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I've been watching XFCE for a short while, and it looks like a superb light-to-medium-weight desktop environment. Its toolkit is GTK2, so you can use a lot of the existing GTK2 themes out there. As for the window manager, it's not Metacity or Sawfish (the two popular GNOME window managers), but it has a window manager of its own that is apparently fairly skinnable. The dock reminds me of CDE or OS/2 Warp, and I remember Warp's dock being very nice. Way back in 1995... wow, that was ages ago.

I haven't installed it myself, but I really want to give it a spin as soon as I fire up Linux again.

XFCE has just released version 4.0.2

Regards
Stephen

That's what XFce 4 is supposed to be. I've switched from KDE 3.1 to XFce 4 and am amazed at how much faster logins are now - it used to take six to eight seconds to log in, and now it only takes two!

The best thing is that the Red Hat 9 RPMs integrate with the XFree86 graphical login manager, so when you reach the login screen you can select XFce 4 in lieu of KDE and switch back if you wish!

Check it out here.

> Unfortunately, a small few people have raised a major stink over the decision to use GNOME even though the majority of the list wanted GNOME.

Hm. looking over the archives, I don't really see that the majority of the list wanted GNOME. There seemed to be a deadlock between supporters of either one, and Bruce picked the one he wanted, based mostly on license reasons. Which is fine, of course, it's his project, and he can set what projects are fine for whatever.

Bruce also said that he expected to be flamed for his choice, which is expected, desktop environments I guess seem to be more holy war-rish than mail UAs or themes, for whatever reason. Probably because of the history of the KDE and GNOME projects in the first place.. massive mud throwing was performed between the projects back in 1997-1999 if you don't remember :-)

I personally think that both KDE and GNOME are ill-adviced for such a project. Both are much more bloated than alternatives. Of course, that's my personal choice; I would have said KDE a year ago, GNOME two years ago, Enlightenment three years ago, and fvwm five years ago. I guess Bruce's choice varies as well! :)

Personally, I am not happy with either environment (although Ximian Desktop 2 gets really close). I use XFCE. It's clean, lean, and works great.

XFce!

That said, Linux or BSD with olvwm or XFce can be made to look so much like Solaris that most users won't care, and the hardware compatibility won't be a problem. I guess it depends on what is more important in a given context, really.

Not everyone hates CDE, you know -- it had a couple of good ideas behind it. If you want to see a modern re-interpretation of CDE, check out XFCE: it's actually quite usable :).

Just choose a smaller size for the icons. Start the config app, choose Icon Preferences, and size. 24 pixels is ridiculously small. OTOH, XFCE should possibly be nice on small screens. Autohide (or do without) the panel, and make the panel really thin (and autohide that too), and choose a thin and light theme like Microcurve (sorry, can't find a screenshot). It's nice when you're used to WindowMaker, since it's much of the same, only with lots of extra features.

Give fluxbox a shot, it uses almost no space at all except for a little slit. And the app menu appears by right clicking on the desktop.. Although iBooks only have one mouse button don't they.. WELL Then, NEVERMIND..

Perhaps XFce would suit you better. The panel can auto-hide and everything.

Klowner

Such is computing for the impatient ...

Wow! XFce has the most adorable logo I've ever seen!

Now I've got to try it. Screw this waiting around for E17.

There are two possibilities:
- either KDE and Gnome are both slow
- or X itself is not well adaptated to modern needs, so we could say that X is slow.

Check out XFce and you'll see that both KDE and Gnome are the bottleneck. It is definately possible to have a modern, sharp looking desktop that's easy on the memory and XFce provides this for me. It's very snappy on my p233 96 MB RAM laptop and uses GTK2 (the same toolkit Gnome uses). I've heard people with far slower boxes than mine say that XFce is snappy on their machines too.

Wow. A international font does look like a "mangled" English font. And also resemble the text in that language.

Imagine that.

This also just in: GNOME and KDE support internation fonts as well. Damn these broken fonts, damn them all!

But English looks just as good as any GTK+2 based desktop does these days.

..the Fonts look a little mangled, no?

SCNR

Actually I prefer IceWM or xfce not because of some old hardware(although sometimes this can be an issue, I'm on a laptop with 800Mhz Coppermine), but rather becasue I really don't have anything against installing all the software I need by myself, thus I'm looking for a Windows Manager not an entire desktop solution.

