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1

Looking for a 3rd DE to complement the XFCE/KDE I have been using, I’d like to know which offering bundled with Manjaro lets me set up ‘deskbar’ style panels on the 4K screen sides offering:

  • up to a with of at least 150 pixels
  • two columns of app icons (configurable to a ittle less then half panel width).
  • some version of xeyes or xfce4-xeyes-plugin

I installed my 1st Manjaro with Cinnamon but will have to remove it because it doesn’t cater to my above requirements.

Here’s an older (color too loud) desktop example:

x2A9zHw
x2A9zHw1920×1080 143 KB

2

Not recommended to mix Gnome (or Cinnamon, for that matter) with KDE Plasma.

I do know that back in the day, it was considered a “reasonable kludge” (on Linux Mint) to install Plasma on a system with Xfce originally installed with it, but your suggestion most likely involves mixing Qt configs in your /home with GTK ones; this is not always a good recipe.

Note: I assume Xfce also uses GTK :wink: … but Xfce tends to stick to its own set of configs more, IIRC.

2 Likes
3

I think enlightenment might offer what you want. It’s in the repositories, but we do not have any preconfigured ISOs with it.

4

Cinnamon is capable of putting panels on the sides if that is what you want?

5

In fact, virtually every DE has some way to achieve what you want;

If you’re prepared to use features already available in Plasma you might be surprised what can be achieved to suit your first two bullet points.

For the third, I’m afraid there is no good substitute for research.

Good luck.

1 Like
8

For what reason is xeyes so important?

If it’s so you can find the mouse pointer, there are other ways to achieve this, that I believe are better.

2 Likes
9

Plus that xorg-xeyes won’t even work on Wayland.

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10

xfce4-panel --preferences has a Deskbar mode option (vertical panel with plugins orientated horizontally)

Panel width depends on settings for Row size and Border width

Number of rows to set number of columns in a vertical panel

xfce4-eyes-plugin can be installed from Manjaro extra repository

Wayland support in Xfce 4.20 is experimental - for advanced users only.

11

With a 32" 4K monitor it’s even harder to know where the mouse is than it was before. Xfce4-eyes-plugin works just fine (in xfce). Other ways? Yes there used to be KDE mouse-trails, worked really well, and it seems that anything that is really practical getss ‘written out’ :frowning:

12

The reason I picked Cinnamon was to have something other than XFCE/KDE on hand. I haven’t been able to get 150 pixels wide or 2 coulmns in the deskbars. I Have no problem getting what I want in XFCE, missing xeyes in KDE, so my questions are not about these two DE’s.

13

Early plasma still made 2 separated deskbars possible and I would stick xeyes leering from in between them like moray eels but now Plasma has made separated deskbars on the same side difficult to customise (I at least haven’t found the way and such stunts should not be necessary anyway).

14

Tried it once but that must have been just the core because it didn’t seem like much. XFCE is available as a Manjaro option too so if I have to let cinamon go it might be a candidate. I’ll take another look at enlightenment but yet-another-learning-curve scares the hsit out of me.

Nothing is stable on less than 3-legs and it’s a bit in that spirit that I’m looking for another DE, same as I did for distros and inits.

15

The one I use is shake, makes the mouse pointer much bigger.

There is Also Mouse Track, which creates a rotating image around the Mouse pointer, when you press CTRL + META.

1 Like
16

Widgets or Plasmoids are unsupported - use at your own risk.

Remember that widgets is not a set-and-forget thing - due to changes in Plasma - they may cease functioning without warning.

1 Like
17

I Increased the cursor size on a HTPC system so I could see it from the sofa
xfce4-settings:mouse [Xfce Docs]