Anyone using Openbox with XFCE4 here?

[AVLinux]

Hi MX'ers!

On my main 64bit computers I'm quite content with MX XFCE4 but I still run a 32bit laptop with a very heavily customized Debian system on it and over the past weekend I added the MX repos and rolled a 5.9.1 kernel and after much experimentation I still have some digging to do but I have MX-Snapshot up and running well enough to snapshot this system and since its an older machine and I used to be heavily into LXDE and Openbox I was considering putting Openbox in the mix and ditching xfwm and xfdesktop but keeping xfce4-panel and Thunar (of course!)... Anyone here mixing and matching? anyone have advice for integrating Openbox as seamlessly as possible???

PS I know MX has fluxbox too but I don't really want to get into unknown territory here... I was comfy with OB in the past

[manyroads]

I have written a bunch on it, although these days I'm using dwm. If you want to wade through my writings they are here...

https://eirenicon.org/?s=openbox

EDIT: you might find this interesting as well. https://sourceforge.net/projects/miyolinux/

[AVLinux]

I have written a bunch on it, although these days I'm using dwm. If you want to wade through my writings they are here...

https://eirenicon.org/?s=openbox

EDIT: you might find this interesting as well. https://sourceforge.net/projects/miyolinux/

Hi and thanks!

Great blog you have there!

[manyroads]

I use it to keep my 'remembry' working. (Winnie-ther-Pooh)

[AVLinux]

Hi,

Well although BunsenLabs looks gorgeous due to the highly customized nature of this particular install I'm working with I opted to do everything the old fashioned way (I was quite surprised obmenu-generator isn't in the MX or Debian Repos) so I ended up building and packaging some stuff from source and some of my old habits from many years of distributing an LXDE distro all came back to me.. I had forgotten how amazingly configurable OpenBox is and how fun it is to hack your own themes! obmenu-generator was a real revelation too, I left LXDE around the time it was beginning to be being actively developed so I had never used it.

At the end I'm very happy with the result.. a 32bit machine running kernel 5.9.1 with a Debian/MX-ised XFCE4 with OpenBox (no xfwm or xfdesktop4) that runs in about 279 Mb of Ram at idle. Admittedly a bit of a FrankenDebian bit I'm picking away at it's guts trying to get it as MX-ised as possible.

Are there any tutes or guides on converting a pure Debian install to MX? I have added MX repos dist-upgraded and installed a lot of the meta-packages and manually reconfigured a few things... It actually will Remaster and boot with MX-Snapshot but I'm still a bit puzzled if there is a clean way to get rid of Systemd since it was a Debian systemd install to begin with..

[i_ri]

Hello AVLinux
Was a time that starting up in openbox, then turning on the xfce4-Panel; it was an enjoyable system. nothing complicated about the way that worked.
Do not shy from fluxbox; give it a whirl.

[handy]

Hi AVLinux, I've been using roughly the same Openbox setup for ~13 years. Arch; BSD's; Manjaro; briefly this & that distro without systemd & then MX & antiX for the last > two & a half years or so.

I have some bits of Xfce4 running with Openbox; power manager is the most obvious, I'm probably running Xfce4 session manager & other bits & pieces without even noticing. The Xfce4 modules are very transparent & reliable.

I prefer tint2 for my pretty small panel & I use volumeicon for my audio control, I run udiskie to handle my external media (does a superb job), xfce notes seems to be the best of the bunch for me... I use the Worker file manager as the heart of my Openbox system (this is not a particularly popular choice, though those that do connect with Worker are very happy chappies. :) (it is reminiscent of Jonathon Potter's Directory Opus on the wonderful old Amiga's :D) Here's a link to a wiki page I wrote for Manjaro a long time ago: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Work ... troduction

Anyway, I've been using MX/antiX for a good two & a half years at this point with this setup. It has caused me no problems (any problems that I have had have had nothing to do with the technicalities of using the Openbox WM with Xfce4, they work together beautifully).

[AVLinux]

Hi handy!

That's good to hear, sounds like you have put a lot of time and experience into whittling things down. I had never heard of 'Worker', I browsed that article and I can see how it may be an acquired taste.. I use a huge amount of custom actions and I have no complaints with Thunar.. I don't really have an issue with XFCE4 in general except that it keeps gobbling up more RAM with each release to the point where like many have said there is not much of a consumption gap between Plasma and XFCE4 any more which is kinda not cool, It seems Openbox helps tip things toward what you'd might expect a light full-featured DE like XFCE4 to consume.

[figueroa]

xfce4-panel should work very well under openbox as your wm. I've posted on the Gentoo forums about my current setup with openbox using the lxde-panel (lxpanel) and PCManFM running the desktop. Using openbox is very distribution agnostic. In fact, I have this setup on my MX-19 computer where I first setup LXDE from the MX Package Installer, which gives you all the pieces needed to run openbox alone or with some of the LXDE dependencies (that are both nice, handy, and small) that come along for the ride. Here is a link to my thread on the Gentoo forums. https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1 ... enbox.html

My advice is that one not uninstall XFCE or its dependencies from the default MX setup, just add the additional pieces to get the lightweight GUI environment that suits your tastes, while retaining the ability to jump back into the out-of-the-box XFCE desktop with a smimple log out and log back in.

[drummer]

I use Openbox on every distro I have tried or currently use, which at this moment on this laptop is Archlabs and MX, with a bit of Bunsenlabs for the Lithium desktop in a dual boot (thanks to manyroads for his excellent tutorials). I used to use Crunchbang Linux years ago, and then I went on Linux hiatus, came back to it, and found that #! went into retirement lol. I tried out all the DE's, and found that I didn't like any of them compared to a simple window manager, like Openbox or bspwm for example. At first, I didn't know my way around WM's, so I tried ArcoLinux for a bit using their Xtended ISO, but Arco - even though it's well done - is very bloated IMO, and it has a ton of keybindings for apps like Variety, a wall paper app, which has like nine of them. I stopped using Arco to then doing the vanilla Arch install, and then discovered Openbox based distros like Archlabs, Bunsenlabs, and ArchBang, all of which were inspired by Crunchbang (or like Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon, if he used Crunchbang), as well as other ones like Star, and Anarchy.

I have checked out Manjaro and Mabox versions of Openbox, but I am not much of a Manjaro fan after it breaking on me because of issues upstream (at least that's what I found) several times, and Mabox is like having a full blown DE, and I don't like to have to deconstruct configs or purge stuff when I have barebones to build with. I recently tried Fedora on a minimal net install, and that install is pretty bare bones to the point where if your not familiar with Fedora, it's better to add LXqt along with xmonad lol, just in case you need a mouse (that Fedora install came with not only xmonad, but qtile, i3, Awesome, Openbox, and.............Ratpoison. Nicely done).

Window managers force me to config things via text editors, which means I have to edit stuff in Lua, or XML, or whatever language or code it's written in. But, what I found what I like about that, it's that I learn where everything is, from my .config folder, to my usr/share, to the /etc, and so on. With a vanilla Openbox or i3 install, practically nothing as far as the size of it, I can run it off a flash or SD card in my Thinkpad (using MX or AntiX of course!) as sort of rescue ISO, in case I bork things. Which is always bound to happen, but now I know why it broke, where all the pieces are to fix it, and that's why I dual and triple boot ISO's, because they are more fun than breaking Windows just to make it work like you want it.