XFce Desktop 4 Released

BladeMelbourne writes "After thorough RC testing, version 4.0 of my favourite 'lite' desktop environment has been released. Sporting purty eye candy, XFce is leaps and bounds ahead of the legacy XFce 3.8.18 release, whilst retaining it's performance. Release notes are available, as well as binary and source packages. Bring that PII back to life!" While it may not have all the bells and whistles, it's pretty clean looking.

Comments

lighter is better

[SHEENmaster]

I run TWM on my server and OpenBox on my iBook. Smaller window managers leave more ram and more proc. time for the processes that matter.

Try comparing compile times of the kernel between TWM and KDE3, no surprise which will win.

Re:Any experience with this on a slow computer ?

[Door-opening Fascist]

I use it. Right now, I'm using it on a dual 450MHz Xeon machine with 1GB of RAM, and it's just snappy. At home, I've run it on a 133MHz 486 with 32MB of RAM, and it's just snappy. At work, I run it on 2.0GHz P-4s with 512MB of RAM, and it's snappier. :)

In short, as long as you can run X, you can run XFce. I really like it because of its extensible and easy configuration (an uncommon combination, unfortunately), in addition to its low memory and CPU footprint.

Warning to RedHat Users

[BladeMelbourne]

I advise all RedHat users (downloading XFce RPMs) not to download and install gtk2-2.2.4-1rh9.i386.rpm from the XFce SourceForge page - it prevented my gdm graphical greeter from loading the login screen.

The error message was: "The theme for the graphical greeter is corrupt. It does not contain definition for the username/password entry element." I clicked OK several times, but the error message stayed there.

If you run into troubles, revert to an older package like gtk2-2.2.2-0.ximian.6.3.i386.rpm or gtk2-2.2.1-4.i386.rpm

Dont play with /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf for half an hour like me, changing gdm greeter themes.

Mike

Screenshots

[breman]

Here is a mirror for the png's.

XFce screens

Re: Light desktop

[dcuny]

I don't know how light it is, but you might consider looking at the ROS Explorer. It was written as a replacement for the NT Explorer, and runs under XP. Its current goal in life is to run as the ReactOS (i.e. NT clone) desktop, although currently the ReactOS doesn't currently implement enough functionality to run it.

It works just fine under XP as a shell. If you want to test it without replacing your current shell, just launch it from the command line with the -desktop option.

Re:Great for Linux, but bad for MS

[johnwroach]

I really wish they'd make a nice light desktop for Windows XP.

There are a few:

• Litestep
• Geoshell
• Shell City has a few links

There's also progman.exe*, shipped with windows. I've heard tell of a "winfile" also supposedly built in, but I don't know anything about that.

I've tried a few of these, but some of them (Blackbox) seemed to take more resources than Explorer! Another caveat, the ports of *nix windows managers retain the *nix settings system, so setting them up can be a pain if you don't have experience with them.

*Yes, that is progman of Win16 fame.

xfce with fvwm

[HermesHuang]

What hasn't been mentioned yet is the xfce plugin for fvwm. I kinda liked xfce, but really liked fvwm but didn't want to spend the time customizing, and then I find that there's a plugin to load into fvwm and suddenly I have the xfce taskbar. It's really the best of both worlds. Fvwm's efficient management of the desktop, and a nice toolbar to keep everything organized. Although I suppose the fact that three of the buttons on the taskbar get set to different sizes and colors of xterms says something about me....

Re:Not a desktop

[Florian]

This comment must have been written by someone (and modded up by
someone else) who doesn't know much about XFCE. XFCE is not just a
window manager, but a fully integrated, mouse-configurable desktop
including wm, panel (with panel applets), taskbar, pager and graphical
file manager (including Samba browsing support), extensive drag'n'drop
capabilities including for printing, central configuration menus
including sound and mouse setup. It's based on Gtk 2.x and
freedesktop.org standards (and thus with a high degree especially of
Gnome and KDE interoperability).

Think of XFCE as a desktop environment without the redundant middleware
layers (DCOP/KParts/arts etc. in KDE, Corba/Bonobo/esd/Gconf etc.i in
Gnome) that make both KDE and Gnome bloated and slow, and which are
hardly used by third party applications outside main Gnome and KDE
distributions at all.

So it amazes me that the previous commentator thinks XFCE is "not a
desktop". On the contrary, XFCE is a desktop done architecturally right,
similar to, for example, the desktops of AmigaOS, RiscOS, Macintosh
Classic and BeOS. While both the XFCE panel (with its legacy to the user
interface of the CDE panel) and new file manager could still need some
usability improvement, the architectural foundation is excellent.

XFCE is also the proof that a X11- and GNU/Linux-/BSD-based desktop
computer can be as fast and efficient as one would normally expect from
a Unix-like system. In other words, it's as fast as a basic window
manager setup with Window Maker/icewm/fvwm2 while providing a fully
integrated desktop that doesn't require users to run the shell or edit
configuration files.

(A prominent XFCE user and supporter is, btw., Alan Cox.)