Xfce 4.8 Released

PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."

Comments

Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?

[caseih]

Hopefully all these new-fangled frameworks and technologies aren't going to turn Xfce into just another Gnome or KDE competitor. Xfce was always fast and light. Hopefully it stays that way.

Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now?

[wvmarle]

For being memory hog, the "out of the box" installation is what counts. I install Ubuntu, comes with Gnome (but that's not the point), and don't want to start heavy configuring to make it less of a memory hog. I guess I could make it lighter, but it's too much effort for me. It has to just work.

You sound like a tinkerer (me too sometimes) but for most people stuff has to Just Work. And for most of my computers I also want them to Just Work. Which modern Linux distros luckily do more and more.

XFCE is amazing

[elashish14]

Everytime I think about it, I'm totally shocked by how good XFCE is. I was a bit misled when I was using Xubuntu (not as lightweght as I had hoped) so I dropped it for a bit, but then I came back when I installed Arch on my netbook. It makes Debian superfast and Arch superstable (and yes, I use both). And on top of all that are all the config tools, which are exceedingly comprehensive, the panel, with a plethora of widgets, and a really good WM (not as powerful as I wish, but I'm so satisfied with it that I can't convince myself to replace it with Openbox). And on top of it all, it's remarkably elegant and simple. Hot damn, it even has its own built-in compositor.

It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it... I do wish some of the config settings were more intuitive, or if they could all be placed in one spot so you could search for what you need... but other than that, for me at least, it's as close to perfect as could ever be hoped. It is, quite frankly, awesome. Sorry for the pun. Here's to hoping that 4.8 is just as good.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[bzipitidoo]

Agreed. Xubuntu was not light enough. Among the many advantages of Linux that is trumpeted, particularly around the time of the advent of Windows Vista, is the ability to make old computers usable again. But it rings hollow. Seems a lot of desktop environments, including XFCE, do font work on the fly, and that's a real drag on old systems. If you turn off the anti-aliasing, the environment looks horrible unless you switch to a fixed or terminal font. A while ago, I tried Firefox 3.5 on a 133 MHz Pentium. Took 30 seconds just to come up. How the heck did we ever surf the Internet on 40MHz 486s with VGA graphics?

I switched from XFCE to LXDE on Arch Linux about 2 years ago. LXDE does seem faster, but it has issues too. Have tried KDE 3 and 4, Gnome, and various bare window managers. Good to know there's a new version of XFCE to check out.

Re:Xfce seems to be a pretty good compromise...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I see Xfce more as becoming a replacement for the "Classical GNOME", as Ubuntu people call it. Lxde is much more light-weight. From a user perspective, I really like the way of the gnome-panel and xfce4-panel. Gnome-panel is dead, though, and obvious and very visible bugs have remained untouched for years. I really think Xfce4 can be a really good replacement for it.

I'm very much looking forward to trying this out.