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?

[simcop2387]

Actually dropping HAL for PolicyKit/ConsoleKit/udev makes it considerably lighter in that regard. HAL has always been a beast of a system that got so unwieldy to maintain and fix that they started dismantling it years ago. As far as ThunarVFS vs GIO, I'm not sure, but it shouldn't be much different and at least reduces the amount of code around that duplicates functions, this should at least make your system itself lighter (unless you've got nothing but XFCE apps on your system, in which case there shouldn't be a change).

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

[shutdown -p now]

It's funny how the further Xfce develops, the more it resembles Gnome... the way it's meant to be - full-featured yet fast and configurable.

As far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing. It means that, when Gnome goes for that crazy "shell" thing in 3.0, and what with KDE guys still trying to make their stuff not crash every other day, there will still be a sane DE to fall back to.

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

[Nutria]

I've got my wife/kids running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS because they are familiar with the Start Menu motif, while I run Xfce on Sid.

When it's time to upgrade their OS, it'll probably be to xbuntu 12.04.

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

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Why is it garbage?

The WM is unstable, and many of the apps still don't have as much functionality as their KDE3 counterparts. Many of the really nice KDE3 apps, such as Kaffeine and Amarok, now seem to be unmaintained and/or stripped of their functionality and gutted.

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

[CAIMLAS]

The irony is that all these subsystems worked pretty damn well in QT3 years ago, and they've only gotten better, since. A lot of the long-running bugs in the various GTK wm subsystems were never really a problem for KDE, and things like the VFS implementations worked much, much better.

If only KDE wasn't such a general memory hog, eh?

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

[MichaelSmith]

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.

More than that: its turning into Gnome.

Meanwhile Canonical writes their own desktop environment...

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

[bjourne]

HAL itself is only five years old and has only recently reached version 0.5. It is hard to tell exactly what is wrong with HAL, just calling it "unwieldy" doesnt prove anything. DeviceKit was supposed to also replace parts of HAL but now that project is merged into udev-extras. And all these replacements are Linux specific, so bsd-users are left out in the cold stuck with HAL. There have been far to many hardware abstraction and filesystem virtualization layers developed for Linux many of which competes with each other.

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

[BrokenHalo]

I'm still hanging on my KDE 3.5.10, but who knows? I might consider Xfce instead of GNOME in the long run.

There's nothing that says you have to run one or the other if you want a fully-featured desktop environment. You can cherry-pick the features you want. For instance, I run compiz-fusion wirh Emerald, use various panels according to how I feel about them, but use Nautilus to draw my desktop. Easy enough on Arch Linux, and probably at least as easy on some of the more popular distros.

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

[the_womble]

That was my immediate reaction. I use XFCE, but I still use Konqueror and Kwrite for browsing remote files systems and editing files on them because they work much better.

KDE is not as much of a memory hog as it is reputed to be. It depends on what you install and how you configure it.

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

[thsths]

That has already happened. I tried Xubuntu 10.04 on an old laptop, and it was terribly slow. Slower than KDE3 (Trinity) in fact.

So I had to move on to Lubuntu with LXDE. It is lightning fast and very small now, but even there you have to be careful not to pull in to many Gnome dependencies. Unfortunately I need Nautilus, because I really like it, and it is the only file manager that Dropbox will cooperate with.

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

[drinkypoo]

I do the same thing but with avant-window-navigator as well. On Ubuntu you have to mess with gconf-editor to make gnome-panel not a required component. I like GNOME but not GNOME panels.

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

[Saint Stephen]

Yeah, Fluxbox :)

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

[Kjella]

Oh, come on. It has worked reasonably well since 4.1, and just fine since 4.2. I guess you haven't used it (certainly not since after 4.1).

The plural of anecdote is not data but KDE 4.1 crashed for me and so did 4.2, even with the 4.2.x updates. Whatever my issue was, it was fixed in 4.3 and since then I've not had any stability problems. In any case, 4.6 is about to be released so we're talking about what it was like two years ago, not how it is today.

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.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

The big thing is that many of the distros are shifting to these "new-fangled frameworks and technologies" and Xfce needs to change to support them, regardless of the impact. If the major distro's drop HAL, for instance, and Xfce would still require it, then Xfce could rightly be called bloated as it would load additional frameworks that nothing else used and possibly would conflict with what was already installed.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

I've done a lot of GTK programming and never programmed anything that hit frameworks like HAL as part of GTK. GTK deals with the screen and widgets and window managers. It doesn't care about HAL or VFS, etc. While GTK may not be as complete as QT, if any of these subsystems were causing a problem, it wouldn't matter whether QT or GTK were the toolkit used.

