HOWTO: Lightest XFCE - Making XFCE lighter and faster

[vermaden]

XFCE is generally light out from the box but it can be a lot more light, to have most of its functionality we need only these 3 processes running:

 VSZ   RSS   COMMAND
14080  9300  xfwm4
23448 12020  xfce4-panel
19836  9512  xfce4-menu-plugin

mandatory ports: [thanks to lvlamb ]
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-wm
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-panel
/usr/ports/x11-wm/xfce4-desktop # to get xfce4-menu-plugin
/usr/ports/x11-fm/thunar # to have nice and light file manager
/usr/ports/graphics/feh # to have wallpaper and nice ultra light/fast image viewer.

to start XFCE with only these processes we will use this ~/.xinitrc:

xfce4-panel & pid=$!
{
  xfwm4 --compositor=off --daemon && killall -9 xfce-mcs-manager &
  random_wallpaper.sh ~/gfx/wallpapers &
}
wait $pid

my random_wallpaper.sh script:

#! /bin/sh

walls="${1}"
count=`ls ${walls} | wc -l`
random=`( time ps aux ; date +"%S" ; w ) 2>&1 | cksum | awk '{print substr($0, 0, 5)}'`
choosen=`expr ${random} % ${count} + 1`
feh --bg-scale ${walls}/`ls ${walls} | sed -n ${choosen}p`

In XFCE generally all settings like current theme icon theme and so are handled by xfce-mcs-manager but we kill it and use pure old ~/.gtkrc-2.0 for that:

gtk-icon-theme-name = "Tango-Blue-Materia"
gtk-theme-name      = "Luminance"
gtk-font-name       = "Sans 10"

here are links for that themes if You like them:
gtk-icon-theme-name: http://vermaden.go.pl/tmp/xfce-icons.tar.gz
gtk-theme-name: http://vermaden.go.pl/tmp/xfce-theme.tar.gz

icons dir: ~/.icons/Tango-Blue-Materia
theme dir: ~/.themes/Luminance

to end work with XFCE You can traditionally hit CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE or hit EXIT on XFCE panel.

the END RESULT looks like that:



Have Fun.