this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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Before you give up on XFCE and/or Chicago95 - have you replaced the default menu with Whisker Menu? For me, Whisker Menu is a must-have for any sane XFCE user. When I used it with Chicago95, I found I could have a Windows 7 style interface with Windows 95 aesthetics.
Honestly, even if Chicago95 is aesthetically not what you want, I'd recommend trying an alternate theme on XFCE - I currently use modified DesktopPal '97 combined with a pack of Haiku-style icons.
Overall, I'd be interested to know more about your qualms with XFCE and see if customization can help you overcome them. A lot of distros have annoying defaults for XFCE, but I changed a few simple settings and have a desktop I rather enjoy using. It is totally fine if it still isn't the thing for you after any potential discussion, but I just want to make sure you really know what XFCE has to offer before you move on.
I don't really like how I keep accidentally rolling-up the windows in Xfce and how long the settings menu takes to load, I probably had more qualms but I don't remember what they are. It works fine (except for some aspects of Chicago95), but it feels outdated in a bad way rather than good way. Part of it is probably my crummy laptop with broken CTRL keys and incompatible bluetooth.
DesktopPal '97 seems really cool, but right now my top priority is switching to KDE Plasma 6 with custom themes and seeing how that goes.
What do you mean by "window roll-up"?
Also, the settings menu thing is weird - mine takes less than a second to load, and I'm on a machine with a 7 year old processor at this point. I almost worry that if that takes a long time KDE will be more miserable performance-wise, unless you've already tried it on here.
By the way, what distro and XFCE version are you running - just for good measure.
The outdated sentiment is probably based, honestly. I think it's gotten better, but there are rough edges. In the end, do what works for you.
Roll up is when you scroll-up while hovering over the title bar and everything except the title-bar disappears. In the image monovergent provided the title bar is highlighted in red.
I use Linux Mint with Xfce. Gonna change to OpenSUSE once I can be bothered distro-hopping.
EDIT: Specifically it's the Font Settings that take forever to load, not all of the settings menu.
Oh yeh. The font menu is crap. I can’t argue with that.
It’s one of those mysterious annoying things that’s up there with the GTK file picker in some apps taking 10 seconds to load.
But I also don’t change fonts that often. Still, that has much room for improvement.
Mine used to be bogged down by the half-a-million Noto fonts, which I alleviated by uninstalling fonts-noto-extra, leaving only fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-mono.
Did this significantly speed up the font menu? I might have to try that!