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Xfce: Alternative to GNOME/KDE
tintin writes "While GNOME and KDE get most of the attention from the user and distributions, other alternatives should not be left out. The interview with Olivier Fourdan of Xfce points out one lightweight alternative, XFce.
To get more information on Xfce, go to xfce home page"
Well... while I agree that KDE or GNOME will be used by the majority, myself included, the minority may prefer something different. Also, more choice is good and that is not a bad thing. XFce is not about competing with GNOME or KDE... There is no competition here... people who like it will use it.
I believe people who have come from a SunOS, Solaris, and HP-UX background to use XFce because it provides them with an interface which is very very similar to CDE. On the other hand, KDE and GNOME will help users with a windows background to make the transition more easily to linux.
We have to keep in mind that linux is about choice. Sure GNOME vs. KDE battle will always be there but so will enlightenment, blackbox, fvwm, afterstep, openlook, sawfish, etc... We must also remember that raw linux is the command line, yet another choice for how users interact with their boxes.
Actually, given the nature of open source, each time somebody reinvents the wheel, it just gives another option for our car.
Or, to put it in precise, real-world terms: each time somebody writes a new window manager, we have another option for our desktop.
I've been using KDE 2.0 since the early alphas. The very early versions (out of CVS) were buggy, and a buggy WM can knock you out. (POI - I was using some KDE 1.1 apps, some KDE 2.0 apps - they coexist just fine).
So, what did I do? I switched the Window Manager to BlackBox, a very nice lightweight WM that works wonderfully. I'll stay in it until KDE 2.0 is officially released, and possibly afterwards: I happen to like it.
Of course, most people would agree that the KDE Window Manager is much more advanced... it allows fancy theming (BlackBox just allows some nice color gradiants), and a nice launch bar and other such "modern" GUI features.
But tastes vary, and I happen to have gotten used to BlackBox, and may very well keep using it one KDE 2.0 final comes out.
To use your analogy: I bought a KDE car... but tricked it out with nice custom alloy wheels.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Who cares?
Really. I like linux because it works right. If making it work like that other dog of an OS is needed to make it "become the dominant desktop OS" then screw that, I sure as hell don't want it! If I wanted that crap I'd be using that crap already!
And the people that work on those projects are perfectly entitled to spend their time and their talent where they see fit, however stupid I might think their choices are. But bringing Linux to the masses IS stupid. Let the masses come to Linux, when and if they learn to appreciate it. Dumbing it down and imitating the same bloated ugly monster that drove most linux users to try it in the first place is just plain insane. And useless.
I am not a big fan of Xfce - I tried it, I didn't particularly like it, I went back to WindowMaker. But a lot of people do like it, and that's the whole point - it serves the needs of some users a lot better than any of these damn stupid world dominations schemes will ever serve anyone. Except Bill Gates, of course. He's very well served by this whole mindset that computers have to cater to the lowest common denominator, and he has the bank account to prove it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Trust me, I've been using Linux for 5+ years now and at different times I've played with just about every window manager out there from fvwm, olwm, afterstep, windowmaker, icewm, black box, enlightenment-gnome, sawmill/sawfish, twm, mwm, and of course KDE.
Of all of them KDE was the most useful to me, after I reconfigured it of course. But like I said, KDE is HUGE! Icewm comes close, but has the annoying "feature" of only having windows in the task bar for the virtual desktop you've currently got open, and I've found no way to turn this feature off.
I'm not sure which versions of enlightenment and sawfish you're using, but the one's I've encountered DON'T resize windows correctly in call cases. If a window is partially "under" the task bar, it will be resized to overlap the task bar. Netscape is where I bites me every time. So I have to double click on the window, which causes it to "scroll up" macintoy style, then I have to unmaximize and remaximize it, then unsroll it to get it to fill the proper portion of the screen. Both E and sawfish do this which leads me to assume its a gnome issue instead of a problem with the window managers themselves. I'm using helix-gnome, so that may be part of it.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I'm not saying it can't be pretty or flashy. I'm also never said a word about drag and drop. Bells and whistles may attract some people who see it as a toy, but serious users, which is anyone using it at work, wants something that works well instead of simply looking pretty. A consistent look and feel is of course important, but these are application issues, not Window manager issues.
I'm hoping that as time goes by and the uber-desktop developers get over the phase of placing flash before function, that the issues I have with most of the current desktop environments (and all of the upcoming ones) will be resolved through user feedback.
Linux has the potential to become the most powerful desktop system ever. Because the users ultimately define what it is, we can sculpt and hone it till it to perfection.
