Hello, I have been using XFCE and have found it to be well suited to my purposes, however as is to be expected, there are still a few things that I would like. One of these is the option to blacklist certain problem applications - such as gnome's desktop programs, which tend to try to take over every time i use nautilus (I use it as a SMB & SFTP gui). When you restart your session, you find that you have gnome's desktop manager staring back at you, instead of XFCEs. Most annoying. Similarly KDE's knotify4 still tries to hang around in my startup list, and generally eat resources for no reason, if I run konqueror (alternative SMB/SFTP util). Whilst appropriate use of kill, or a short, custom shell script can reset everything, a few additional features would be nice. Another related item is the problem of crashes or other methods by which XFCE-desktop manages to trash itself, then remember its trashed state. When re-logging in I sometimes find that, if XFCE didn't quit entirely gracefully (ie with some components not loaded) then I can be missing my panel or deskopt. Again changing runlevels and manually starting some apps can help, however this is less than ideal. 1) a blacklist to forbid certain apps from starting by autostart (eg knotify4, gnome-panel, gnome-session...). Could be a possible solution to Bug 2382? 2) A whitelist to force certain apps to start (xfce4-session,xfce4-desktop,xfce4-panel) if they do not get started. Related to Bug 2380: A way (GUI) to flush the autostart list. Sometimes hung programs or programs that are not behaving correctly can be re-initialised by xfce4 in their bad state. being able to remove this from the autostart list would be great! Thanks
(In reply to comment #0) > One of these is the option to blacklist certain problem applications - such as > gnome's desktop programs, which tend to try to take over every time i use > nautilus (I use it as a SMB & SFTP gui). When you restart your session, you > find that you have gnome's desktop manager staring back at you, instead of > XFCEs. Most annoying. This shouldn't be blacklisted. You need to run nautilus with a command-line option (can't remember what it is) to disable drawing the desktop. I believe you can also set this option in gconf. Regardless, if someone *wants* nautilus in the session, this would break that. > Similarly KDE's knotify4 still tries to hang around in my startup list, and > generally eat resources for no reason, if I run konqueror (alternative SMB/SFTP > util). Don't really think we should be blacklisting this -- there are legitimate reasons why someone might want knotify4 in their session (faster startup of KDE apps, for example). > Another related item is the problem of crashes or other methods by which > XFCE-desktop manages to trash itself, then remember its trashed state. When > re-logging in I sometimes find that, if XFCE didn't quit entirely gracefully > (ie with some components not loaded) then I can be missing my panel or deskopt. This should be fixed in 4.6beta2. The session manager (as of a few minutes ago) now allows clients to tell it that they should be restarted if they die. Xfdesktop already makes use of this, and the panel and WM should be fixed to do this as well. > Again changing runlevels and manually starting some apps can help, however this > is less than ideal. Runlevels? Huh? > 1) a blacklist to forbid certain apps from starting by autostart (eg knotify4, > gnome-panel, gnome-session...). Could be a possible solution to Bug 2382? If a user runs gnome-panel, we assume they'll want to keep running it. Blacklisting here isn't desired. gnome-session doesn't make sense -- it *IS* a session manager; it won't register itself with ours (and should refuse to run if xfce4-session is running; if not, that's a bug in gnome-session). > 2) A whitelist to force certain apps to start > (xfce4-session,xfce4-desktop,xfce4-panel) if they do not get started. Already addressed by restart hints. > Related to Bug 2380: A way (GUI) to flush the autostart list. Sometimes hung > programs or programs that are not behaving correctly can be re-initialised by > xfce4 in their bad state. being able to remove this from the autostart list > would be great! I don't really think this should be handled by the session manager. Regardless, it has no way of knowing the state of apps in the autostart list. At best, it can tell if they exited with a failure code, or crashed, but I don't think we want to be doing anything here if that happens. And if they just exited/crashed, what's the big deal if they remain in the autostart list? Users put them there for a reason; I think the user should remove them if they don't want them there anymore.
Yeah, gonna pass on this.