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

[amn108]

Hilarious post - it sums up modern desktop computing.

"X has become bloated and now I use Y which is great unless you use Z with it, which I have to because I like it, and it's the only thing that W works with."

No offense, after all we're all users, but you have to see the irony of it all here...

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

[Dcnjoe60]

That was my immediate reaction. I use XFCE, but I still use Konqueror and Kwrite for browsing remote files systems and editing files on them because they work much better.

KDE is not as much of a memory hog as it is reputed to be. It depends on what you install and how you configure it.

So what you are saying is that by using Konqueror and Kwrite, you aren't concerned with the memory footprint and Xfce being lighter (or not) is irrelevant since you are loading most of the kdelibs anyway. Is that correct?

I do agree with the last part of your last statement about it depending on what is installed. It never ceases to amaze me that people will say they want a low resource desktop environment like Xfce or even LXDE and then install, say OpenOffice.org on it. While obviously, we want any desktop environment to not use any more resources than necessary, if you are running heavy apps, like OO or Evolution, etc, you really can't complain about how lightweight or not the environment is as the environment is not the limiting factor. (I've seen users install nautilus in Xfce to get dropbox access, which is not longer needed, btw, and then complain about how sluggish Xfce is!)

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

[Dcnjoe60]

And Ubuntu packs so much extra stuff, that unless you do a minimal install and then add what you want, it is virtually impossible to have a lightweight system. This isn't a slam against Ubuntu. They are trying to be all things to all people. As such they have a lot of services running and such to handle just about any situation. Need a hammer, it's in a default install Ubuntu, need a wrench it's in a default install Ubuntu, need a screwdriver, it's in a default install Ubuntu. However, if all you needed was a pair of tweezers, well, you get that too, with the default install, but you still get all the other tools in the toolbox, too.

It's been regularly reported that Gnome, KDE, Xfce, etc, all run faster and with a smaller footprint on things like debian, arch, fedora, and many others. However, with those systems, the user is expected to add what services and software that are specific to their needs. That is how they stay lean.

This is not to say that Ubunut is bad, or wrong in what it does. On the contrary, they are trying to produce a distro that "just works" without having to do a lot of tinkering. They pretty much have succeeded, but just like clothing, their one size fits all approach really means that it fits no one, well.

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

[wvmarle]

Absolutely true. That's what I like about Ubuntu, no (at least not much) tinkering needed. The only thing that needs serious work is the network login: it's not easy to set up a system to do kerberos login, and get user/group details from an ldap server. Previously I used Mandriva (really loved that distro - worried about the future and tried Ubuntu which works well too) - there you could set that up very easily when installing the system. A tick mark, enter a few settings (kerberos realm, ldap server name), and done.

OTOH my server is Debian. Considered a good server platform, never tried another as I'm happy with it. No GUI installed, running headless, and it just works. Lots of tinkering needed but then it's a server and those things just need a lot of customisation. It's the nature of the beast.

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

[tom17]

tom@muon:~$ hammer
hammer: command not found
tom@muon:~$ wrench
wrench: command not found
tom@muon:~$ screwdriver
screwdriver: command not found
tom@muon:~$ tweezers
tweezers: command not found

liar

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

[ultranova]

As far as ThunarVFS vs GIO,

Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems? Is there a point to it besides just making it harder to use applications not native to said GUI system? Or do the developers just like adding redirection layers to make their codebase look bigger?

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

[r_batty_00]

So I had to move on to Lubuntu with LXDE. It is lightning fast and very small now, but even there you have to be careful not to pull in to many Gnome dependencies. Unfortunately I need Nautilus, because I really like it, and it is the only file manager that Dropbox will cooperate with.

Have you tried Crunchbang? It's a small Debian based distro that uses many of the components in LXDE. They use Dropbox with Thunar and have a quick howto at:
http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/howto/howto_setup_dropbox

You could try their live disc or use the howto to get a lighter filemanager to work with Dropbox.

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

[otis wildflower]

Agree.

I gave up on KDE back when the various distros decided to drop KDE3. I haven't really kept up since I switched (first to xfce, then GNOME, but my next build may be xfce again), but AFAIK KDE4 does not yet have all the functionality that KDE3 did, and is not as stable, even now.

