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

Cutest logo

[questamor]

I vote for xfce as having the dang cutest logo yet.

*squeeee* lil rodent

Re:Cutest logo

[commodoresloat]

yeah but how many buttons on that mouse?

The joy of screenshots

[commodoresloat]

It's incredible, really. Here I was reading slashdot, trying to procrastinate doing some work, but it's the same stories I read earlier.... just when I am almost forced to stop reading /. and actually do some work, along comes slashdot not only with a new story for me to procrastinate more, but a story that involves looking at pictures of other people doing work! Thank you slashdot!!

Re:The joy of screenshots

[sinserve]

I spent the day pushing my "good boy" debian stable to the dark side by introducing it
to the sinful pleasures of the "unstable" apt sources. In the process, I documented
minor GNOME quirks and posted a couple of screen shots to freshmeat. I still have to
configure VideoLAN since I am missing the OGG codecs.

So you see, not every screenshot envolves a "working" person, some of us are just
broken.

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:lighter is better

[phraktyl]

I agree. I'm a big supporter of light. I use PWM. All keyboard shortcuts. No cute GUI stuff. And very fast...

Re:lighter is better

[shellbeach]

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

But there is a "middle-ground" between butt-ugly TWM and big-and-bloated KDE (which is also, IMHO, butt-ugly, but that's more because I can't see the GUI for the kitchen sink that's in the way ...)

That's why environments like xfce, ROX, WindowMaker and IceWM exist - providing speed, but not at the expense of being so minimal they interfere with usability. I'm currently using IceWM and ROX as a desktop, but having had a quick look at xfce4 I'll certainly give it a try. It looks very neat indeed ...

Any experience with this on a slow computer ?

[Zork the Almighty]

How funny, just last week I was wondering what desktop to put on an old P133 with 48mb of RAM. I stumbled on Xfce and I was going to try the 4.0 release candidates. Does anyone here use Xfce, and if so, how well would you expect it to run on this computer ? Any tips ?

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.

Keyboard shortcuts

[TheFlu]

I've been keeping up with XFCE for a while now, and I've really enjoyed using it. I typically use either it or fluxbox when I'm in the mood for a minimal window manager. Anyhow, if you'd like to edit your keyboard shortcuts in XFCE (one of the first things I do when I install a new WM), you can do that in the following file: /usr/share/xfwm4/themes/default.keys/keythemerc

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

Their desktop may be fast...

[kcbrown]

But their web server sure isn't!

Ah, the power of a good Slashdotting. :-)

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

[gaijin99]

Another reason is variety, right now one of MS's biggest advantage is people don't have experience with variety. If they get used to a utilitarian WM without the flashy features they may start to wonder if it wouldn't be easy for someone other then MS to make a good WM and start looking around.

This is actually a good point. MS, by promoting a ruthlessly standardized desktop environment, has managed to get large numbers of people quite used to doing things one way (the MS way, that is). It really is a struggle for some of the more ossified types to even change to another browser simply because the buttons have slightly different icons from IE.

By eleminating diversity, the MS designers have quite neatly gotten a psychological lock into the minds of many people. Gamers tend to switch more easily because games don't follow the MS standard interface, but non-gamers are very used to/addicted to the MS look and feel.

Not, mind you, that standardization doesn't have its place. When every program makes the scrollbars look and behave differently even the most flexible of mind can get a bit worn out. I wonder if there's a happy medium between over-compliance with a standard UI, and over-diversity in UI look and feel?

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.)