Xfce 4.2.0 Released

kelnos copies and pastes: "The Xfce Team is pleased to announce the availability of Xfce 4.2.0, the next major version of the Xfce Desktop Environment and Development Framework for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Xfce 4.2.0 can be downloaded here. Xfce 4.2.0 includes new applications like a session manager and an application finder, a new and beautiful icon theme, support for bleeding-edge features (like the X.org Composite extension), usability and performance improvements, better support for multihead desktops, new and updated translations, additional themes, and various other improvements over the previous stable releases. See this page for a complete list of changes between Xfce 4.0 and Xfce 4.2. Furthermore, Xfce 4.2 is the first desktop environment to ship with an easy-to-use and platform-independent graphical installation wizard, which takes care of compiling and installing Xfce on your system. Visit the os-cillation installers website for download links and instructions. If you want to try Xfce 4.2.0 first, without installing anything on your system, you might want to try the Xfce Live Demo 0.2, provided by os-cillation, to discover the power and efficiency of Xfce."

Comments

Best Alternative

[ebob]

To anyone who thinks this sounds like the best alternative to the bloated KDE and Gnome, it is. Go the their website and check out the flash demos. They show how well (and how fast) it works better than any description. The window manager has about a bazillion styles from simple to extreme. If you want to compile it yourself, the graphical installers are fabulous. Translations into 40 languages! Xfce simply rocks.

Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?

[bcrowell]

Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies?
fluxbox

License confusion does not inspire confidence.

[jbn-o]

From the download page of the Xfld.org website:

"Various parts of Xfld are covered by so many different licenses, we can't possibly keep them all straight."

They have an obligation to do exactly that--keep the licensing straight--so they aren't distributing something they don't have a license to distribute. Perhaps it is time to comb the distribution and make sure the licensing is correct.

ION

[G. Waters]

Do yourselves a favor; try ion for 15 minutes and you'll be hooked.

Re:One reason why I'm still using Window Maker....

[pherthyl]

Yes. I notice this too. I have no idea what causes it exactly, but you can definitely tell that MS Windows or OSX has a better "feel" to it than the Linux desktop (I haven't tried WindowMaker). I think it has something to do with the way redraws are done. KDE has long had problems with flickering, which have been fixed to a large extent in recent releases, but some problems still remain.

The thing is, it's so hard to quantify so its impossible to file any meaningful bug reports.
My best guess right now is that Windows seems to draw things to the screen when it is fully rendered so the entire menu/window/dialog will appear at the same time. In KDE I notice that sometimes windows will appear but will be drawn a second time after they are displayed. Perhaps it displays the text first and then redraws the icons or something.

Well this comment is starting to sound like meaningless blather, but I can't describe the problem much better.

FYI I almost exclusively use Linux, so no I'm not a microsoft troll.

Young at Heart

[Doc Ruby]

All operating systems' origins can be traced back to the 1960s, when they invented operating systems. OS development is largely "punctuated evolution" - incremental accelerated by occasional revolutionary changes. So OS'es with older, more direct roots have the advantage of maturity, meaning that many problems which OS'es address have been solved, in order to survive enough to contribute to the next generation. Truly new OS'es, like PalmOS, aren't even tested enough in many scenarios to predict how they'll fail, the most imporant property of using an OS. Some OS'es, like Windows, are trapped in both worlds: significant new, untested tech combined with lots of obsolete legacy apps to support, often in mutually exclusive modes or subsystems. Of all these lineages, Linux probably has the best deal, being a rebirth of pedigreed Unix architectures, without the old apps or users to hold back innovation, combined with its essential self-modifying toolchain and community.