I'm running Xfce with i3 instead of Xfwm. To be more precise 1. LightDM launches the xfce session 2. In "Settings Manager > Session and Startup > Session" there are only two programs with "Restart Style = Immediately", which are xfce4-panel and Xfsettingsd 3. In "Settings Manager > Session and Startup > Application Autostart" there are i3 and other stuff which should not be relevant. The issue I have is that Xfsettingsd overrides the properties _NET_DESKTOP_NAMES and _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS of the root X window which instead should be left managed by i3, as there is no Xfwm instance running. I also tried configuring LightDM to start the i3 session and then launching xfsettingsd manually but the behaviour is the same as before.
You can modify the workspace count and names via xfconf - even without having xfwm4. Try e.g. this to retrieve the current amount of workspaces xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/workspace_count You can also edit this value through xfce4-settings-editor. The names of the workspaces are stored in an array, for which you'll have to use the commandline tool xfconf-query to modify. For more examples continue reading here: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfconf/xfconf-query
I knew this, and it's ok. The problem though is the difference in how i3 and Xfce manages workspaces. Through xfconf-query you can set the array of names and the workspaces count, so if you set respectively ["A", "B", "C", "D"] and 2 you have workspaces "A" and "B". In i3 you always start with one workspace, then workspaces are "created" as you move windows to them; so, for example, if you set Thunderbird to be open always on the workspace "Mail", by launching Thunderbird the workspace "Mail" is created and the window is placed there, then when you close the window and you switch to another workspace, the workspace is "destroyed". This allows different features (and workflows) wrt how Xfce manages workspaces, but (in this case) if Xfsettingsd is running the workspaces names are "A" and "B" instead of "A" and "Mail". I don't know if this should be classified as a misfeature of Xfsettingsd or i3; i3 seems to be setting the number of workspaces correctly (and the names too; I checked with Xfsettingsd not running), but apparently Xfsettingsd is overwriting the names.
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