To me part of that perfection will mean that it is extremely configurable with each user able to alter the interface to his or her personal tastes. So someone coming from a windows background will be able to get a desktop that works just like windows if he wants, and someone coming from a Mac background will get a Mac desktop if she wants. Or any combination of features from both of them, or neither of them.
Traditionally GUI's have tried to be something the user had to learn and get used to, malleable in some areas and unyielding in others. This simply isn't how it has to be and I'm waiting for the day when it isn't.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I've got 2! a VR319 I do BnW stuff on (amazing resolution compared to a color monitor doing BnW) and a VRT19, 20" trinitron tube (that's the size of the image not the size of the monitor)
Got both of them of a skip, the trick is to be able to drive them because they only do fixed sync and worse, they sync-on-green (but I've seen on the net that you can solder in some resistors and get it driven by external sync, too!!!)
So how do you do fixed sync/ sync-on-green monitor to work with linux?
Get yourself a millennium 1/2 maybe the new G200/G400 do it too and stick a sync_on_green option in your XF86Config:
You will also need the modlines: (I've seen some 1024x768 modelines for the VRT19 but I don't care, as long as 1280x1024 works) and that's it, you're all set!Don't forget your friendly
in your screen/svga section and you'll enjoy your black'n'white monitor even better!That's for X, I haven't checked if SVGATextMode works with these monitors, 'coz driving characters at 1280x1024 maybe a little too fast for a millennium 2 but! you never know :-)
Now, to get two of these suckers on your desk, use x2x or better, xfree86 4 (which I still have to try when I have time to spare)
If you are serious about imaging, buy yourself some of these OLD monitors, you won't regret it, they are well worth the 20$ you'll pay for them at a computer fair (because nobody knows how to drive them with PCs...)
Only drawback appart from being fixed frequency... they run hot... something to consider if you have them at home.
Back to the subject, olvwm is your WM if you run 256 colors. Slick and functional.
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
"Do not look at desktop with remaining eye"
___________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X.
There are plenty of small, light window managers for X11. You just havn't found them. Since they're all over the place, I imagine you havn't found any because you haven't looked. Examples: Sawfish, BlackBox", and LarsWM. Just to name a few.
maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to
That's a configuration error. The three window managers I use on a regular basis(Enlightenment, Sawfish, and IceWM) all support this feature.
No offense, but if I had any moderation points, your post would quickly be rather to (-1:Troll). Pretty much everything you railed against is configurable at the user's end. You're not bitching about KDE and GNOME, you're bitching about what Corel Linux uses for its default desktop(or Debian, or Red Hat, whatever). Sure, it might take you a bit of work to get things "just right", but it can be done. Pretty easily, too. So, most of your post is not only trolling, but also *WRONG*, as in incorrect. Sorry to have to break the news to you.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
More choice is always a good thing...
...because three holy wars are better than one!
I disagree.
As someone already pointed out, it is the developer who chooses. So you end up with some apps for GNOME and some apps for KDE. This helps to spread our resources out thinner so that we are less effective at combatting big evil expensive systems.
Of course, someone counters that you can run GNOME apps under KDE and vice versa.
This just shows how out of touch the programmers are with what users want. (The abysmal user interface of most non-GNOME and non-KDE apps, and even of some GNOME and KDE apps, already make this abundantly clear, but that's a different topic.)
It is not just a matter of which widget set a program is written with. I want the applications to be deeply integrated togerher. I want to cut and paste between apps. I want to grab some cells from my spreadsheet and embed them into my word processor, or charting application, and still keep those cells as "live" references back to the spreadsheet. I want component embedding. I want drag and drop between applications, where the receiving application is aware of the kind of data being dragged to it and can act accordingly. I want powerful scripting of all of the applications, but in an integrated way. Other fluff, like themeability where all the apps obey the theme -- not just the window decorations around the apps, but things that affect how the content of the app is presented, that is nice too.
Despite all the bitching and moaning that only stupid end users want such things, make no mistake that this kind of an environment makes programmers more productive too.
Me thinks it is a case of sour grapes. (Windows has it, we don't, so we make noises like we don't like it or want it. But then when it materializes, everyone will say "Of course, I was always in favor of Unix having such a rich and productive application environment.")
Everytime I read about yet another new "lightweight" desktop environment, I read it as meaning "feature deprived". Other people seem to read "feature rich" as "bloat" or "heavyweight".
I suppose that is why choice is good. At least I can choose either GNOME or KDE, while others can choose twm.
I can understand where some people who cry "bloatware" come from. When I need to use under-powered hardware, I am glad to have icewm, and happy to use it. But most of the time I don't need to run on under-powered hardware.
