I love Xfce, always been a great fan of it, know my way around it. For the last few days I have been bashing my head against a wall.
In Xfce there is Window Manager options, Xfwm4-settings where you can choose what window decorations you would like to use, instead of using the default one that comes with your GTK theme of choice you can install other xfwm4 themes.
I like to try out new themes and as default I took out of a theme called Graphite the xfwm4 themes renamed them and compressed them into a tar_gz file. My GTK theme of choice for Xfce is Orchis-Grey-Dark. Both Graphite and Orchis themes are made by the same creator Vinceliuice.
So know that they go together, thought I'd use them in Zorin OS 18.1 Pro Lite. Whether or not Zorin Appearance is interfering with Xfwm4-Settings manager? Just it only works in root and not in normal view. I first tried this on real hardware and have same results in VMware too. I tried moving dconf file to root and vice versa I must stress though that I use Nemo file manager in Xfce, as Thunar has not got a lot of options.
I always make Nemo default and using gsetting commands, to make Nemo open with Terminal, be the default file manager to use for searching and to change wallpapers.
Below are photos elevated privileges is the root window, the window behind has not changed decoration whatsoever, neither has the Window Manager window.
Zorin 18 uses csd by default. It is setup in a file which exports GTK_CSD=1. So disable that file by adding .bak to the filename or comment the line in the file by adding a # at the beginning of the line (you need root rights) at /etc/profile.d/zorin-os-lite-csd.sh and disable "dialogs use header" at settings > appearance > settings.
Then logout and login again.
You see, nemo has the graphite theme now as xfwm theme.
An addition:
With the Orchis theme, the icons of the apps in the taskbar look pretty squished. It helps to select layout 2 in Zorin Appearance > Layouts (however, this will reset the taskbar and all apps that were pinned to the docklike taskbar, and you’ll need to add them again) and then, in the taskbar settings at the items tab, select the window buttons, click the gear icon, and then under the appearance category, disable "show button labels".
Or, alternatively, in the taskbar settings of layout 1 in Zorin appearance, go to tab items and remove the docklike taskbar. This will remove also all pinned apps which have been added to the docklike taskbar. Then add them again to the taskbar. Now they are not in the docklike taskbar and are not squished:
I'm wondering why it has worked at all for root. When I added recently an export function for scrollbars to /etc/environment, it was applied for root in file manager.
Usually /etc/profile.d applies to
all users, but I'm not sure what about root. Maybe root is excluded from that script, but where? Is it the file at /root/.profile?
When you run
sudo -i
nemo
then the theme doesn't work for root, only with pkexec it works.
Edit: I tried with disabling various files for testing to find out the file which excludes root from the scripts, as e.g. /etc/environment, /etc/profile, /root/.profile, and some bashrc files, but there it is not set up. When I added GTK_CSD=1 to /etc/environment, then the theme stopped working for root.
I use four transparent panels that auto hide in every Xfce setup I run. Thank you so much for this fix. I also make my own wallpapers and Whiskermenu buttons. I will post screen shots of desktop soon. Again thank you.
