Panel-less Xfce setup. Kitty terminal emulator with Fish, Conky window for essentials, super + space opens application finder. Tons of other keyboard shortcuts :)

installed debian 13 xfce and a little bit of customization. had to manually convert my old conky file to be recognized by the newer version.

Prototype: scheduled theme switching in Appearance settings (Xfce 4.20)

Hi all,

I've built a prototype that adds a Schedule tab to xfce4-appearance-settings. You can define any number of rules of the form "at HH:MM, switch the style to ...". This is useful for an automatic dark mode in the evening and back to light in the morning.

Each rule can do any of these, together or separately:

• Theme: switch to the dark or light variant of the theme that is active at that moment, or to a specific theme. Variants are found case-insensitively, e.g. Greybird → Greybird-dark, Orchis-Compact → Orchis-Dark-Compact.
• Color scheme: set the dark/light preference that GTK 4/libadwaita, Qt 6, Firefox, Chromium and Electron apps read through the settings portal.
• More: also set the matching xfwm4 theme (by default this follows the "Set matching Xfwm4 theme" option), set screen brightness, the icon theme or the cursor theme, or run your own shell command.

The rules are stored in xfconf (xsettings:/Xfce/ThemeSchedule/).
xfsettingsd applies them, so they work without the dialog being open. A rule fires when the clock passes its time, so a manual change stays until the next rule. A switch missed while you were logged out is applied at login.

The code is a set of patches against xfce4-settings 4.20.1 (tested on Xubuntu 26.04), and GitHub Actions builds .debpackages from them:

https://github.com/gtubolcev/xfce-patches

There is also a PPA with .debs for Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gtubolcev/xfce-patches

Sunrise/sunset-based rules are planned next, maybe redshift-based. I'd welcome feedback on the UI and the approach.

A note on why this is not a merge request for xfce main project: I'm not a programmer, and the code was written with Claude (an AI assistant). I can test that it works on my machine, but I can't properly review the code myself, so I don't feel right submitting it upstream as-is. If a developer finds the idea useful and wants to review it or take it over, please feel free.