mobility, mobility, mobility

bent fender · 2025-03-13 20:21:33

Everything seems to be revolving around mobility these days. Well, my way of cloning a user's look-and-feel to another user used to be to just copy the source user's home folder over, period. That stopped working with kde around the time that uuid came into existence but XFCE is at least partly holding the fort! I tried this again by copy-pasting only the .xfce folder and it worked with ONE EXCEPTION. The clickable panel launchers were all there but their custom icons had to be re-assigned. That's still a lot better than having to do the whole setup ritual (which is no small feat when you have lots of users on lots of machines.

OSes have become plugins for programs and I am in the process of increasing my OS stable from 7 to 10; this way each distro gets to be booted about 3 time a month. Half of them are KDE, the other half XFCE with the exception of a single Cinnamon. To make my life easier I'm thinking of inching up the XFCE participation mostly for the above reasons.

I don't really know how XFCE does things as my hands-on time with it is very limited but if it were up to me I'd fix every path or link in a user directory solely in terms of THAT directory without every using absolute paths (which may be necessary for other paths but not for look-and-feel). I'm NOT knocking XFCE, it is freakin' KDE that has every such file full of absolute paths pointing to another user's rags making cloning impossible. Again, I'm just ranting, but I'd like to see every look-and-feel detail if not in a single clonable/migratable file then at least in a single no less migratable/clonable directory or link to such.

k3dAR · 2025-03-14 16:27:14

not sure if understand, you talk about custom app launchers added to xfce panel? (ex. by right click on app in whiskermenu, or via PanelPreferences/Items/Add/Launcher)

this is stored in ~/.config/xfce4/panel/launcher-*/*.desktop and if i look at mine, then *.desktop files have set "Icon=iconname" without relative or absolute path, only icon name... and used is icon file based on selected system theme...

bent fender · 2025-03-14 22:03:04

k3dAR wrote:

not sure if understand, you talk about custom app launchers added to xfce panel? (ex. by right click on app in whiskermenu, or via PanelPreferences/Items/Add/Launcher)
this is stored in ~/.config/xfce4/panel/launcher-*/*.desktop and if i look at mine, then *.desktop files have set "Icon=iconname" without relative or absolute path, only icon name... and used is icon file based on selected system theme...

I mean if I copy the entire .xfce4 folder over to another user then that user's desktop should become an exact clone of the source one. But this is not what happens; I get a close copy of the source desktop, with the launchers in th right places and working, BUT their icons are blanks needing to be reset to the folder of custom icons.

As I said, XFCE is quite good at this as it is, kde not even close, I'm just tinkering with different ways to have several distros using XFCE to all use a common folder for custom icons, wallpapers etc. Eventually I want to see them use the same .xfxce folder and after that the same $USER folder even for different DE's. Why? Because OSes are just plugins for one's favorite programs and I'm raising my stable from 7 to 10 distros :-)

eriefisher · 2025-03-15 10:27:35

When a new user is created I believe the all the basic set up is taken from /etc/skel. I would think if you had one user set up the way you wanted it then copied it to /etc/skel then every new user would be the same.

bent fender · 2025-03-15 13:10:27

eriefisher wrote:

When a new user is created I believe the all the basic set up is taken from /etc/skel. I would think if you had one user set up the way you wanted it then copied it to /etc/skel then every new user would be the same.

