Brief: Xfce is a great lightweight desktop environment with one drawback. It looks sort of old. But you don’t have to stick with the default looks. Let’s see various ways you can customize Xfce to give it a modern and beautiful look.
To start with, Xfce is one of the most popular desktop environments. Being a lightweight DE, you can run Xfce on very low resource and it still works great. This is one of the reasons why many lightweight Linux distributions use Xfce by default.
Some people prefer it even on a high-end device stating its simplicity, easy of use and non-resource hungry nature as the main reasons.
Xfce is in itself minimal and provides just what you need. The one thing that bothers is its look and feel which feel old. However, you can easily customize Xfce to look modern and beautiful without reaching the limit where a Unity/GNOME session eats up system resources.
4 ways to Customize Xfce desktop
Let’s see some of the ways by which we can improve the look and feel of your Xfce desktop environment.
The default Xfce desktop environment looks something like this :
As you can see, the default Xfce desktop is kinda boring. We will use some themes, icon packs and change the default dock to make it look fresh and a bit revealing.
1. Change themes in Xfce
The first thing we will do is pick up a theme from xfce-look.org. My favorite Xfce theme is XFCE-D-PRO.
You can download the theme from here and extract it somewhere.
You can copy this extracted file to .theme folder in your home directory. If the folder is not present by default, you can create one and the same goes for icons which needs a .icons folder in the home directory.
Open Settings > Appearance > Style to select the theme, log out and login to see the change. Adwaita-dark from default is also a nice one.
You can use any good GTK theme on Xfce.
2. Change icons in Xfce
Xfce-look.org also provides icon themes which you can download, extract and put it in your home directory under .icons directory. Once you have added the icon theme in the .icons directory, go to Settings > Appearance > Icons to select that icon theme.
I have installed Moka icon set that looks awesome.
You can also refer to our list of awesome icon themes.
Optional: Installing themes through Synaptic
If you want to avoid the manual search and copying of the files, install Synaptic Manager in your system. You can look for some best themes over web and icon sets, and using synaptic manager you can search and install it.
sudo apt-get install synapticSearching and installing theme/icons through Synaptic
Open synaptic and click on Search. Enter your desired theme, and it will display the list of matching items. Mark all the additional required changes and click on Apply. This will download the theme and then install it.
Once done, you can open the Appearance option to select the desired theme.
In my opinion, this is not the best way to install themes in Xfce.
3. Change wallpapers in Xfce
Again, the default Xfce wallpaper is not bad at all. But you can change the wallpaper to something that matches with your icons and themes.
To change wallpapers in Xfce, right click on the desktop and click on Desktop Settings. You can change the desktop background from your custom collection or the defaults one given.
Right click on the desktop and click on Desktop Settings. Choose Background from the folder option, and choose any one of the default backgrounds or a custom one.
4. Change the dock in Xfce
The default dock is nice and pretty much does what it is for. But again, it looks a bit boring.
However, if you want your dock to be better and with a little more customization options, you can install another dock.
Plank is one of the simplest and lightweight docks and is highly configurable.
To install Plank use the command below:
sudo apt-get install plank
If Plank is not available in the default repository, you can install it from this PPA.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/docky
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plankBefore you use Plank, you should remove the default dock by right-clicking in it and under Panel Settings, clicking on delete.
Once done, go to Accessory > Plank to launch Plank dock.
Plank picks up icons from the one you are using. So if you change the icon themes, you’ll see the change is reflected in the dock also.
Wrapping Up
XFCE is a lightweight, fast and highly customizable. If you are limited on system resource, it serves good and you can easily customize it to look better. Here’s how my screen looks after applying these steps.
This is just with half an hour of effort. You can make it look much better with different themes/icons customization. Feel free to share your customized XFCE desktop screen in the comments and the combination of themes and icons you are using.
I like XFCE – but one thing needs to be put up front and centre.
Many developers are fucking idiots.