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

[ultranova]

There have been far to many hardware abstraction and filesystem virtualization layers developed for Linux many of which competes with each other.

The obvious solution is to add an abstraction layer that wraps them all. Perhaps a small set of intermediate layers to wrap various combinations of existing abstraction layers, and a loopback layer to deal wtih more complex circumstances, such as a many-world quantum computer?

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

[fwarren]

Ubuntu is a Gnome distribution. Did you try

gnome-hammer, gnome-wrench, gnone-screwdriver or gnome-tweezers?

It could even be

ghammer, gwrench, gscredriver or gtweezers

However

khammer, kwrench, kscredriver and ktweezers will not work till you do a apt-get install kubuntu desktop

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

[h4rr4r]

Dropbox works with thunar just fine.

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

[fwarren]

It would not be just the fact that HAL would be a dependency that takes up extra room and resources. The larger issue is it is becoming outdated, and broke. What happens when HAL no longer compiles cleanly on a particular distro? Who will fix it? The HAL folks? The XFCE folks? The distro? The more nonstandard a package becomes the more of a risk it is to rely on it. Moving away from HAL can't be considered a bad thing.

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

[Dcnjoe60]

tom@muon:~$ hammer

hammer: command not found

tom@muon:~$ wrench

wrench: command not found

tom@muon:~$ screwdriver

screwdriver: command not found

tom@muon:~$ tweezers

tweezers: command not found

Obviously your system administrator doesn't trust you using such powerful tools and has removed access to them for your account. :)

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

[CynicTheHedgehog]

I still get Konqueror crashes almost daily. It all seems to point back to Nepomuk and Akonadi. I'm going to give 4.6 a shot when Natty comes out, and if they haven't figured out Akonadi by then I give up.

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

[MrHanky]

Amarok and Kaffeine are both actively developed, and none of them are stripped of functionality (Amarok has been rewritten, though, which is not the same). Kwin is stable, but demands decent graphics drivers.

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

[spitzak]

Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems?

The normal excuse is that all other methods of making a VFS are Linux-specific (such as using FUSE). But you certainly could at least offer a FUSE solution on Linux and a library-only one on other systems. Also the only main alternative is BSD and it has methods for this, too.

However I think the real reason is that they already started writing it that way and don't want to do the work of splitting it away from their other libraries.

Linux would be MUCH better if any program using open() could open anything the KDE or Gnome desktop can.

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

[shutdown -p now]

I have been trying every KDE 4.x release since 4.2 (I skipped the first two because of all the horror stories), and I still haven't seen one that would be stable for me. YMMV.

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

[Terminus32]

Amen to that!

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

[simcop2387]

Actually I was going with the reasoning that was on the HAL mailing lists when it was decided to depreciate it. The design of it wasn't very good for handling all the hardware quirks that it was handling (all kinds of graphics card quirks related to suspend, bios things, etc.) and they had started to have maintenance issues. Regardless of it's age or it's version number the HAL developers themselves decided this and decided to depreciate HAL and switch architectures for the whole thing. HAL itself has also gotten very noisy on DBUS since it will send out events without anyone listening.

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

[tom17]

Oh, was it a metaphor? Fuck me I didn't see that!
Silly me :(

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

[pandrijeczko]

I'm a long-term UNIX and Linux user & the last thing I ever do is evangelise about operating systems.

If you like Windows, then good luck to you, just use proper registered & purchased versions of everything so that you're not running virus-ridden cracked crap that makes the Internet that little bit worse for the rest of us. And if you're a Windows user who doesn't like paying for extra software, then run FOSS apps on it.

As for Ubuntu, I try it occasionally, it's a nice piece of work but far too bloated for what I want. But again, if it's some people's first steps away from proprietary software that they no longer want to pay for, then they too deserve a great deal of credit.

Incidentally, at least I've tried Ubuntu, but I don't use any other pre-packaged distros either like Fedora or OpenSUSE for the same preconceptions - namely the bloat.

I use Linux most of the time at home and at work I do a lot of technical security work on Red Hat-based servers, so I've settled on Gentoo Linux as my platform of choice - highly customisable, highly optimisable but far too fiddly for newbie users.

The good thing about learning a "low-level" distro like Gentoo is that I'm working near to the lowest common denominator for Linux - yes, lots of editing text files in vi, manual kernel compilations, etc.

