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XFCE Adds Icons, Switches to Thunar in v4.4
b100dian points out yesterday's release of XFCE 4.4, writing "If you have already followed the release candidates, you know that XFCE is really evolving. Besides adding desktop icons, introducing Thunar (in lieu of xffm) and MousePad, applications that are as simple as they are effective, and Terminal, which has built-in support for desktop composition (supported by the window manager out-of-the-box), it also introduced (finally!) a shortcut for the pop-up menu (you can see in the tour that Ctrl-Esc is bound to this menu). Congratulations for the lightest and slickest window manager ever:)" I've been using Thunar a lot lately (mostly under Gnome) because the renaming feature is powerful but reasonably intuitive -- very handy for cleaning up digicam photo names.
Icons on the desktop and autostart programs on login!!!@!!!
Did somebody show win95 to those guys finally?
[...] very handy for cleaning up digicam photo names. Yeees... Digicam photo names. Sure.
It's hardly the lightest... My entire windowmanager fits in less space than one of those pretty icons they use. Sure, it's not as bloated as KDE or Gnome, but that doesn't make it light any more than a Hummer is fuel efficient because it uses less petrol than a 747.
Although the link is incredibly informative, here's more info about Thunar.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
Finally a Proper envieronment!.I love Xfce. I use it mainly via Xubuntu. From the release visual tour I can see this version is really nice. However, "niceties" require processsing power to display (like the fancy icons or alpha blending). I am afraid Xfce could end like firefox (which started as the "lightweight" version of Mozilla and now is itself bloated).
:icryptic^M^Mkey combinations^[:wq! required to edit a file).
The text editor (mousepad) is very nice, simply that, an easy to use text editor (without
Recently I had to "downgrade" a notebook to only 256 MB and decided to install Xubuntu. It runs really fine and does whatever I need it to do.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Let me be the first to ask that posters include a couple of words when posting about relatively obscure software.
Like "If you have already followed the release candidates, you know that XFCE, COMMA THE BLAH BLAH SOFTWARE PACKAGE COMMA is really evolving."
I have no clue what it is, or Thunar for that matter, and doubt that most others do.
Three Squirrels
I have to say, XFCE is looking very impressive. Thunar is, IMHO, a significant improvement over the earlier file manager. The desktop in general is also looking more robust and featureful - XFCE is starting to look like good competition for GNOME and KDE, and in the space of resource light desktops it looks like a clear winner. Better yet, due to freedesktop.org standards it interacts with GNOME and KDE just fine. For a while I had been hoping E17 would provide the impressive option for light desktops but, with interminable delays and XFCE now looking like a perfectly good alternative to GNOME or KDE regardless of whether you are interested in a light desktop or not, it looks as if XFCE is the clear winner.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
So I guess this would be a place to ask. I spent a bit of time this morning searching for .debs for edgy. I guess I could do the compile route but I'd like to be able to drop the gnome cruft and go back to XFCE now that 4.4 is done.
.debs for Edgy?
Anyone know of any backported
What a load of biased drive! After considering Fluxbox, Icewm, wmaker and a slew of other window managers; Xfce doesn't even come close to being the "lightest." Granted, it is light in comparison to GNOME/KDE but come on people lets be a tad more objective.
find / -iname life 2>
i love xfce and everything it stands for; would download again.
lose != loose
Thunar?
Isn't that the actress in those Quentin Tarantino movies?
Thunar... lacks SMB/NFS/Network support.
That's the only (IMHO) problem with Thunar. It would be easy to integrate it with SMBCLIENT (like xffm does, by the way) but apparently they are too lazy to do that.
Hatredman
"Congratulations for the lightest and slickest window manager ever"
... Desktop Environment!
But it's a Desktop Environment, Spock, it's a
Oh, not that Thundarr. Thunar.
Meh.
