I love the idea of a minimal desktop environment, but I've never tried XFCE. Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? I find the screenshots on their homepage very intuitive but a bit ugly.
I'd choose Zukitre better. No dark theme or a light one blinding your eyes. Pretty neutral, gray.
As for the icon theme, Elementary XFCE works perfectly well with Zukitre. If not, ePapirus or Papirus itself. Simple and flat but contrasted, the opposite to a good chunk of flat themes today, where you can't guess where the buttons start and end.
Once you get used to that theme the Night Mode it's useless as I you can just spawn
sct 5500 #or xsct
at daytime, or
sct 3500
at night time.
xsct/xsct will work with any window manager, too. And the Zukitre
themes blend really well with minimal window managers as CWM, i3,
DWM and the like, as it has neither curves nor gradients.
I use Arc-Dark with elementary-xfce-dark icons (but have a script to switch to toggle dark-mode, where light mode is Adwaita with elementary-xfce icons).
TBH I typically run things fullscreen, so the only part of xfce I normally "see" is a thin task bar at the bottom with open windows and clock and such. Well, except for when I use Thunar, which is a nice enough file manager.
I use XFCE since 2000. It run great on 8 MiB of RAM on a diskless 486,
with hard drive mounted over Ethernet. It is my robust daily driver.
For dark mode, try:
- in 'Appearance': set Adwaita (dark),
- in 'Window Manager': set 'Default',
- in 'Panel': set dark mode.
This works in Debian 12 (running XFCE 4.18) and looks beautiful.
Easy on the eyes, readable, comfortable.
For other themes look at xfce-look.org. You install these
by decompressing tarballs into ~/.themes/$(theme_name) folder
and then selecting these in settings manager.
Are you sure just switching up the colors and background image wouldn't do it for you?
I just looked at the homepage to see if it was anything different than I see on my machine, and if anything it looks nicer there. It's certainly nothing fancy, but I feel like there's hardly enough there to really count as "ugly". It all fades into the background quickly when you're doing actual work on it. But YMMV I guess.