But the good thing about working at that level is you can apply that knowledge pretty well to any other distro - so at work, for example, I don't know much about the configuration tools that Red Hat provides in their distro but it doesn't matter anyway because I can just go in and do lots of manual editing and scripting to create the configuration I need.

So if Ubuntu works for you, great but also appreciate that graphical, easy-to-use configuration tools can hide away some of the real power of Linux because to do some really clever and whizzy automation stuff, and to tweak things to a very fine level, you do need to get into the command prompt.

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

[Rich0]

Great idea. We should call it PulseAudio!

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

[tzanger]

No, KDE4 is still unstable compared to KDE3. I have all the desktop effects turned off, so it's not that. KDE4 was all about eye candy and new APIs and doing things the right way, but with absolutely no plan with respect to how to USE it until it actually stabilized.

I'm a KDE fan (I am running Kubuntu and have since 9.x, and was a Slackware user with KDE before that) but I'm really, really disappointed in KDE4. I like Gnome even less, which is why I stick with KDE. It's not because I love it. The printing subsystem still has not regained all the functionality that 3.x had, Amarok is ass now (I am using Amarok for 3.x), Konqueror took a big nosedive, the networking system tray icon still can't set up a VPN or use a cellular modem properly, Kontact is a steaming pile of instability... Kopete's notifications don't always fire... The only thing that *IS* stable on KDE4 is the goddamned terminal app. This instability has been like this since KDE4.x came out. Every new release introduces new features but bugs never seem to get addressed.

So no, KDE 4.2 is *not* fine. It's improving, sure, but if they really want to make a usable desktop they have to do a full-out feature freeze and fix some of these incredibly bad bugs!

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

[tzanger]

I have no problems with Dropbox in KDE (Kubuntu). I did install the nautilis plugin, but my Dropbox folder works, the systray icon works... *shrug*

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

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Kaffeine 1.1 on KDE 4.5.4:

The TV guide doesn't work the same way, and is much less useful, than in Kaffeine 0.8 (or whatever the KDE3 version of kaffeine was). One standout regression in functionality is that it is no longer possible to actually change channels from the TV guide window. It used to be possible to double-click on a program in the TV guide and start watching it immediately. Now, you need to remember the channel name, close the TV guide dialog and then manually switch to that channel.

I've had numerous occasions when the DVB has simply stopped working, and even a restart doesn't fix it. Following reports I found on a forum, removing all of the channels and rescanning solves the problem, but that is quite a hassle.

The playlist is harder to use. I'd prefer to not have a playlist at all as such - what i want to do is record TV shows, and watch them later. It used to be that double clicking on a file in the file browser window would add it to the play list (and maybe start playing it? I can't remember). Now, it is necessary to physically drag n drop the filename from the browser window onto the playlist window, and then hit play. Actually, in experimenting just nhow I discovered by accident that it is possible to start playing a file immediately by dragging it onto the play window instead, which is better but not obvious. Heh, and I just went to kaffeine.kde.org and that was the tip of the day ;-) But I'd prefer a right-click action to start playing a particular file, and maybe previous file and next file, so I can set up DBUS actions via the remote.

There is no documentation that I can find. A total of 4 'tips', and an out of date FAQ (that still discusses DCOP!) is all I can find. No handbook or installed documentation (that I can find, anyway).

I find the scheduled recording harder to use than the KDE3 version. If I'm browsing the TV guide and I see a show I want to record (say, every week), I 'schedule' it, and then go into the edit schedule dialog to set it to record every week. There used to be a simple options 'repeat daily', and 'repeat weekly'. Now, there are 7 check boxes for the day of the week to repeat the recording. Arguably a bit more flexible (but if there is an unusual pattern of recording, then that could be handled in KDE3 kaffeine by having multiple separate entries, so I don't think there is any win). But now, and really annoyingly, I need to know what day it is on, whereas in the past I didn't need to care about this. I just see some random show in the future, say on 2011-01-24, and I want to repeat it weekly. Quick, what day is that? ummm, let me just open up the calendar here .... okay, it's a Monday, I'll click the Monday check box.

The configuration settings have been stripped out. It used to be possible to set all of the xine enging parameters via a dialog on the Settings menu. I see, from looking at the config files in .kde4/share/apps/kaffeine/xine-config that those options are still relevant but there is no way to adjust them anymore without editing that file.

