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XFce Desktop 4 Released

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the minimalist-approaches dept.

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.

6 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. lighter is better by SHEENmaster · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
  2. Re:Any experience with this on a slow computer ? by Door-opening+Fascist · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Warning to RedHat Users by BladeMelbourne · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  4. Screenshots by breman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is a mirror for the png's.

    XFce screens

  5. Re:Great for Linux, but bad for MS by johnwroach · · Score: 5, Informative
    I really wish they'd make a nice light desktop for Windows XP.

    There are a few:

    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.

  6. xfce with fvwm by HermesHuang · · Score: 5, Informative

    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....