Mostly I use my "productivity" machine. The computer is supposed to make me productive, not the other way around, like in the 70's. How many megahertz and megabytes it requires be damned! Moore's Law and all that.
There are plenty of "lightweight" desktops or widow managers out there. Why do we need yet another one? This question seems to go perpetually unanswered.
I can imagine why some of them get written. It is fun to program. And such a project is quite a learning experience. I and don't begrudge anyone from building their own flavor of window manager just for the fun/learning of it. Maybe that's all that's happening here. I suppose yet another "lightweight" window manager isn't going to deplete resources from either KDE or GNOME. Serious developers porting from Windows will probably look mostly at GNOME or KDE. So I suppose I should quit ranting now.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
For me, the point is that it is small.
While I like GNOME a lot, and KDE 2 looks great, if I had a machine with less than 48M I wouldn't try to run either. Windowmaker, Afterstep, and XFce are all good options in such a case.
As someone who is running the XFree86 4.0 G400 beta drivers (3200x1200 24bit, dualhead), I'd be interested in benchmarking the Xi versus the Matrox XFree86 driver.
Anybody know of any reliable X benchmarks that seperate system performance from raw X performance?
Oh, and yes, this is topic drift, but it seemed vaguely on-topic enough to post with the following paragraph:
For that matter, has anyone actually real-world benchmarked the various WMs on various levels of systems? Memory footprint aside, are the lightweight WMs actually that much faster? Links to sites, anyone?
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
it's refreshing to find a desktop that conserves memory and lets my applications run faster. Netscape is distinctly faster than it was with Gnome. XFCE is stylish without being distracting, and it does what I need without a lot of tweaking.
I'll stick to my desktop, but for those who need it's strengths XFce provides a needed alternative for them.
Anyway, at my new job I needed to choose a window manager. I like Enlightenment generally and run it on one of my boxes at home, simply because of its configurability. Unfortunately, this machine (an HP Kayak with 128MB) seems to have problems running efficiently, and since it uses Rambus we couldn't just run out and buy more RAM for cheap, and my machine would take close to 10 seconds to switch virtual screens. (Have I mentioned that I hate Intel?)
I decided to give Xfce another try and was incredibly pleased with the results. It had the first GUI configuration tool that didn't feel insulting to me (but that's probably just my fragile geek ego talking =), and it was smoother even than the excellent WindowMaker to set up through the dialogs.
I've got a few tweaks I'd like to make (remapping certain events, turning off session management), but this configuration has been running for months now without a hitch. And it's lightweight--almost no thrashing.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Jeez I hate that name!!! Why dont they just go ahead and call it XFeces
And I don't see how more brands of cigarettes would be bad. If I smoked (and I didn't feel like growing my own), I think I'd appreciate not having to be stuck with one brand.
Bruce
Bruce
I am the real Bruce Perens.
damn... i have the g400... just looking for a second monitor now.. 17 + 21 may be overkill... any suggestion on a good mix ? ?
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
i used XFce maybe 2 or 3 years ago on an old 486 (which is being used as a footrest atm). it was the only wm that i could get to run at any speed with like 6 megs of ram in the system.
so all you pansies running gnome on your 1ghz athlons with 128 megs of ram, i bet this 486 runs X just as fast as your system.
all hail code-bloat!
With love,
,
faeryman
When I first started with Linux a year ago, I'll admit that I was drawn to KDE. It was windows-ish, and made the transition a lot easier.
However, as I got used to the command line, and usually ended up running all my apps from there, I began to wonder more and more why I was wasting precious resources with KDE when all I really wanted was a few simple menus for more obscure commands and the ability to open a shitload of xterms.
(Actually, pathetically enough, what really promped my search for a new WM was that I wanted to make more resources available to seti@home, but I'll never admit that pub... oh.)
I tried a few different WMs (blackbox, afterstep, icewm, fvwm2, and even *shudder* twm), but the only one that felt like "home" was XFce. I had used CDE very briefly on Solaris before, and found that I was quite fond of it.
XFce is impossibly easy to install on an *NIX clone. `./configure ; make ; make install` should get it working for those with the proper libs installed. RPMs are available everywhere. It's part of the OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and NetBSD, I'd imagine, but I can't say) ports trees.
gnome runs pitifully slow and all the fancy panels and such that make gnome worthwhile take up too much real estate on my P-166 laptop. XFce runs like a charm.
Yeah, twm is not bad, as long as you change those default colors, blech!
:)
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Yes it is extremely fast, even on my P166 / 32MB.
Kind of makes fools of people who insist that interpreted languages like lisp are always way too slow...