A big one: the diagog box that one ued to get by pressing the 'v' key during DVB playback doesn't appear to exist anymore (at least, i can see no sign of it). This is a big one, because for whatever reason, when I watch live DVB the audio sync is off by about 0.15 seconds, and this dialog had a slider to adjust the A/V sync. This seems to be missing in kaffeine 1.1, and it makes watching live DVB rather irritating.

I used to love the old kaffeine, and I used it all the time as my TV. But having finally made the switch only a couple of weeks ago to KDE4 and the new kaffeine, I'm disappointed by all of the regressions in ease of use and functionality compared with the KDE3 version. Same goes for many other good KDE3 apps that have lost functionality or are just not the same application anymore.

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

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Thanks, I'll check out Clementine! I've since switched to Sonata, which I don't like as much as old Amarok, but I do like the idea of the Music Player Daemon back end.

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

[TheRealGrogan]

Except that OpenOffice is only bloat if I open it and when I close it, it goes away. I don't care about bloat in an application like that but I do care if the system is kludgy and bloated. It doesn't matter if I have the hardware for it, waste is shameful.

There used to be a time when you opened a KDE app outside of KDE, that the kdeinit process would clean up after itself (and exit) when all child processes were gone. Not so anymore... KDE services and their ilk stay running.

I've been using XFCE for several years (Starting back when it was a new desktop environment that used GTK+ 1.x) and every version becomes more Gnome-like it seems. Out of the box, it takes me a while to get things the way I like them... the way it used to be.

I tend to just never upgrade XFCE 4 after the initial build anymore because it's just too damned much work to get everything set up again, only to have it introduce changes that piss me off. It's my work environment and it's too important for me to dick around with. If I'm starting from scratch on a new Linux setup, I'll get the latest and work out any annoyances then.

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

[simcop2387]

and since I'm bored right now. I believe one of the biggest issues was that the design made it extraordinarily hard for them to rename or reclassify things because of the number of xml files that had to be changed. so whenever a deficiency was found it was difficult to fix.

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

[bjourne]

Sure it is not HAL:s clumsiness I'm arguing about. It is the API churn and the general development model in which a single developer comes up with a "fantastic" api and releases version 0.0001 of said software, pushes it to become standard, then the next programmer takes over, realizes the previous system was junk and decides to build a new one and so it goes on and on.

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

[simcop2387]

Yea that is one large danger when everyone is free to come around and reinvent something because of a problem, many times it would be nice to just slightly transform the existing API (either extending it or depreciating part of it) to fix the problem rather than start from scratch.

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

[theCoder]

Because using mount to modify the kernel's VFS layer normally requires root privileges. Some of that has been fixed for mounting of external disks and drives (though I think it just signals through DBUS some root daemon to do a mount or umount as necessary). In addition, there's also security to consider. If I want to make an 'ssh' virtual mount, I probably don't want that exposed to everybody on the system. I don't really even want it exposed to root, though I confess I don't know if things like GnomeVFS, ThunarVFS, or the KDE equivalent (kio-slaves?) allow root access to the virtual mount.

I agree it would be nice if there was a ~/mnt or something that was used instead of virtual mounting through the DE.

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

[theCoder]

Unfortunately, I still find some things nicer in Gnome. For example, I can configure Gnome to not treat my finger briefly touching the trackpad on my laptop as a mouse click. I can also quite easily configure the caps lock key to be an additional control key (like on Sun keyboards). I also like all my Compiz settings (not too much flash, but just enough to be nice and useful).

I know I can configure the X server to do the caps lock option. Maybe there's also a way to do the touchpad, too, but it's nice to have a simple GUI to do it and not mess with the xmodmap settings. Not sure if there's a way to use compiz with XFCE, though.

I just hope the Gnome anti-configuration people don't take away those options, like the way they took away my screensaver settings, my login screen settings, my session settings, etc. I probably need to give this latest XFCE a try to see if it would work for me. I've used XFCE in the past, but I've always gravitated back to Gnome (despite its shortcomings).

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

[Reservoir Penguin]

Are you root?

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

[shutdown -p now]

I'm talking about what's today, not about past things. Yes, KDE 3.x was awesome, and I also still remember 2.x with fondness (it was my first Linux DE). But KDE 4 has been a disaster, and I haven't seen a stable release of that yet, even though I try every new major one.

