Panel layout in Xfce 4.8 (was Re: Goal: Make XFCE rock in Fedora)

[Panu Matilainen]

Greetings from another Gnome 3 refugee...

On 03/09/2011 01:04 AM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 08.03.2011, 21:00 +0100 schrieb Martin Sourada:
>> On Tue, 08 Mar 2011 19:43:34 +0100
>> Christoph Wickert wrote:

>>>        * mixer
>> Don't we have volume control (pulseaudio) in systemtray already?
>
> this is gnome-sound-applet and we want to get rid of it for several
> reasons:
>        * it lacks the icon (bug 678696)
>        * it's GTK+3 and we don't have a fitting theme
>        * it's not supposed to be in the spin, in the latest nightly it's
>          no longer their because dependencies on the GNOME side have
>          changed.

Hah. I thought I'd found /one/ thing in XFCE (I'm very much an 
xfce-newbie, only been using it for a week now) that's absolutely 
dreadful - the volume control - and was thinking okay time to dig up the 
source and fix the damn thing... but turns out it comes from the big G.

Fiddling with the real xfce-mixer-plugin also kinda revealed the reason 
I found the new gnome-sound-applet so dreadful: you're supposed to use 
the mouse scroll-wheel to adjust volume while hovering on the 
applet/plugin. What if you don't HAVE a scroll-wheel, like on many 
laptops? Sure you can then open the entire mixer... but that feels like 
quite a step backwards from being able to just click on the loudspeaker 
icon and then adjust the slider right there (which is the way it worked 
forever in Gnome, until they managed to make a mess of it in G3). Am I 
the only one finding this an issue?

FWIW, I'm willing to volunteer to even writing a damn new mixer plugin 
if what's exists isn't sufficient for whatever reason. Seeing where 
Gnome appears to be headed, I've a feeling I'm about to turn from a 
refugee to a permanent XFCE resident and at that point it's easy to 
justify a little bit of extra investment in ones own future :)

	- Panu -