I was hoping for Something LIke xfce Awesome Ariel Edition, or maybe Version 4.4 Mighty Mok.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
In the past one of the things that I loved about linux was that you could choose a lightweight window manager, and run just fine on older hardware. Now-a-days that doesn't seem to work anymore, because it isn't the WM that are heavy weight (sawfish, metacity and KWM really aren't that bad), or even the desktop apps (how big is the doc), it is the libraries. And if you use a single Gnome or KDE application, you end up having to load those anyway. GTK is especially bad now, especially if you aren't using an accelerated (aka proprietary) video driver. I just cannot make linux useful on lower-end machines anymore, without restricting myself to older distros.
That was actually part of the reason that I started using OS X. If I am going to have to buy a hefty machine, I might as well get a Mac. And if I am going to have to use proprietary drivers, and codecs of iffy legality just to do the work I need, I might as well use an OS that has that nicely integrated.
Feisty Fawn will be out in April and will probably include it.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Will it do the automagical plug in your USB/FlashDrive and it pops up on your desktop ready to use thing yet?
I've been using Thunar on Ubuntu (compiling my own from the release), and it's a great file manager. I especially like the compact view it gives, which is very similar to the compact view in MS Windows Explorer.
The one issue I have is that the Trash is not shared with the standard Gnome trash can. Hopefully this can be fixed in time for Feisty.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
See my blog entry for other experiences made during the quest for a slim desktop, and what ups and downs I found beyond the "big" desktop environemnts. (Includes a screenshot of my desktop :-).
- Hubert
Now if it only had a dock. I could leave my beloved fluxbox and still keep all my cool dock apps.
vi +
For the Fisting Fudgepackers release.
Now the file manager looks like OSX Finder. This is thrilling, fantastic, wonderful...
Wait...
This is a good thing?
(and this from a self-confesssed Mac addict)
They're both acronyms and the last phoneme is the same. I can't see any other similarities.
If you think XFCE is light, try Fluxbox. Doesn't look as impressive but it gets the job done and it's much faster on older hardware.
Please don't confuse 'bloat' with 'functional'.
I am a _huge_ fan of XFCE though it just isn't there yet in regards of being robust and usable in many different applications. For example I usually have to run a bunch of GNOME apps just to make it a usable desktop...Or an even better example; At work I've been trying very hard to implement a Linux/XFCE environment onto our older PCs to 'upgrade' them from Windows 2000 - due to their memory/cpu power XFCE is the only usable desktop environment.
I have managed to account for every feature the users of these PCs require including all of our propriety apps yet my failure to roll out this implementation came down to XFCEs file manager and it's complete lack of any features required to exist on a network - let a lone a business network - and bringing nautilus into the setup just wasn't practical. From my point of view this was a huge shame as it would have been nice to see a bunch of Linux PCs out side the server room and in production and XFCE fit the bill nicely.
So yes...Don't confuse the terms.
I ate your fish.
"I've been trying very hard to implement a Linux/XFCE environment onto our older PCs to 'upgrade' them from Windows 2000 - due to their memory/cpu power XFCE is the only usable desktop environment."
I don't believe it. If it runs Windows 2000 it runs KDE. I'm telling this from a PIII 860MHz with 256MB RAM that runs KDE 3.5.5 full bells&whistles (from Debian Etch) just smoothly. And I've run it decently on a K6-II too.
Xfce4 from etch is 4.3.99.2. That seems pretty close to 4.4.
Thunar, on the other hand is 0.4.0rc1, that seems far off from 0.8.
Same versions for unstable of debian.
I guess once etch is declared stable, there is no chance the new thunar will be hitting stable any time soon?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
I don't believe it. If it runs Windows 2000 it runs KDE. I'm telling this from a PIII 860MHz with 256MB RAM that runs KDE 3.5.5 full bells&whistles (from Debian Etch) just smoothly. And I've run it decently on a K6-II too.
I don't know about that. I've had Windows 2000 running on a Pentium with 64 MB of RAM. KDE is not going to run on that.
Time makes more converts than reason