Xfce xfce4.20 Appearance settings

Hi, I've a fresh install of FreeBSD 14.2 with xfce4.20. I'm experiencing a slightly annoying quirk when I login via lightdm display manager. After logging in, the Desktop Appearance settings are off, mostly noticeable with a larger font. I have to open the Appearance settings and select away from and then back to my chosen Appearance style and then everything is okay. This occurs for me with the default Appearance settings after installing xfce4 and with another one I have chosen. Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this behavior and if there is a fix for it.

My environment:

FreeBSD 14.2 VM running on a Proxmox host with GPU pass through (GEForce GT 730 and Nvidia driver 470.161.03, XFCE4.20 x11).

thanks
John
 
The only time I have had problems with desktop icons in Xfce is when I had Xfce plus other WM and DE installed on the same install (it was a mess around test machine, I know it is not smart to do that), the desktop icons would not display only the text.

Sorry just trying to understand, desktop settings and appearance settings are two different things. By changing the appearance style to fix it, do you mean you change settings in just appearance settings i.e style tab, fonts tab? or also the desktop settings? In the desktop settings icons tab do you have "use custom font size" checked off?
 
After logging in, the Desktop Appearance settings are off, mostly noticeable with a larger font.
TL;DR Try changing DPI to 100 in Settings Editor.

I have the same problem now on old hardware after installing a 4K screen. I have to change the scaling back to 1 and then to 2 again every time I log in. I use startxfce4 to start the desktop environment, and the problem occurs both with and without EFI boot.

After a couple of days of experimenting (I'm new to FreeBSD and still reading all the books and searching the forums) I decided to read the Xfce 4.20 documentation (Settings Manager -> About Xfce > About). I experimented with some of the settings in Settings Editor and found that changing DPI in the Xft section affects the font size. I tried 1024 first, which was much too big, and then I tried 100 which looks just right. This setting seems to persist across reboots.

On new hardware, where I don't have this problem, the DPI is set to -1 but this isn't working for the old hardware.
 
The only time I have had problems with desktop icons in Xfce is when I had Xfce plus other WM and DE installed on the same install (it was a mess around test machine, I know it is not smart to do that), the desktop icons would not display only the text.

Sorry just trying to understand, desktop settings and appearance settings are two different things. By changing the appearance style to fix it, do you mean you change settings in just appearance settings i.e style tab, fonts tab? or also the desktop settings? In the desktop settings icons tab do you have "use custom font size" checked off?
Yes, select Applications -> Settings -> Appearance, Choose a new Style and then go back to your original Style. That fixes it.
 
TL;DR Try changing DPI to 100 in Settings Editor.

I have the same problem now on old hardware after installing a 4K screen. I have to change the scaling back to 1 and then to 2 again every time I log in. I use startxfce4 to start the desktop environment, and the problem occurs both with and without EFI boot.

After a couple of days of experimenting (I'm new to FreeBSD and still reading all the books and searching the forums) I decided to read the Xfce 4.20 documentation (Settings Manager -> About Xfce > About). I experimented with some of the settings in Settings Editor and found that changing DPI in the Xft section affects the font size. I tried 1024 first, which was much too big, and then I tried 100 which looks just right. This setting seems to persist across reboots.

On new hardware, where I don't have this problem, the DPI is set to -1 but this isn't working for the old hardware.
Hey, thanks! I selected Applications -> Settings -> Appearance and then in the Fonts Tab, I checked the Custom DPI setting and adjusted it slightly. Now the problem is gone. I can logout and log back in and I don't get the wonky font.
 
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