.

[@pandeymangg]

Thanks a lot, tiling was the only thing left in my xfce setup, and now I feel like I can go with my current desktop for a considerable amount of time!

[@heroe1486]

I think I've suggested you this video few months ago ! I've however had some problems with xfce and MATE then switched to KDE but after a few months I went back to bare i3, KDE and i3 are a pretty solid combo tho

[@saendhor]

Just finished a fresh XFCE + i3 install and I also followed your tutorial. Thx for giving me the idea :D

[@zoltan1953]

I love this. I watched first, then watched a second time and followed along, and I love this setup. Looking forward to the qtile version.

[@gingered]

This was a good one. Nice job showcasing the strange and fun things you can do on Linux ❤️‍🔥

[@Gajasta]

Thanks for that video :) ! Been using linux for so many years and only now getting to use tiling window managers. I did exactly the same thing with trying to get my panel vertical, and that got me sweating a bit; tried to alter the xml panel file but couldn't change anything. Then I realised that we can force windows to float in i3 so I could get it back to horizontal that way.

[@lunsj]

I like this hybrid setup. I'm just testing it in a VM right now but I'll see how much I like having tiling as an option instead of going all in.

[@alexandrosvangelatos9979]

Very cool video. It's nice to see how simple it is to change a wm for xfce. I think it's similar for mate.

[@jozhuet]

That xfce-i3 plugin for the bar makes the difference, thanks, tried alredy but couldn't figure it out everything, great video, really helpfull

[@ZenCharlie]

This has been the best tutorial on setting up i3! Thank you so much sir.

[@Kyjorei]

I was thinking about doing an update to my video on this subject since it's been a few years, but this about covers it. Great stuff!

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

15:12 This is why I'm always much more comfortable changing things using a config file directly... or at least if I use a GUI it's one that stores the settings in a config file I'm already familiar with; because if you know what you changed in a config to break it, it's usually pretty easy to get back to some kind of terminal to change it back. And if I'm clever about it (which I'm not always) I will initialise a git repo where the configs are located and add all files to the index before experimenting, because then I can easily see what I changed and also easily discard all the latest changes without even editing the file in an editor.

[@Bruces-Eclectic-World]

Matt, I'm proud of you, you have stuck with nano... Hahaha, still typing"V"or "vim" but changed the alias, funny! Good for you so far and good luck! Interesting, did not know you could do this. I use the Cinnamon desktop on all my installs be it Arcolinux, EndeavorOS, EzArcher or what ever and then install my Window Managers. I will have to give this a try someday. I like this Intro better Matt. Did you make these? Interested in how. Thanks Matt LLAP 🖖

[@ceebs648]

Giving this a shot in EndeavourOS today! Thanks for the tutorial.

[@lukasostar3008]

would LOVE to see the KDE + i3 combo tutorial, i just love the KDE settings app, no need to hunt down things. maybe im just a pleb

[@Filip_Phreriks]

In IT the easiest way is often the best way.

[@Your_Degenerate]

Thanks for also including the Debian/Ubuntu instructions.

[@afroceltduck]

I love that you can do this on Linux. I might have to think about doing this at some point, maybe if I ever need to reinstall.

[@Flackon]

What does XFCE offer other than the bar, vs a standalone i3 setup? Are there any advantages to using the rest of the DE?

[@keshhan6412]

I was wondering the same thing.

[@MarkusHobelsberger]

I'd argue with ease of use if you know your way around Xfce (bar, settings, etc.).

[@geryz7549]

Sensible default applications, menus like the whisker menu and the Run Application launcher, the ability to theme all these things just using "standard" GTK icons/themes

[@DavidBerglund]

I decided to jump into both tiling WMs and Arch one weekend. On Sunday evening I'd crashed the system and installed OpenSUSE with KDE. :P But I've recovered now, I think, and going to try to ease into i3 or Sway (on OpenSUSE or on my Debian 12 machine), while keeping the option to use KDE. I like the idea of combining XFCE4+i3! :)

[@themroc8231]

This video has been n the back of my mind for the last couple of days. I'm a stack and master guy, and i found a guide to use xfce with xmonad on the Haskell wiki. Xmonad is a headache, but in this case there shouldn't be too much to do. It might become my project for the next few days. You didn't show how you removed the window decoration at the end, but it shouldn't be that hard to find. I miss xfce. It's so modular, well donne and simple. Unpopular opinion: xfce is actually just as customizable as kde if not more.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Removing the window decoration is going to depend on which window manager you use. With i3 It's just a matter of two lines.

[@stulora3172]

I switched from xfce to i3 for the tiling. Now I might switch back!

[@Proferk]

How is it that when you type the name of an alias, it automatically changes that to what the alias is for At 3:14, you type "install nitrogen". But as soon as you press space after typing "install", it substitutes that for the value of the alias, that is, "sudo pacman -S"

[@bu5hm45t3r]

Same happened with me at 14:34 , i was trying in a vm tho that wasnt a problem but yeah.. learnt to not to put panels in vertical mode!