What functionality are we BSD users ...

[0x000000]

What functionality are we BSD users going to be missing? It didn't really say in the article at all other than that apparently there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world. As a developer I am saddened by this fact, that what I have available for use on Linux won't work the same on FreeBSD for example making my life as a developer and porter much harder.

Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers? What can be done to change the situation? Where are some places we can start looking?

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[hedwards]

From the looks of it, some of the dependencies haven't been ported to FreeBSD yet. Such as xfconf, xfdesktop and garcon. Which would account for the loss of features, but OTOH it doesn't look like that big of a deal in the long term. From the looks of it they'll be ported as the changes were made with some concern for not making it Linux only.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue:

Merge. Free Software is powerful, but not that powerful, and we are split. Thousands of distros, Linux + 3 flavors of BSD, Android, ChromeOS, plus countless other half-dead projects like Hurd. We need to stop being dicks about it and merge it all down. A single Free Unix. Then we can have a few flavors of it, for example: Desktop, Server, Lightweight, Mobile, Realtime (but all coming from the same codebase). Then we would be unstoppable. But, instead, we have 100 variants of every possible component of a free system. We don't have a single professional linear video editor, but we have 30 that are getting there, sometime in the future, each with its own coders and users. Instead of having a single awesome WM (very customizable to each people's needs), we have 10 and they all are incomplete.
r
I know this has been said over and over, but it's still our biggest issue and it's worth repeating it.

And don't tell me that there is a single valid reason why FreeBSD should exist as a separate operating system, because there isn't (and the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count).

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[macshit]

I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue:
...blah blah blah...

good luck with that.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Korin43]

You seem to be missing the point entirely..

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Nutria]

What functionality are we BSD users going to be missing? It didn't really say in the article at all other than that apparently there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world?

According to the 3rd paragraph, udev replaces HAL.

So, since udev is Linux-only, apparently none of the devices that it manages and exposes to the WM can be seen by BSD.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Renegade88]

I'll tell you what, Ace. You get all the Linux distros to merge first, and then you have to right to come knocking at BSD's door. Just ask yourself why operating systems developed as a complete unit would want to merge with a kernel.

BTW, there are 4 major flavors of BSD.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[jjohnson]

the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count

Why not? That's the main reason right that there are so many variants of basically the same thing. Everyone has their own idea about the best way it should be, few are sufficiently humble or diplomatic to accept consensus decisions, and so you get a million shades of red.

You can argue that the continual splintering is worthwhile--natural selection of projects, in effect--but you can't deny that the basic motive behind most forks is "fuck you if you won't do it my way".

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder if removing the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) makes Xfce more specific to one OS (Linux) and harder to port.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[bjourne]

It is freaking hard to develop for a system you dont have access for. Most free software developers doesn't use BSD (or Windows for that matter) so they need help bug-testing and verifying that their software works on those platforms. They don't get the help they need, so they advertise that they really need help triaging those platforms, they still don't get any help so they drop support for them.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Tubal-Cain]

Our goals are varied and often incompatible.
Ubuntu wants to be up-to-date and user friendly, and will tolerate proprietary elements to make it happen. Debian sacrifices the cutting edge for the sake of stability, and user-friendliness for the sake of openness. Red Hat and Novell want to simplify support by controlling their codebases. DSL wants to be smaller than 50 MB, and Yellow Dog wants to run on PS3s.

Apt and Yum handle dependency resolution for you. Slackware hands you a pile of .tgz/.txz files and lets you figure out what you need for yourself. LFS has you compile every piece by hand.

KDE wants every config option to be controllable from the UI. Gnome gives you a UI for some config options, and a registry for the rest. XFCE gives you practically no UI config options whatsoever. The independent WMs are mostly adjusted by editing config files.

KDE uses the Qt toolkit. Gnome and XFCE use GTK. The independent WMs stay lean and fast by not using any toolkits.

GPL wants to ensure that what you write isn't simply forked into a proprietary product. BSD is less concerned about proprietary forks, as long as what they've built on their own is still available to whomever wants it.
This, incidentally, is why FreeBSD should exist: because there is a fundamental disagreement about what "free" software is, and FreeBSD is the largest project in the BSD camp. It's differences in principles such as this one that lead to, for example, Apple choosing to base itself on the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux.

