Xfsettingsd managing the workspaces when another (not Xfwm) WM is running

Submitted by Francesco Galizzi

Assigned to Xfce Bug Triage

Link to original bug (#15788)

Description

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.