On the "One desktop to rule them all" rant, I'm certainly not the only one to think that it's not so bad at all to have diversity "even" on the Desktop choice. Yes, some users gets confused, yes, there're compatibility problems(heck, I hate when one really *needs* to run a gtk program on KDE PC or QT one on Gnome station), but at the end I tend to agree with you that people should "deal with it" and adopt one or another. The futur will show if we'll have a "winner"...

Good luck getting a big enough chunk of the Linux users out there to all agree on the same GUI. In the open source world if you don't like something, rewrite it. I think you won't get anyone to conform to a standardized GUI, it's way too subjective. Because it's hard to prove one is better than the other, people have a lot of personal bias when it comes to how they should operate their computer.

If windows were open source, I'd move things all around because I don't like where a number of things are. Other (I've asked) do not agree with me they they should go where I think they should go. Example: I'd eliminate wizards. I'd combine the control panel into a heirarchy broken down by software components and hardware devices. (it doesn't quite do that, it's close. of course WinXP went and change it all for no reason and didn't bother improving the organization).

If you want everyone to standardized. Then it's simple. Everyone install XFce. It's light-weight, quite powerful, supports "normal" features of a desktop environment like drag and drop. Comes with lots of useful tools (like graphical diff) without coming with a bunch of games and other silliness. And XFCe has a definite Unix feel to it. Almost as if it were CDE with all the crufty bits thrown out. GNOME and KDE try to be too much like Windows and old MacOS. Although I'll admit that XFce does have a somewhat MacOS X feel to it.

There's this thing called freedesktop that defines common standarts on Drag and Drop etc. Gnome & Kde are starting to follow it. and even xfce 4 is compatible,so it's even easier to cross use things

There is always XFCE-4, which is currently in RC2, and can be themed to look like Bluecurve. It's still not perfect, but it's getting there in functionaility.

There is always XFCE-4, which is currently in RC2, and can be themed to look like Bluecurve. It's still not perfect, but it's getting there in functionaility.

what on earth are you talking about??? how in any way shape or form is shlashdot the biggest advocate of linux? how is linux window's main competition? for one thing, linux still has a smaller desktop usage percentage than apple. secondly, in the server market -- doesn't BSD have the upperhand? and third of all, slashdot has microsoft advertisements in their pages. this is not he future of my desktop. this is nopt he future of ANY desktop. thsi is the furture of crappy proprietary software that it mostly used for controlling the user's experience. if i want a different/better desktop i already got mine

Check out Xfce4. It doesn't seem to be as customizable as *box/fvwm/afterstep/windowmaker, but looks much more "slick", and is fairly lean, compared to KDE and Gnome anyway. I use either fluxbox or fvwm2 myself, but they are definitely in your "industrial" category.

Very minimalist hits it. If you want a fast GTK2-based desktop, use XFCE 4.

As the other reply mentioned, this is off-topic.

But on the other hand, I run Linux on a p166mmx laptop /w 96mb ram.

I run Debian on it, with the Ion window manager and XFree86 3.3.6 (cos I don't like the glidepoint, and I use mostly console apps on it), but you could use IceWM, Blackbox or XFCE, all of which are in Debian Stable (Woody).

For a web browser I use Dillo mostly but Mozilla for some stuff (SSL etc). I don't use email on that machine though.

For productivity I have vim :P but AbiWord and Gnumeric would work okay I would imagine.

Basically, keep it sensible, and don't go for any memory intensive stuff (KDE / GNOME). Recompiling the kernel would help.

It's a nice laptop actually, apart from the HDD has a maximum transfer rate of 4mb/s, which is it's downpoint. Still, it's adequate for it's needs.

Martin

So... now we have GTK2 drop-shadows... Who the hell will ever figure out how to turn them on?

gtk-menu-drop-shadow : When set to 0, menu shadow will be turned off. Any non-zero value enables menu shadow (default value: 1)

gtk-menu-shadow-delay : The delay before the shadow appears. The shadow is delayed to give some time to the underlying application to refresh its window. You can increase or decrease this value to adjust the shadow to your system (default: 100)

I keep trying out all these newer WMs, and they always seem to be missing some essential feature that I've come to depend on over the years, and/or they're massive, bloated monstrosities that don't do noticably more than my old workhorse.

