I have been using XFCE with xmonad for years now. I’m not sure exactly how many, but at least 6 years, if not closer to 10. Today I threw in the towel and switched to Gnome.

More recently, at a new job, I was given a Macbook Pro. I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of this, but I thought I’d give it a try. I found MacOS to be extremely frustrating and confining. It had no real support for a tiling window manager, and although projects like amethyst tried to approximate what xmonad can do on Linux, they were just too limited by the platform and were clunky. Moreover, the entire UI was surprisingly sluggish; maybe that was an induced effect from animations, but I don’t think that explains it. A Debisn stretch install, even on inferior hardware, was snappy in a way that MacOS never was. So I have requested to swap for a laptop that will run Debian. The strange use of Command instead of Control for things, combined with the overall lack of configurability of keybindings, meant that I was going to always be fighting muscle memory moving from one platform to another. Not only that, but being back in the world of a Free Software OS means a lot.

Now then, back to xmonad and XFCE situation. XFCE once worked very well with xmonad. Over the years, this got more challenging. Around the jessie (XFCE 4.10) time, I had to be very careful about when I would let it save my session, because it would easily break. With stretch, I had to write custom scripts because the panel wouldn’t show up properly, and even some application icons would be invisible, if things were started in a certain order. This took much trial and error and was still cumbersome.

Gnome 3, with its tightly-coupled Gnome Shell, has never been compatible with other window managers — at least not directly. A person could have always used MATE with xmonad — but a lot of people that run XFCE tend to have some Gnome 3 apps (for instance, evince) anyhow. Cinnamon also wouldn’t work with xmonad, because it is simply another tightly-coupled shell instead of Gnome Shell. And then today I discovered gnome-flashback. gnome-flashback is a Gnome 3 environment that uses the traditional X approach with a separate window manager (metacity of yore by default). Sweet.

It turns out that Debian’s xmonad has built-in support for it. If you know the secret: apt-get install gnome-session-flashback (OK, it’s not so secret; it’s even in xmonad’s README.Debian these days) Install that, plus gnome and gdm3 and things are nice. Configure xmonad with GNOME support and poof – goodness right out of the box, selectable from the gdm sessions list.

I still have some gripes about Gnome’s configurability (or lack thereof). But I’ve got to say: This environment is the first one I’ve ever used that got external display switching very nearly right without any configuration, and I include MacOS in that. Plug in an external display, and poof – it’s configured and set up. You can hit a toggle key (Windows+P by default) to change the configurations, or use the Display section in gnome-control-center. Unplug it, and it instantly reconfigures itself to put everything back on the laptop screen. Yessss! I used to have scripts to do this in the wheezy/jessie days. XFCE in stretch had numerous annoying failures in this area which rendered the internal display completely dark until the next reboot – very frustrating. With Gnome, it just works. And, even if you have “suspend on lid closed” turned on, if the system is powered up and hooked up to an external display, it will keep running even if the lid is closed, figuring you must be using it on the external screen. Another thing the Mac wouldn’t do well.

All in all, some pretty good stuff here. I continue to be impressed by stretch. It is darn impressive to put this OS on generic hardware and have it outshine the closed-ecosystem Mac!