Re: first experience with XFCE

[Felix Lechner]

Hi Christian,

On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 3:57 AM Christian Gelinek
<christian.gelinek@mailbox.org> wrote:
>
> > but starting xrandr in the shell says command was not found.

I am not sure what's happening to you folks. I have the 'xrandr'
package in my home profile [1] and it runs fine.

[1] 
https://codeberg.org/lechner/home-config/src/commit/243e6c1c59a23ee9560c5dfdcbf6631eb93fad19/desk.scm#L161

> > Does that mean that even man shows help infos for xrandr
> > xrandr is not installed?

Well, Guix is a bit different. What does it mean for 'xrandr' to be
installed? It's obviously in each of your /gnu/stores because XFCE
probably uses it under the hood, but it's not available in your
profile.

> > or does it only show help infos if a package is installed?

Whatever aggregates the manual pages may be more zealous than the
infrastructure that builds executable profiles. I am too new to Guix.

> This is interesting, I just tried this myself, with the same effect:
> `man xrandr` shows the manual but trying to run it (either as my user or
> with `sudo` returns with `command not found`.

You can find the manual page by running (in Bash):

  $ find `echo $MANPATH | tr : ' '` -name 'xrandr*'

Sorry about the shell scripting. That should really be in Guile.

Then you can run 'ls -al' on the resulting path. For me, it looks like

  $ ls -al ~/.guix-profile/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz

which produces

  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 83 Dec 31  1969
/home/lechner/.guix-profile/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz ->
/gnu/store/hhdalqvr3dgsapmh8n6wkha6gm6wklrx-xrandr-1.5.1/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz

You can probably find the xrandr executable nearby. Locally, I can run

  $ /gnu/store/hhdalqvr3dgsapmh8n6wkha6gm6wklrx-xrandr-1.5.1/bin/xrandr

which produces the customary (and lengthy) xrandr output.

> I'm not an expert, but I respectfully disagree: I have been using XFCE
> for several years now

Sorry, I didn't mean to take a position of any kind. You are right.
Xrandr is actually pretty decent.

I have used X since it was called Xfree86 and when backing store had
to be enabled manually due to the AT&T patent. [2] It's not a great
code base by any means. I thought that was universally acknowledged
but cannot find a reference right now. My comment was meant to
encourage the use of Wayland whenever possible.

I didn't mean to reflect poorly on XFCE, either. Personally, I am
still on X just like you and Gottfried, because EXWM supports only
that. My three monitors flicker every time xrandr sets them up, and
every so often some do not turn on. I have relatively old equipment,
though.

[2] https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull12.html#SEC9

> All of them use multiple monitors.  In fact, I'm writing this email on
> my monitor which is "on top of" my laptop screen at this very moment.

I am glad it's working for you! Will you please help Gottfried?

Thanks!

Kind regards
Felix