And Xfce, too.

But on the aspects of cooperation between Software Libre projects, the reasons are fairly dead-on. It's not easy to cooperate with someone when you aren't forced to. Hell, I can't even cooperate with myself somedays.

I've used XFce on everything from a 486 to a P-4. It'll be snappy no mattery where you run it. It's not too hard to get used to, and almost never crashes.

If you want even less resource consumption, go for VTWM. I've also used it on everything from a 486 to a P-4, and it's even faster than XFce, and not too much more difficult to figure out. We use it at the Earlham College CS department on our Red Hat Linux P-4 clients, and it really flies.

XFCE is another nice very lightweight X environment.

If you're using GNOME or KDE then, yes, I have to agree with you. But my dual 450MHz Xeon Linux machine with 256MB of RAM still blows the socks off those 2.5GHz monsters running XP. I use XFce as a window manager, and couldn't be happier. I run Apache (mod_perl, mod_php, and mod_ssl), ProFTPd, MySQL, NFS, NIS, OpenLDAP, Samba, Sendmail, and UW-IMAP, and there's still enough juice for it to function well as a workstation.

Try http://www.xfce.org/, then, oh vast and ominoidal dude...

Yes. Read Advanced XFwm configuration.

I wish that there was some way to get Sun and all the other CDE using companies to look at XFce. It's capable of looking and feeling like CDE. However it's got more functionality and more cababilities than GNOME or KDE. It's also as fast (if not faster) than IceWM and other light WM's. The iceing on the cake is that, from within XFce, you can run all the GNOME and KDE apps with absolutely no compatability problems at all.

Now, I am not saying that GNOME (or even KDE) are not outstanding products. They are two great projects doing fantastic work. It's just that if you were going to move from CDE wouldn't it be better to go to something that would be easy for people to use as a steping stone to GNOME? It's only common sense.

There is an old saying... "Vote with your feet."

I don't run either GNOME nor KDE. I run XFce. That is the wonderful thing about Software Libre. Choices are a Good Thing<tm>.

Interesting. I wouldn't have thought it would work. Around how long did it take? I should give it a shot just for the interest factor. Have you thought about using XFce as a lightweight desktop? Anyway, thanks for the info, always good to know what can be actually done.

You can use excellent xsmbrowser. Also XFCE has samba browsing application - looks very good.

KDE and GNOME are not the only window managers available!

I would like to point XFce , a "lightweight desktop environment", I ended up findit it a ouuple of years ago looking for a faster desktop, MAYBE that used FLTK (fast light toolkit), that seemed SO fast.
Anyhow, XFce uses GTK but IS fast and light, really...

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but if you go the *nix route there's a decent window manager that is lightweight, and nicely configured right "out of the box". I haven't used it in some time -- but the project website suggests that development is still active...but check out the XFCE window manager.

Check it out here.

Its lightweight, and in the past, its run quite well on all of my old naff hardware. It borrows alot from Sun's CDE.

Hope this helps
--Turkey

If you want to feel the same thing again try XFce. The feeling you felt when going from GNOME to KDE will be felt 10 fold when you see that XFce can do everything GNOME and KDE can, and far more, yet run as fast and take as little resources as IceWM or Blackbox.

I really wish I could get someone from Sun and IBM and all other vendors who use CDE to look at XFce. XFce is better, stronger and faster than GNOME (and KDE, for that matter) and can easily look and feel just like CDE for those who want that. It can also look and feel like nothing else out there. The Muntihead capabilities are better than anything on the market (to include WinXX and OS X). The speed of this thing can only be matched by things like twm or IceWM get it is a full, complete desktop environment. It just seems like a complete waste of time and effort to try and build something that will, at best, only be a shadow of something that is already here.

Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.

AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.

Steps in roll-your-own:

Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.

If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.

Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.

The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.

Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.

Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.

Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.

File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.

Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.

Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!

Vim is definitely my favorite editor. I find it easier and faster to use than any others. However, compaired to XFce, KDE is quite a bit slow and old-fassioned. Maybe KDE 3 will come close to having the feature set and capabilities that XFce does. I can't wait to try it.