1. I had a big fight with one of them about the hair thin window borders, that ARE hard to use… I work to within fractions of a 10th of a mm by eye on machine tools etc., and I find it very hard to get the mouse pointer on the edge of the window to resize it. Many people with poor vision, eye hand coordination etc., would have no hope. The MORON of a developer had the attitude – “it’s my way or the highway and you can fuck off because I am not changing anything.” We NEED border that can be manually set to the width you NEED and to the colour that you want.
2. OS’s must have areas of multiple redundancies, and the MOUSE ONLY menu system, is bullshit… I have fought about this issue with the MORONS who implemented this. The lack of Alt + A (etc.) based keyboard signposted pathways through the menus makes the ability to drive the system by keyboard alone – basically impossible.
Fuck – Even Microsoft XP had ALL of these functionalities… and rather than acknowleding that there are some pretty idiotic people in the open source community who do really fucked in the head work, and are basically free ranging mental cases, the issue arises that these stupid cunts won’t respond to good reasons and the product lays in perpetual limbo with some of the most insane levels of functionality AND there are all these fucktard moderators who have shit fits about niceness when I crucify these idiot developers and moderators who cover up the critiques, for their bullshit.
There are people in the “Open Source” community who really are dumb fucks – kind of like “We don’t want pilots using parachutes, and just jumping out of the planes. Because the planes are really expensive. So we won’t give them parachutes.” Well the dumb cuntism of World War One is still ongoing.
Hence why the XFCE community has a good but incredibly fucked to use and difficult to navigate interface – is because the dead shit developers are protected and the forum moderators cover up for them.
The only one throwing a ‘shit fit’ here would be you.
You claim that borderless windows are a pain, but they increase usability by giving more window space. These can also simply be opened on multiple workspaces, which are fast as fuck to navigate over keyboard, making all this resizing drama unnecessary.
Most keyboard navigations around any OS is fairly simple and has a very lean learning curve. The fact that you think most OS’s are trying to force you into using a mouse just makes you look like a lazy and ignorant cunt.
And if you’re still not happy, then fuck off and make your own theme/ OS instead of bitching about it because you don’t like it.
>>You claim that borderless windows are a pain, but they increase usability by giving more window space. <> Most keyboard navigations around any OS is fairly simple and has a very lean learning curve. The fact that you think most OS’s are trying to force you into using a mouse just makes you look like a lazy and ignorant cunt. <<
So you're abusive as well as stupid. What a surprise… The point of desktops like xfce is that they are mouse friendly. If you're really into keyboard control you'd use xmonad. Excusing bad gui design through saying people should use the keyboard is cretinous.
On Linux Mint, I finally found the window border theme setting in Settings, Window Manager. “Default-xhdpi” has thick borders.
Regardless of window borders, Xfce supports Alt + left mouse button to move and Alt + right mouse button to resize windows.
Alternatively you can edit the theme files to do whatever you like. Overriding them from my home folder didn’t work.
Which doesn’t really help Joe Average much. And Joe is supposed to be the target for distros using xfce, not Hiro Protagonist. Still, that was a sane reply…
Nope, they still looks like something out of win98 era, but with dock
True, But modern desktops (Windows10, KDE5, Gnome3, e.a.) tend to be very cumbersome; you need lots of mouse clicks to get something done.
That is only advantage. GUI from late 90. was much better than GUI designed nowadays.
While Microsoft stuck to its excellent GUI design guide in the 1990s, it didn’t have window snapping and Start menu search feature.
I do the same thing , everytime I install Linux mint xfce :)
I’m currently using “Adwaita-dark” style and “Humanity-Dark” icons via Appearance, “Mint-Y-Dark-Red” style via Window Manager, and the “Burrard Inlet” background via Desktop settings.
Three different programs to change how my desktop looks.
I’ve tried using GNOME Color Chooser to change border colors, but only managed to remove them entirely.
Seems the suggestion to change the dock really meant to make it look osx. And it’s not just this article.