I am running Arch on a Dell XPS 15 9530 which has a touchscreen. Living without the touchscreen is really hard once you get used to it. Actually whenever I sit infront of another laptop I touch the laptops screen by accident, hoping I would be able to pinch-to-zoom or scroll through an article the way I would do it on my smartphone. Now on XFCE the touchscreen support is not the best. Pinch-to-zoom, scrolling, rotating,.. doesn't work (I tried synaptics, elographics and evdev drivers). Touchegg is a dead project which is buggy, has high cpu usage and doesn't work as it should anyway. Xswipe fits somewhere in between touchegg and XFCE. Gnome should support touchscreen features out-of-the-box and wouldn't even need any further configuration / optimization. How ever, gnome is bloated. It comes with so much stuff. Online syncing, calender, etc etc. Does anyone know how gnome would compare to xfce in terms of privacy & security ? All that stuff that gets installed and is running gives more room for bugs / exploits. Also, how trustworthy is the "big gnome project" compared to xfce ? Thanks
Well, if you think RedHat is an Evil company that is trying to make Linux as close to Windows as possible, then you might want to avoid GNOME But I don't think they're Evil. XFCE is more narrow, GNOME is more "bloated". Remember that you're using Arch Linux and so you can chose whichever packages you want to install, you don't need to install everything related to that Desktop Environment. Just hit "pacman -S gnome gnome-extras" and select only the packages you want with "1,2,4-15,17,etc" or whatever number-related packages you want. I do something similar with KDE: on most distros you need to install a lot of GNOME stuff in order to have "file-roller" installed, but on Arch you literally just get the package you want:
gnome is developmet by the gnomve project/foundation. What does it have to do with RedHat ? Yes, I guess I will install a "minimalized" gnome, also remove some stuff from the standard gnome, and then add what I want by myself package by package. What do I expect from gnome: Less bugs, more user friendly, more support/features out of the box. I don't believe it will slow down my system compared to xfce (core i7 with 16gb ram should have enough ressources to handle gnome's "bloat" easily) ?
Thank you a lot ! Great article but so far I made a completely different experience: XFCE actually seems to work quite well with touchscreen, but it is not fully integrated yet: Drag & Drop works, Resizing windows works, Scrolling in Okular, Ristretto, Telegram works,... Scrolling in Thunar & Firefox/Iceweasel doesn't work. Pinch-to-zoom doesn't work anywhere. So if scrolling & pinch-to-zoom gets fixed, XFCE would do everything I need to do with my touchscreen.
Redhat is the biggest corporate contributor to the GNOME project. So yes, they have a fair amount influence over GNOME project.