[@vincentcaudo-engelmann9057]

awesome tutorial. thank you for your time. how are you capturing your screen?

[@TheLinuxCast]

OBS studio

[@adrmantap6508]

Hi dude, i try to learn i3wm 2 days ago, is Possibly to make every app i open in floating mode by default ??,,

[@anon_y_mousse]

Apparently you can set it so certain windows will always float, but unless I'm missing something you can't make every window float by default. But if you hit the mod key, shift and space at the same time it'll turn off tiling mode for an application and you can move it around. If you add to the configuration file: for_window [class="XTerm"] floating enable # then every xterm window will be floating.

[@adrmantap6508]

@@anon_y_mousse very well, thanks 👍

[@stulora3172]

concerning the vertical panel, couldn't you exclude the panel "window" from tiling in the i3 config?

[@agaskew]

The longest part of doing this was installing paru. It might be good to include 2 mins on how to back this out if you need to.

[@diegonavia1404]

Hi matt! I followed your instructions and got the setup working on manjaro but I accidentally toggled the gui-option to move the panel and got the same problem as you in 14:35 :( how did you fix it? Honestly I was loving the setup until I got trapped into full panel haha, great video. Love from Chile.

[@TheLinuxCast]

If I remember I had to delete the xfce config files. If that doesn't work let me know and I will stir some brain cells around.

[@diegonavia1404]

@@TheLinuxCast I fixed it by deleting i3 and reloging into vanila xfce to change the panel as it was mentioned in a previous comment. Thanks for the quick response. Keep doing the great content you do !!!:D

[@jameskellam2980]

If you doenload the arcolex iso, it has xfce, i3, and openbox included and will install all 3, as well as variuos othet goodied.Sounds like a great system to learn with no?

[@jardah81]

Good tip, thank you

[@iAmTheWagon]

Haha. I did this a while ago with dwm for the lolz. It was really weird and messy to get working. I ended up not using it.

[@GDKepler]

i3 does not support vertical bars unfortunately, had this problem when using KDE+i3

[@GCoda]

xfce plays well with others, i used herbsluftwm and bspwm with xfce

[@tambuchalinux]

I haven't tried it with i3, but instead of deleting your Xfce config folder, you could have just disabled i3 and enabled xfwm4, then move the panel back to horizontal. Then swap i3 back in.

[@TheLinuxCast]

In order to disable i3, wouldn't I have needed to be able to see a window? Or I suppose I could have uninstalled it.

[@tambuchalinux]

@TheLinuxCast What I meant was to swap back xfwm4 in the startup session, restart the session, then move the panel back horizontally, then swap the i3 window manager on startup. There's probably an easier way by adjusting an xfce config file, but I haven't develed that deeply into it yet.

[@thingsiplay]

There is an i3 community edition for EndeavourOS. Why not install that one instead? Edit: I am myself using the Qtile edition since months and most stuff is setup already. It uses XFCE applications as its backbone.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Because I didn't want to

[@thingsiplay]

@@TheLinuxCast That's a fine reason and nothing wrong with that. I was just curious. :-)

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@thingsiplay Sorry didn't mean to seem short. I was on my phone and typing on there is a pain. I like xfce, and only had i3 on there because I did that speedrun video the other day. xfce is my main in that VM.

[@jakubzolich3118]

I've done everything like in the video and I have a problem where mouse pointer just freezes and I can not click on anything, Switching between workspaces fixes the problem. Anyone had the same issue and has a solution to this?

[@anon_y_mousse]

I didn't know you could just replace the built-in WM that a DE uses like that. Now I'm wondering if kwm can be replaced. I have been thinking of trying out dwm, and I have done some weird things to KDE that it might never recover from without a complete wipe, but why not.

[@heroe1486]

i3 works fine with mate xfce and plasma, it just doesn't work on gnome

[@TheLinuxCast]

dwm might be a challenge to get running in xfce or plasma, but it might be possible. At least in xfce, it's really just running the executable of the wm. But it might require some or a lot of tweaking, IDK. bspwm and i3 seem to be the two that work the best. herbstluftwm would probably be equally good. For plasma, it too has the same way of doing things so it should be easy enough. I've seen guides online.

[@rexempire3365]

@@TheLinuxCast The "easy" version is just to treat xfce/lxqt/plasma as a 'back end" for dwm (disabling the DE's desktop, panels, and keybind daemon). If I remember right there is a patch for dwm that allows xfce panel intergration.

[@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

I've been wondering why Arch people keep referring to it as "A. U. R." and not just a word "aur", because to me it looks perfectly pronuncable... But then I suddenly realised that in English "au" has no distinct default pronunciation like it does in Norwegian, so it would sound like weirdly pronounced "or" or "oar" or something. 😅

[@DanielCastro-ok8zb]

It would sound like we're pirates: "Download that stuff from the AAARRRGHHH!". Jokes aside, it's perfectly pronunciable in portuguese too.