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
If you're on a budget how about: Monitor + TV?! :)
I just got it working. TV resolution is only good at up to 640x480 for NTSC (can't get PAL to work for now). But it's neat to tune into your X server. The extra space on the TV is used for gkrellm and the other monitoring tools. That way I can keep an eye on my networks while channel surfing. You need the mga_drv released by Matrox which includes the HALlib.
BTW, Enlightenment 0.16.4 crashes on my Xinerama setup while WindowMaker works flawlessy.
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
> People who view these screen shots [...] enjoy having sex with children.
:-)
Since you know what's on those screenshots, you must have viewed them as well, ergo you also enjoy having sex with children. Correct me if I'm wrong
I was actually thinking something along those lines when I saw the screenshots, and it strikes me that a lot of geeks seem to be into the repressed sexual phantasies thing, be it the pedophile or just plain nudie pics angle. Also check out the latest screenshots of KDE 2, where the guy might think that he covered up his desktop wallpaper strategically. But the desktop thumbnail gave him away. Dirty young man!!!
> a windows application developer going to do when faced with the task of
> porting his windows app to unix.
He ought to use Kylix, which hopefully will take care of the KDE/Gnome differences fairly transparently. Not to speak of the Windows/Linux differences.
What's the difference between the window manager and the environment? Where's the bounary drawn between theie responsibilities. Some things which are described as part of the "environment" are to me nothing more than applications. For example they claim to include file managers as part of the environment. Where I come from, a file manager is nothing more than a application. Why does it have to be so confusing?
Phil
(who runs TWM at home still, cos it does what he wants in the way that he wants)
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I hardly ever boot up Windows at home anymore, what with KDE Netscape Quake DescentDemo Terminus Sound RealAudio StarOffice GnuCash CorelDraw etc etc etc etc, more utilities than I know what to do with, plus very distinguished and stylish wheels - the only time I bring up the closed partition is to use Forte' Agent and that's only because I haven't taken time to sort thru all the available oss alternatives. Gaaaa, open source is working GREAT from my point of view!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is your problem, you think someone wants to dominate the market, get more users, stablish itself as the standard and all the other usual crap. Has someone ever told you that programming is fun? That you scratch an itch you are feeling? That no everything has has to be determined in terms of corporate acceptance.
Had I moderator points, would have marked the original post as "troll".
This is what I love about Unix,Linux,BSD is that you have the of how you want things to look and if you do not like how it looks you can change it easier that if you want to change windows or mac. Choices is what is going to keep unix around for a long time.
I don't mean to disparage the hard work that the authors have put into this project, but do they really think that this can compete with Windows and Unix? Both Windows and Unix have been around for years and have established user and software bases, as well as plenty of corporate sponsorship. They're the de facto standards for computing, and Linux is going to face a uphill battle winning users over.
It seems that Linus' time would have been better spent helping to improve the existing application base instead of coding a new platform from the ground up. But that's just one of the flaws with the open source, model I guess -- we have dozens of teams reinventing the wheel and none building the car.
It sounds about the same, but do you still agree with it?
I have tried various window managers/desktops, ncluding KDE and Gnome, but I'm still using plain old twm. Pop open a couple of xterms, xbiff, netscape, and I'm happy. Everything in plain colors, no fancy shading, themes, or shiny icons. I have been using twm since tvtwm was still considered revolutionary.
:-) With my hands on the keyboard, and aliases for often used commands, starting up new applications is faster than picking up the mouse, and navigating through menus, or finding the right icon.
Twm is ultra fast, uses very little memory, and starts up in a blink of an eye. I also shuts down really fast using ctrl-alt-backspace
Maybe I'm just too old... haha... but I am very thankful that nobody's forcing me to upgrade to the latest desktop. Having the choice to use something old-fashioned and outdated is what makes Linux and OSS great.
If people want to extend the number of choices, more power to them. If they don't want to help working on KDE, but start their own project, I respect them. I'm glad Linus started his own little project, instead of contributing to minix.
Therefore, XFCe or IceWM might be good for default initial desktop (especially for root, which should not spend much time in X anyway)... especially since the most important use of X is still having multiple xterms & emacs simultanously visible, and being able to view "modern" web pages with graphics (and emacs in color).
IceWM also seems to be the only WM that correctly sets the initial size & pos for applications. Perhaps we will see this feature in Gnome 3.0...
Oh yeah, I forgot that KDE is also a viable option nowadays after the evil, oppressive reign of QPL.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
The name is actually XFce, not Xfce ;)
While I can't see why anyone would want to run a CDE clone, I guess the extra choice is good.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
www.afterstep.org
It's really well done, and you can run kfm on top of it to get the functionality of kwm's icons. My thoughts on the matter anyway.
