Okay… been using XFCE for a while in Xubuntu, and tinkered with the XFCE spins/versions of Mint and Fedora.
What gives with the flavor of XFCE in openSUSE 12.2? It looks closer to LXDE than XFCE… and yes, I installed LXDE specifically just to check against 
Is there an easy way to get it ‘back’ to what XFCE is supposed to look like?
With your experience using xfce, I think it will not be hard for you to tweak it to what it is supposed to look the way you want it to be.
Can you explain further what kind of look Xfce supposed to be?
Install the upstream branding instead of the opensuse branding packages. Then re-arrange the panels using the nice simple gui xfce already includes. Either way I see no problem with the default theme, change it if you want.
Okay… can you be a little more specific than ‘upstream branding’? When I get home tonight I will be updating a bunch of stuff, including adding some repos for additional software packages. Are you saying that the latest version of XFCE (4.10) vs. the 4.8 that ships with 12.2 should look ‘normal’?
I am kind of curious why they (developers, whoever) felt the need to make XFCE on SuSE look very un-XFCE…?
Yeah but I just used it… I didn’t have to spend a lot of time un-screwing it… well, except for things of my own doing This is more like completely turning things upside down.
Can you explain further what kind of look Xfce supposed to be?
Toolbar along the top instead of the bottom, and there is normally a dock along the bottom center. Kind of like Mac OS X… but XFCE was doing it long before there was an OS X.
There’s something strange here. The version that ships with opensuse 12.2 is 4.10
Now I got ya.
The Xfce you are looking for with a dock at the bottom(cairo-dock) is not the natural look of Xfce.
The openSUSE Xfce should be the right one, except for the application menu which is the openSUSE gecko.
Anyway to make it look like what you want, just unlock the panel and move it to the top.
add the packman repositories and install the cairo-dock including the plugin and add it in the autostarted application
and you have that macos look.
The mac os look I think is not done by Xfce but by Distro. If you compile Xfce from their source what you will get is almost same as what you see in openSUSE.
Edit:
If it is not the cairo-dock you are looking for, it could be the shortened xfce4-panel at the bottom you are referring to.
Ummm… I beg to differ. Its been a long time since I first used XFCE… but that dock was right there in the middle of things from the beginning.
Granted, I know of at least one other distro (Linux Mint 13 XFCE) that doesn’t have the panel (aka ‘dock’) front and center and has the tool bar along the bottom. I still consider that mildly heretical
But this is generally what I’m looking for:
That dock looks like the rox filer to me though not sure it’s been a long time I used it in xfce, but then again
it’s not an xfce thing. Been using xfce for at least 9 years maybe it was like that before I used it. It was one of the alternative
when xfce still not supporting desktop icons. If memory serves xfce started to have a native desktop icon in version 4.6.
Very possible. When I first used XFCE it was probably more than 9 years ago… and they definitely didn’t have desktop icons back then. The ‘panel’ was just one of those ‘iconic’ (pardon the pun) XFCE things that I expected when I started using Xubuntu and Fedora XFCE (default desktops for both):
http://xubuntu.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/precise_01.png
http://spins.fedoraproject.org/static/images/content/xfce-screenshot-01-lg.png
It may be a moot point anyways… YaST appears very odd in XFCE on my laptop - when I open any of the modules from YaST, they appear very small and sort of squished - about 4"w x 3"h - and I have to drag/expand first the window and then the dividers open to where I can see and use them at all - every time I open it. That got real old real quick… asked on the mailing list, and someone said they’d seen similar reports, but never heard of any remedy 
I may have to try to wrap my brain around KDE4 after all…
I got ya! That’s awful.
Try this
Index of /repositories/X11:/xfce/openSUSE_12.2
add that repo in yast2 or zypper
Hope it helps.
On 2012-12-09 01:56, memilanuk wrote:
> asked on the mailing list, and someone said they’d seen similar reports,
That was me, and the reports were on these forums. I don’t have links to
them, but they are recent. Look around.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
If you want the panel transparency at the bottom panel , enable the transparency in window manager tweaks
and right click your panel-preferences and under appearance move the alpha slider to the transparency you want.
On 2012-12-09 02:38, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2012-12-09 01:56, memilanuk wrote:
>
>> asked on the mailing list, and someone said they’d seen similar reports,
>
> That was me, and the reports were on these forums. I don’t have links to
> them, but they are recent. Look around.
>
For example, View this thread here
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)