Marrying Kde to Xfce in MX-16

[i_ri]

hello TenderFoot
KDE "Convulsions"; good one Stevo. Kde webpages now seem to seek equilibrium using the words free and donate three or four times per page. Personally a bit embarassed to be associated with that; So glad that MX steered us to XFCE.

[richb]

I must say that on a 21 inch monitor that area of the login screen is quite small and hard to see. I am about 2 1/2 feet from my monitor and I have to move closer to see the choices.
EDIT: Of course the font can be enlarged with lightdm Greeter Configuration.

[Jerry3904]

Which is why we put the red arrow on the MXUM image...

[TenderFoot]

In this instance I was being ironic about the paradox of consulting the manual whilst at the login screen! (That sentence is a sort of tautology)! I'm playing devil's advocate here on behalf of potential new - uninitiated in the wonders of linux and/or MX - and who want an intuitive environment.

BTW I've just browsed through The Manual 20170108 and could find no image of login with or without a big red arrow. The only reference is at the end of Section 6.3 Alternate Window Managers. It does. however, make me think of trying a different Login Manager. [And Ctrl-F does not respond for me to enable me to search].

Anyway, back on piste, the point of this was to get an alternative WM (not a Kde session) and although using kwin works up to a point it is not as reliable as it was with kde-mini in MX-14/15. But have copied some Aurorae decorations across from M11 (as suggested by Stevo) and seem ok.

However, my preferred solution would be Compiz but can anyone assure me that this works properly with MX-16 and I can add metacity/gtk decorations - please NOT Emerald - somewhere(?) which can be selected with gconf as in Mint Xfce say?

[richb]

I have the KDE Window Manager (Kwin) installed and find it very reliable. What reliability issues are you having?

[TenderFoot]

By default in boots with xfwm4. Switching to kwin via terminal is unsatisfactory because closing the terminal windows looses kwin without reverting to xfwm. Alt+F2 is better. Even so, open windows don't get decorations until selected. Later, parts of the display go black and eventually the whole screen. Then parts recover but, eventually, have to restore xfwm. There seems to be some connection to mouse movement.

I'm also wondering whether the old nVidia 6200 graphics may not be fully supported and whether to try Nvidia Driver Installer.

[Stevo]

I can use the fusion-icon taskbar widget to switch between Emerald and GTK window decorations; both seem reasonably stable with my graphics (Intel Skylake 520) and compiz-0.8.8. Debian now has the more recent and less flashy compiz 0.9.1.X back in the repos upstream, if we ever decide that 0.8.8 is too buggy and want to try backporting a supposedly stabler version.

Fusion-icon will let you switch between whatever window managers are installed, so it can be used to switch to Kwin, also.

You'll have to look for advice from other people with similar Nvidia cards, though.

[TenderFoot]

Yes, I understand what Fusion-Icon does but my early query was whether it's installable and works without Compiz being an available wm? My reluctance to install Compiz is, as intimated before, the nightmare of window decorations. Hence this messing about with kwin.

[anticapitalista]

Why not use a KDE distro and save yourself the hassle?

[Stevo]

Fusion-icon depends on compiz, but won't need to be running it to switch to something like Kwin.

I can run at least a few Emerald themes that we have in the MX 15 test repo with the Emerald we had in there, but Metacity and GTK also seem to work if they are also installed, at least for the themes I've tried. Our compiz doesn't have any presets enabled, so we have to turn on Window decoration support manually in the Compizconfig settings before any of those will work.