May Xfce desktop
This month’s mostly warm, occasionally cool and windy weather inspired me to create a working environment that called to mind the pleasant days of springtime. The wallpaper is suitably natural, with pale blossoms and soft shadowed reflections at the water’s edge.
icons: Crashbit
gtk+: Lila-Xfce
xfwm4: axiom
background: sakura
cursor: gentoo-xcursors
The gtk+ colors were chosen to complement the lavender cherry tree blossoms. While Xfce includes a gtk+ theme with matching colors, Xfce-Cadmium, one of the Lila themes had better-looking widgets. Cadmium is still a good choice, as are Lila-Simple and Lila-Industrial.
The icon set is an older version of Crashbit. The window manager theme “axiom” was chosen because it picks up the neutral background colors. Most themes are designed to pick up one of the primary colors, but that made things too purplish. The Lila project offers a couple of xfwm4 themes, but both are too harsh for this desktop.
The final piece of the theme is the mouse cursor. Normally I just use the Vanilla DMZ cursor theme, but I thought I’d try out a cursor set created specifically for Gentoo, which you can install by running emerge gentoo-xcursors. It even comes with an animated Znurt for “working” operations. The light on his head pulses rapidly while you wait. Cute, very cute. The Lila project also has a few cursor themes, but I decided to stick with the Gentoo theme, because of Znurt.
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It’s a pleasantly warm background, medium contrast, so it’s easy on my eyes at all times. Plus, the water complements my SLiM theme, Wave.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. An Xfce Terminal displays the working directory for my LogJam fork. (Ebuilds in the overnight overlay.)
The weather plugin is running in the panel, displaying the local forecast, just after the very flexible Orage clock and my lastsync.sh script in the genmon plugin.
Also visible: the Xfce Task Manager and Decibel Audio Player. Decibel is running in Playlist mode, playing the album Raja by Planet Boelex. The album is beautiful, relaxing, entrancing. It’s freely available at Soft Phase.