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Profile Manager

The Xfce4-profile-manager can be used to configure, apply, import and export 'settings-profiles'. These profiles contain settings of different applications across the spectrum of the xfce desktop.

Rationale

Xfce can be quite complicated to configure. There are nearly endless possibilities, but this can mean a problem to new users. Especially if you want to configure xfce for a specific task, it can be difficult to configure xfce for a specific task.

The profile-manager allows users to share their settings, export profiles and re-use them on different systems. Also, distributions can provide profiles specifically tailored for specific use-cases. Like a 'thin' profile that disables all the fancy resource-intensive settings, and a 'fat' profile that has all the pretty gui-stuff people love these days.

Mockups

Settings dictionary

Settings are not always easy to understand. For example: '{xfwm4}/general/use_compositing' is not something a user would come up with himself if he wants to enable or disable the compositing feature of xfce. To solve this problem, the profile-manager needs some sort of settings-dictionary. A dictionary that maps '{xfwm4}/general/use_compositing' to and from a user-friendly name 'Enable window compositing'.

Backup / Restore

One of the main problems that users experience with xfce is that somehow they changed settings without realizing it. With the nr 1 example, the session. It happens quite often that people have saved their session without a running xfce4-panel. Explaining to a user how to return xfce to the desired state proves difficult, it would be nice if users can save a backup of their settings, and restore if they choose to.