I don't understand, why to run heavy gnome|kde stuff on slow machine? there are things like xfce (here) (The Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment) and FVWM didn't hurt anyone yet too. When I was running 486, I had FVWM. Now running machine with almost 1Gig of ram and still on FVWM... FVWM isn't Feeble as first letter in acronym says.

I've got an old Thinkpad 760XL (P166MMX 64MB! 2GB 20x CD). It's heavy like a bowling ball.

I ditched GNOME for xfce and never looked back

I also have a second 2GB with Win95 on it, somewhere ;). Win seemed faster on it, X grinds the hell out of audio output while doing simple stuff liek scrolling windows. I get better apm support in Linux (I can hibernate and sleep), better network performance, and 60+ day uptimes!

The battery is fried on it, so it's really just being used as a spare machine and always-on, low power development server (apache/mysql/php/etc) so I can do work from my gaming machine and see how pages look in IE. It'll probably run my mail server and local proxy eventually, and I don't have to pay for a 300W power supply on the monthly bill.

I switched a few weeks ago from GNOME to FXCE (I know, it's still base on GTK, but at least it isn't GNOME). And I think KDE is also barking up the wrong tree. It has become too bloated for my taste.

But I agree, GNOME is clearly going to the dark side of the force. If it's .NET functionality they want, there can always help with the JBOSS project.

It would make an excellent compromise between CDE and GNOME. XFce is fully GNOME compliant. It will work seemlessly with GNOME & GNOME apps while still giving users the look 'n' feel of CDE. And XFce has many features than GNOME (KDE, CDE, et. al.) do not have. In addition, the speed and resource usage are so much better than anything except striped down or bare bones WM/Environments like IceWM or twm. I think it would be worth taking a very hard look at.

For the record; I am not writing this to start a holy war on window managers or desktop environments. I would just like to get some feedback from vendors who currentlly use CDE as their primary environment whether they have looked at XFce or even know about it.

I'd say XFce belongs to the light-weight league. The nice thing about XFce is that it's almost like a desktop system. It has much more than just a simple window manager.

For a file manager, XFtree, which comes as part of XFce, is increadable. You will not believe what it can do. And if you need any kind of connection to a WinXX network, XFsamba is increadable. There is no better Samba tool. Period. rox is good too, though.

Dillo was mentioned and it is worth having a look at. It's very usable if you don't need frame support.

Someone mentioned running text based tools as an option. I would have to say that the #1 file manager I use is mc in an xterm. And links in an xterm does great for web stuff.

So, use one of the others. ROX (which I develop for) is quite different to Windows, and XFCE is different again.

I can not say enough good things about XFCE, a very polished environment (for lack of a better word) by Oliver Fourdan. Go here for more info:

XFCE Homepage

Here's the blurb from the homepage:

XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various UNIX systems.

The XFce project was first started because I needed a simple, light and efficient environment for my Linux System.

There are now a lot of good environments and interfaces for UNIX based systems, but most are too heavy, or too expensive, or even both !

I wanted something easy to use and configure, stable, fast, and, at last but not least, visually appealing...

I believe that the desktop environment should be made to increase user productivity. Therefore, the goal is keep most system resources for the applications, and not to consume all memory and CPU usage with the desktop environment.

From version to version, XFce became more and more user friendly and easily configurable. As XFce is made for the user, it has to be very simple to configure. That's why everything is driven by the mouse, using buttons, drag and drop, etc., and the configuration files are hidden from the user, although it is plain text.

XFce 3 is based on GTK+, a free and powerful tool kit widely adopted by many applications.
XFce 3.x features :

* XFce, the main panel
* XFwm, the window manager
* XFTree, the file manager
* XFClock, a clock and calendar
* XFbd, the backdrop manager
* XFMouse, the mouse configuration
* XFSound, the sound manager
* XFGnome, the GNOME compliance module
* XFPager, the pager
* XFRun, a small utility to run programs by pressing Alt+F12
* XFGlob, a powerfull file search tool
* XFDiff, a great graphical diff frontend
* XFSamba, the new SMB browser
* XFbdmgr, a small utility to manage list of backdrops for Xfbd
* Plus as set of shell scripts for use as Drag and Drop actions for the XFce panel (xfterm, xftrash, xfprint, xfhelp, xfmountdev, CDE2Xfcepal, etc.)