Xfce? No, I don't Think So

I just checked the xfce site to see if their documentation situation has improved. They seem to be preparing the 4.8 release, with 4.6 in use, but the documentation is 4.2,. No way I'm going back to that--it appears to be run by a bunch of coders with no interest in the user. Thus, xfce developers, IMHO, are developing for themselves, but not for the wider Linux community. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think things like Xubuntu should be discontinued until someone thinks xfce is worth documenting.

Removing a menu item in Xfce4.6.1

I recently uninstalled gnumeric, but the menu entry didn't go away. Looking through various menu items, settings, configuration options, etc., didn't yield anything. The online documentation for xfce 4.6 has the helpful statement that there is no documentation, and refers us to the xfce 4.2 documentation. I noticed in the same place that there was a link to 4.4 documentation, but no dice--that also refers us to the 4.2 docs. Clearly documentation has been a continuing issue in xfce. The 4.2 documentation led me to a page of misinformation (maybe it was accurate in 4.2), http://www.xfce.org/documentation/4.2/manuals/xfdesktop. This page shows an image of an "Edit Desktop Menu" button in the desktop settings window. There is no such button in 4.6.

A little googling led me to a lot of people asking how to do it, some suggestions that didn't work, etc. This reminded me of trying to get OpenOffice to stop "helpfully" suggesting word completions and spreadsheet cell contents: many complaints about how stupid the default settings were, many complaints about how difficult it was to disable, but solutions were few and far between.

Finally, fed up with trying to figure out how to do it the right away, I removed /usr/share/applications/gnumeric.desktop (actually I moved it to a safe place just in case) and, voila, the gnumeric menu item was gone.

Xubuntu Glitch

This morning I opened an open office document by clicking on it in Thunar (xfce's file manager), and the formatting was all goofed up. Weird. I started to mess around with it, but quickly realized the save as menu was different as well, and then noticed I was in Abiword, not Open Office.

For some reason, Xubuntu, which is supposed to be stripped to mostly essentials, ships with Abiword, Gnumeric, and some other useless crap. I hadn't gotten around to uninstalling these, because the clutter they were adding to my Office menu was a minor inconvenience. But now they're gone, kind of.

Removing Gnumeric didn't remove it from the office menu, so I'll have to figure out how to remove it manually, which isn't an obviously simple task in xfce.

Palimpsest

I recently upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 9.10, and tonight I noticed a new tool, palimpsest. In addition to being a great name (though I had to look it up), it's an interesting tool. It's now a default on Ubuntu 9.10, but not in Xubuntu 9.10. Install gnome-disk-utility to get it. Click above or here for a brief description.