[@enricodemarchi1412]

Is it possible for it to break in an update?

[@vanadium4167]

Hitting Ctrl+S (Save) then Ctrl+X (Exit) is how you quickly save and exit in nano.

[@scarthebadguy]

**ctrl+o

[@BraidenVstob]

Ive been on Xfce/Bspwm for about a year.... it's about perfect. But, Ive tried xfce/i3 several times and never got it right.

[@josmoify]

catchy outro

[@ex0ja]

I've been watching a lot of videos and I gotta ask, are you a big angry birds fan? 😂

[@TheLinuxCast]

Lol no. I just needed something to hang off my wall in college 15 years ago and I was broke. It's been with me ever since.

[@mr_truex]

thanks

[@franciscocardoso6903]

Is there any way to go back to the old version?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Just follow the steps in reverse.

[@franciscocardoso6903]

@@TheLinuxCast it worked thank you 😁

[@DylanMatthewTurner]

I forgot that not all distros have the merged i3/i3-gaps yet

[@TheLinuxCast]

Yeah, I think it'll be a bit before Ubuntu/Debian gets it

[@linux-guy9596]

Can use tell me how to use openbox with kde

[@josmoify]

for people who should be window tiling but can't let go of xfce...especially practical on a laptop

[@techtude]

I think best option would be i3 + xfce4-pannel

[@heroe1486]

If the panel was good why not, it's the most interesting thing in a DE imo but xfce4-panel is bare bone although there's a plugin to add i3 workspaces indicator, even centering things is a pain and I don't even know if you can backup your panel config. Might as well just use polybar, it's less frustrating and more configurable.

[@techtude]

@@heroe1486 I would recommend With WM xfce4-pannel. For beginners Polybar. For intermediate Eww. For advanced Btw configure is possible for xfce4-pannel or anything because everything is just a file in Linux. ;-)

[@hiii4805]

​​@@heroe1486 xfce panel isn't barebones lol but yeah isn't the coolest thing about xfce Edit: for me it's probably ability to use css and xfconf to make scripts that change your ui entirely and how the forums kinda encourage scripting like on other DEs they just tell you just use our gui tools..

[@avalagum7957]

One thing that Windows is better than Linux is that Windows Terminal can bring the tabs to the top panel. Is there any Linux terminal able to do that?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Many terminal emulators can have tabs at the top.

[@anon_y_mousse]

I use konsole and it can display tabs at the top or bottom. Although I don't use a title bar or menu bar or tabs with it. It's the one application I use that I refuse to tabbify.

[@TheLinuxCast]

@@anon_y_mousse I just found out that Kitty has tabs and have been using them like crazy. I'm tab obsessed, though.

[@anon_y_mousse]

@@TheLinuxCast I'm also tab obsessed, but I just don't like using them for my terminals. I know I'm weird. Especially since I use them in vim which I run in a terminal window.

[@avalagum7957]

@@TheLinuxCast ​ I think I was unclear. My "tabs in the top panel" means that the tabs are in the same panel with the maximize/minimize/close buttons like in this screenshot cdn.mobilesyrup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/windows-terminal.jpg. Do we have that in Linux?

[@DrVektor]

On xfce's gitlab page, labwc's page and many other places it is emphasised that xfce4-panel can work inside the wayland compositor. I tried but I am not an expert on these issues. Generally, in these descriptions, many details are omitted because the user is an expert user anyway. It is not written how to modify which file. There is not even one example on the internet. Could you please make a video about how to rice labwc and xfce4-panel together?

[@jsizemo]

I appreciate these HowTo videos but can someone refresh me as to why tiling window managers are all the rage now, at least with the Linux KZbin community? My first thought is that this is a step backward.

[@JohnsonSignaigo-x8t]

Olson Mission

[@itsfish8672]

GVM

[@mal1k_me]

How about Cinnamon?

[@TheLinuxCast]

I think cinnamon uses mutter. If so, that's not easy to pull out of anything.

[@johanb.7869]

I liked the video, but I don't like window managers.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

I3 AND I3 GAPS have merged.

[@TheLinuxCast]

Old video

[@TheLinuxCast]

NOt sure why your other comment got deleted by KZbin. but what I meant was that I didn't get access to it at the time of this video. Not all distros get access the moment it's released, but I'm sure you know that.

[@JoseLee-h9r]

Bernier Tunnel

[@MarchelleKneisel-y7q]

Von Square

[@Edocsil]

It's not Gui, it's GUI. Do you also say Fbi instead of FBI? 😂

[@davmbol]

@@Edocsil nobody says the individual letters when saying GUI, that’s super weird.

[@StevieRayLou]

No thanks. I run debian12 and vanillaOS with full DEs.