OPi 4 switching to LXDE

[Dave Kimble]

Armbianmonitor:

http://ix.io/2yaz

There is only a desktop download for OPi 4 and it comes with XFCE desktop.

I cannot change the color for the taskbar from the absolutely horrible charcoal gray, other than to the 16-color set.

If I choose a light color, the font color doesn't automatically change to dark, or be set specifically, it stays as white.

I cannot put the computer's name on the taskbar.

I cannot put the temperature on the taskbar.

I cannot put the CPU usage on the taskbar.

With the taskbar on the left margin (deskbar), the icons for the launchers are single and huge - the full width of the taskbar, not in rows 0f 24 px icons like with LXDE.

I cannot change the rest of the screen's background color, other than to one of the 16-color set.

I edited /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks-Olive/openbox-3/themerc to have the active title bar colored yellow, instead of the absolutely horrible Black.

I launched lxappearance and it had the new Clearlooks-Olive, but it didn't affect the color of the title bar.

 

So I installed LXDE desktop, the usual nurses screen asking which desktop you want to be default, didn't appear.

I logged out and logged back in, but the login screen does not have an icon to click to choose which desktop you want.

So I removed XFCE4, logged out, logged in and still didn't get an LXDE desktop.

Repeating the above, I noticed a"blob" in the bottom right of the screen, and clicked that - offered the choice of LXDE.

Where does the usual ncurses screen put the default desktop choice ?

Finally OK.

Can we please have LXDE replace XFCE in the desktop versions in future ?

I have a red LED light on all the time, the orange light on the ethernet port is always on, the green ethernet flashes every now and then, the green light on the board flashes twice evry second.  In the dark these lights light up the room. 

Is it possible to switch the LED lights off ?

Is it possible to describe the differences between Armbian for OPi4 and Ubuntu_armhf for OPi4 ?

 

[lanefu]

1 hour ago, Dave Kimble said:

Is it possible to switch the LED lights off

Yep. Search the forum for "led trigger"

 

 

[Werner]

4 hours ago, Dave Kimble said:

Is it possible to describe the differences between Armbian for OPi4 and Ubuntu_armhf for OPi4 ?

I dont know if there are advantages of using an image directly from orangepi since they are not really known to have high quality software. From time to time they even clone and rebrand armbian images and put them as their own.

Btw using an armhf image on an arm64 SoC would be quite pointless.

 

 

A few facts about Armbian you can read at the documentation: https://docs.armbian.com/#what-is-the-difference-between-armbian-and-debianubuntu

[Igor]

6 hours ago, Dave Kimble said:

Can we please have LXDE replace XFCE in the desktop versions in future ?

 

If you will be a developer and maintainer or if you will be paying developer and maintainer anything can be done. Otherwise, there is a big stack of wishes which will never be addressed - its for several years of works and for several millions to blow on development and support already posted on this forum: https://forum.armbian.com/forum/38-feature-requests/

 

Can't comment your troubles with XFCE - I never had them and we are not the authors of it. We only add few tweaks and fix minor bugs. Is this the best DE? Certainly not.

 

6 hours ago, Dave Kimble said:

and it comes with XFCE desktop

Because we can only afford to maintain one DE and there are no plans to blow our limited time to maintain yet another lightweight desktop. Start with a CLI image and install any standard desktop of your wish on top - should be easy and fast.

 

However we are developing at least two new (high-end, not yet another lightweight) desktop options which will become available in the following months. Currently we are not far enough to show out anything yet https://armbian.atlassian.net/browse/AR-200 (if someone wants to contribute with comments at this early stage, drop me a PM to get Jira write access)

[NicoD]

XFCE is a lot more customizeable than LXDE. I think you need to do a bit more investigation.
If you want LXDE, you can easily install it yourself. "sudo apt install lubuntu-desktop"
I hate LXDE. Ain't nothing good about it except for a little less memory usage. Only for a 500MB device it's useful. But who runs a desktop on a 500MB device?

The xfce4-goodies are too good vs those of lxde.
You can make an xfce4 desktop look the way you like, MacOS, Windows or just your own flavor. No other DE is that good for that reason.

[Dave Kimble]

18 hours ago, lanefu said:

Yep. Search the forum for "led trigger"

 

 

My OPi4's /sys/class/ layout doesn't look anything like any of those examples/scripts .

Is there an overview written up anywhere for OPi4 ?

13 hours ago, Igor said:

Because we can only afford to maintain one DE ....

Perhaps I should have said "replace XFCE with LXDE".

9 hours ago, NicoD said:

XFCE is a lot more customizeable than LXDE.

 I pointed out 7 things I couldn't do with it in my first post.

 

16 hours ago, Werner said:

Btw using an armhf image on an arm64 SoC would be quite pointless.

 

My mistake.