Have you actually tried? Let's say I want userX as the source and made that /etc/skel, then every new user's home will be lousy with files referencing /userX and THAT's not a good thing. NB. the user folders on my machines are full of links and references to outside /home/userX including other disks and not just other partitions.

eriefisher · 2025-03-15 15:36:28

You obviously need to take the time to set it up properly and not fill it with user specific data.

k3dAR · 2025-03-15 15:57:56

bent fender wrote:

with the launchers in th right places and working, BUT their icons are blanks needing to be reset to the folder of custom icons.

but i still not sure if launchers you talk is:

k3dAR wrote:

[...]custom app launchers added to xfce panel? (ex. by right click on app in whiskermenu, or via PanelPreferences/Items/Add/Launcher) [...]

and also not understand what exact problem you have with icons of this launchers, if you set before clone icons as ex. /home/bent/MyIcons/example.png and clone it to user "john" then is logical icons not found/show, is this your problem? then don't use this path, and use system way for custom users icon:
put example.png to ~/.local/share/icons/ and in launcher assign only name of icon without extension: example
then clone to another user ~/.config/xfce4/ and ~/.local/share/icons/

bent fender · 2025-03-15 18:17:42

k3dAR wrote:

bent fender wrote:
with the launchers in th right places and working, BUT their icons are blanks needing to be reset to the folder of custom icons.
but i still not sure if launchers you talk is:
k3dAR wrote:
[...]custom app launchers added to xfce panel? (ex. by right click on app in whiskermenu, or via PanelPreferences/Items/Add/Launcher) [...]
and also not understand what exact problem you have with icons of this launchers, if you set before clone icons as ex. /home/bent/MyIcons/example.png and clone it to user "john" then is logical icons not found/show, is this your problem? then don't use this path, and use system way for custom users icon:
put example.png to ~/.local/share/icons/ and in launcher assign only name of icon without extension: example
then clone to another user ~/.config/xfce4/ and ~/.local/share/icons/

One of my tweaking principles for 30-40 years has been NEVER to put ANY of MY rags where I and/or the system could step on each other. So /home/userMe is just a link to some directory on another disk or at least another mounted partition. Inside that real-disk real estate are other links pointing to other real places. I've been 'sourcing' custom wallpapers/icons/scripts/etc from places like /0/data/icons for at least some of the few users that are myself.

I have not tried using skel per-se thus far, that's on the way maybe. But I did dump Ububntu-Studio because it started sabotaging links for home folders. KDE has also made such freedoms next to impossible so I could well be setting up to dump KDE as well. I'm doing a LOT of this nowadays because I'm tweaking 4 computers almost at the same time almost identically so things can become confusing but XFCE is the DE that's doing it best.

k3dAR · 2025-03-15 18:42:17

lots of text, but not see answer to my question ;-) but... as demonstrate on my notebook:
- in my primary user, on panel have lauchers, on one i change icon to /0/data/icons/example.svg
- then add new user "test4" and: cp -a /home/myuser/.config/xfce4 /home/test4/.config
- login to user test4 and see on panel lauchers with using example.svg icon from /0/data/icons/

hf2094 · 2025-03-16 09:15:42

Change user and group of the target files imediatly after copy; e.g. chown -R
If you use icons from .local/share/icons you may have to copy these too

Last edited by hf2094 (2025-03-16 13:00:15)

bent fender · 2025-03-17 00:48:04

hf2094 wrote:

Change user and group of the target files imediatly after copy; e.g. chown -R
If you use icons from .local/share/icons you may have to copy these too

As far as these copies go I use identical user id's, numbers, groups, and permissions so a plain copy in a file manager should do. But k3dar has a point in that the icons SHOULD have been there. The fact is that they were NOT so my job is to find out why. This may take some time as I'm swamped in other chores. Right now I'm tarring up an entire user home folder and will replace with its contents the user home folder of the same credentials in a new system of the same distro (OT but I just mentioned it).

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#1 2025-03-13 20:21:33

mobility, mobility, mobility

#2 2025-03-14 16:27:14

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#3 2025-03-14 22:03:04

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#4 2025-03-15 10:27:35

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#5 2025-03-15 13:10:27

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#6 2025-03-15 15:36:28

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#7 2025-03-15 15:57:56

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#8 2025-03-15 18:17:42

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#9 2025-03-15 18:42:17

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#10 2025-03-16 09:15:42

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

#11 2025-03-17 00:48:04

Re: mobility, mobility, mobility

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