There have been some reports that using XFCE in a ThinLinc session works poorly these days. Short summary: - Works fine on Debian 7.0 (XFCE 4.8.0.3), but not on Ubuntu 12.10 (XFCE 4.10.0) or other derivatives such as Mint. Fedora 18 also has problems. - Not specific to our VNC; other solutions such as Vino also have the same problems - Issues include not being able to change theme and other customizations, missing icons, broken layout etc Perhaps we should investigate this and see if we can improve the out-of-box experience for XFCE users.
Unknown if we can fix this at this point. We'll start by investigating and the "solution" might be to report the issue to XFCE.
This bug is vague and we need to do some investigation: - Search roundup tracker to see if we can find any relevant information for this bug - Test XFCE on recommended distributions to identify possible problems
(In reply to comment #2) > > - Test XFCE on recommended distributions to identify > possible problems The chosen list of distributions to do exploration tests of XFCE are: - CentOS6 - Fedora 25 - RHEL 7 - Ubuntu 16.04
I could reproduce and found the problem cause for theming issue mentioned. There are many themese shipped with XFCE which does not support GTK3 which makes any GTK3 application to render awfully. It should also be mentioned that some of XFCE applications is built for GTK3 and is affected by this problem. Default xfce theme "greybird" does support GTK3 but there are many others that does not. There is also a gtk3-engines-xfce which enables the use of gtk3 themes for theming xfce which works all good, "adwaita" theme for example. Found ubuntu upstream bug for the topic: [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4/+bug/1050012
I can't really find any other problems with XFCE and ThinLinc, except for the generic GTK3 theming issue.
(In reply to comment #3) > > - Fedora 25 Was initially tested and resulted in comment #4. xfce v4.12.2. No difference between local and thinlinc session. > - Ubuntu 16.04 Uses xfce 4.12.1 and no difference between local and thinlinc session. However, the error on this platform is slightly different. The menu of a GTK3 application looks decent but does not follow theme as expected eg. light vs. dark theme differences and font sizes are not respected.
(In reply to comment #6) > > - Ubuntu 16.04 > > Uses xfce 4.12.1 and no difference between local and thinlinc session. However, > the error on this platform is slightly different. The menu of a GTK3 > application looks decent but does not follow theme as expected eg. light vs. > dark theme differences and font sizes are not respected. Theme "GREYBIRD" is used by default, ubuntu applies a patch to enable this by default, see earlier mentioned launchpad bug, and this theme works for both GTK2 and 3, eg no differences out-of-the-box...
(In reply to comment #6) > > - Fedora 25 > > Was initially tested and resulted in comment #4. xfce v4.12.2. No difference > between local and thinlinc session. > GTK theme "Adwaita" is used by default which does not show any differences between application. No problems with appereance out of the box. However still many themes are not supporting GTK3 applications.
Found only this [1] issue in roundup Seems to be very related to this bug due to time ranges and that it is Aaron the is handling the issue. [1] https://intranet.lkpg.cendio.se/tracker/issue14154
(In reply to comment #3) > The chosen list of distributions to do exploration tests of XFCE are: > > - CentOS 6 CentOS 6 uses XFCE 4.8, installed from EPEL. Local session is indistinguishable from a ThinLinc session with the default theme. Changing themes works just fine, both locally and in ThinLinc. No icons are missing.
(In reply to comment #3) > - RHEL 7 I had a centos7 image which i installed xfce 14.12.1 from epel. Dekstop works without any problems using default theme, out-of-the-box.
With the tests on different platforms and reading the issue mentioned earlier, there is only one indication that there would be a problem with running Xfce within a VNC session. "Result... for the ThinLinc session the same as the Xenserver version... Not all icons are missing but some are... The theme settings are completely ignored, when I change themes nothing happens... When I log in using the vmware console... everything is fine and I see a nice desktop in front of me..." However this does not tell if the same user / theme config is used etc, there is too much vague information and we can not reproduce such a problem. Therefore I will close this bug now.
Closing this due to it was only an investigation and does not need testing.
