Slashdot Mirror
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.
yeah but how many buttons on that mouse?
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!!
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.
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.
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.
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf for half an hour like me, changing gdm greeter themes.
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
Mike
Ah, the power of a good Slashdotting. :-)
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Here is a mirror for the png's.
XFce screens
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?
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
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.
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....