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
What about an object oriented desktop? I know OS/2 & NeXT tried to do this to some extent. Why don't we learn from them instead of trying to copy Windows all the time! Surely someone out there has a unique thought in their heads!
[Sorry for the duplicate posting -- damn enter key]
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
What I intensely dislike about both Gnome and KDE is the fact that they are so bloated. I'm not sure why it is that there can't be a small, efficient, simple, window manager for X. One which minimizes the dexterity needed to do things like start an Xterm, maximize a window so it fills as much of the screen as possible without overlapping things you don't want it to, and minimize a window but still keep it on the desktop in an easy to access location.
KDE 1.x will do these things well if you reconfigure it properly, but its friggin HUGE! You have to load up all this nonsense into memory just to use a decent window manager, which is really sad. Gnome is even worse. Trying to use it is like fighting with your computer. It may have all kinds of nifty features and programs under the hood, but its desktop leaves much to be desired. If I open up netscape and maximize its window, netscape will overlap the damned gnome bar along the bottom of the screen. There are other issue I have with it, but that is the one that really pisses me off. KDE 2.x is almost worse. Instead of improving the window manager, they've taken out the best features and removed the ability to configure other features. I consider it a big step backwards, not forwards. Built in web browsers and point-and-drool file managers don't mean squat to me. I just want a window manager that works.
In the race to create the uber-desktop, lets not forget that people want to USE their computers, not just look at pretty desktops. Special effects on a computer are about as useful as special effects in a movie. Both are pointless without substance to back them up.
I for one would just love to see a window manager that recreates the best features of the win9x desktop. Create a taskbar at the bottom for all the currently running windows. Create a second bar along the left or right side that users can start commonly run applications such as netscape or xterm on to. Then have a menu system for other programs accessible via a "start" button as well as via drop down menus on the desktop itself. Add to this the ability to properly maximize windows so they fill the available real estate without overlapping these to bars, and to me you'll have the perfect desktop. To me this is far more important and useful than the creation of yet another theme for a desktop that doesn't work.
I'm almost at the point where I want to create a window manager of my own because of all this.
I'm suprised that so many people seem to love both KDE and Gnome when both are bloated hogs and the latest versions of them get in the way more than they help. Get rid of the nonsense. Lets have a desktop that's functional instead of merely flashy. Flashy may look pretty, but it sure doesn't make for a better user interface.
Lee Reynolds
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
KDE and Gnome is also a paradigm in user interface and design. I don't see XFce quite as grandeur in mission.
... maybe not even that.
I believe that XFce would be better compared with Enlightenment, WindowMaker, etc.
XFce is a FAST alternative to Gnome/KDE/Bloat and runs very very well on older hardware.
I might add that Gnome supports XFce as a alternative window manager.
--------------------
im sure people are getting tired of hearing comments like this, but i just have to point out that XFce has been mentioned on /. before. see:
/99 /11/18/0957218.shtml
http://slashdot.org/asksl ash dot/00/06/24/2253237.shtml
http://slashdot.org/articles
i checked this out a while back when i first saw it mentioned. someone said in a previous comment it was a pain to compile, but i dont remember it being so (though maybe i had a different version). sometimes i kinda like having that cde feel, and it is pretty relatively light weight. it seems like development is progressing steadily, too.
ok...commence flaming
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
Slackware is about the only distro i know that still has Openlook... with is funky green background and filemanager its probably the coolest little file manager you can find... and it (like Enlightenment) dont have that menu bar on the bottom... i know you can move it in kde/gnome/whatever.....BUT once you use something like enlightenment you see what serious configurability is all about... i mean the first thing i do on any new system is copy my ~/.enlightenment dir. fix the file pointer (which i think are stored so very well!) and good to go. :)
Try it out (0.16.5 just came out!!)
http://www.enlightenment.org/!
And all you Gnome/Kde users.... they are good too and provide a lot of cool features for most users, but if all you want is something to give you a good devel env. (a screen for Xemacs, one for Eterms, one for Mozilla(/.) and finally one for mail/etc.) enlightenment gives you a clean and good looking window manager with a lot of punch.... try it out and then flame back at me
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
I just want to point out that the perhaps most powerful alternative to all those X based environments is GNUstep - see
http://www.gustep.net and
http://www.gnustep.org
While there is still some way to go, it becomes more and more usable every day!
If you are interested in a platform independent environment (or just API!), check it out!
cheers, Phil
--- GnorpH