So we should have a Single Unified Unix, eh? That's great. Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, CDE or LXDE? Or maybe BlackBox, OpenBox, Fluxbox, JWM, or IceWM, Ratpoison, FVWM, or xmonad? Yum, Apt or Emerge? Should there be any proprietary binaries (like drivers) in the default install? Should any proprietary binaries be available in the repos at all? Do we accept Mozilla's terms regarding their trademark, or do we fork it a la Iceweasel? BSD, GPL, or Apache license? Microkernel or Macrokernel? Benevolent Dictator for Life or democratically-selected project leaders? How do we accommodate companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell?

Every possible combination will have supporters; how do you reconcile them?

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Tenebrousedge]

Welcome to Unix. You seem to be confused about a great many things. I'm not more than a novice myself, but I must recommend Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming , because for better or worse Unix and F/LOSS count most of your complaints as strengths. Core principles, even.

Your view of the One True Unix implies that there is only one correct way to implement an OS. If there's only one way to implement an OS, doesn't that imply that all computer usage is pretty similar? Perhaps we can optimize for all use-cases at once? Or do you just think that you know better than everyone else how they should spend their coding time?

It's likely that if you've raised this argument here before that people have mentioned the UNIX certification process as well as the Linux Standard Base. In what way do these entities fall short in defining a common standard?

Oh, fuck it. Don't have this argument with me. Don't have it with anyone on slashdot. Go have it out with Theo de Raadt, Linus, Eric Raymond, and RMS. If you want to change the world and change people's minds, start at the top. Alternately, close your mouth, open your mind, and start with the first chapter of that book.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Ant P.]

If my Linux Xfce 4.7 install is any indication (I exorcised PAM long ago, so none of this fancy bloat actually works), you'll just lose the ability to shut down from the menu. And maybe automounting.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Renegade88]

Great thesis except it doesn't apply to either Linus or Theo. Theo spent months trying to regain his commit status. He wasn't looking to fork. The NetBSD core guys basically locked him out and gave him no reason to believe anything would ever change. The sad thing was (besides the fact Theo co-founded the project) was that the code NetBSD locked out was really useful to them. A real interesting story, but it was not an "F*** you" situation.

Linus claimed he wasn't aware of the existing BSD projects, so he wasn't trying to "do his own thing" either.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[icebraining]

Not true; Marx (and Engels) defended that the state is a tool of the oppression of a class by another and both defended a decentralized, stateless society. To them, the idea of a communist state is an oxymoron.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Lumpy]

Only bad designers will use a "registry"

Keep the configs in Config files where they belong.

DesktopIconSize=Large

is better than

{12433242354435435.3245324534253245.345456.5467345643567435643256.34256.3456.34562456324.2546.4356.4356} Option 0

Only a complete nutjob likes the former compared to the latter.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Chemisor]

> there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world
> Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers?

It lies in the BSD philosophy of stability, which the OS developers have translated into stagnation. The native BSD development environment is unusable until you install the GNU toolchain. The BSD desktop is unusable until you install a bunch of GPL software. Even the shell tools suck. And once you get that far, why bother keeping the BSD kernel? I can already get all that with a default install of Linux and without all the drama.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Kjella]

I agree that there is an ideological split between the BSD and GPL camp. But apart from that you're throwing up a million kinds of problems that equally well apply to the Linux kernel but that is running on everything from desktops to servers, with or without binary modules on lots of distros that want different things.

KDE and Gnome may have their holy flamewars over UI design, but if that was the only thing splitting them apart we'd long since see a unification and the different UIs as different skins/settings. All the major subsystems would be shared and how the start bar/menu/file dialog and so on should look would be trivial. And probably configurable for all applications.

Actually the language barrier of C vs C++ is a much bigger problem. Lots and lots of functionality is duplicated between Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt simply because there's no way to write a common module that would fit both projects. You can write a spec and have two implementations, or you can have a separate process like D-Bus but you can't really make GObjects and QObjects talk.

Ok, so maybe not absolutely everyone would use it. But if you managed to get one toolkit become a de facto standard for the average Linux desktop, you'd be a lot further along. It'd be a helluva job though, I'd suggest an asbestos suit as work attire...

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Kjella]

I think more that GPL code can use BSD code, but BSD code can't use GPL code. So in practice the GPL tools tend to do everything the BSD tools do, plus whatever was made by people that only want to release code under the GPL. Same goes for projects, if there's a BSD project someone probably started a similar GPL project that could stand on the shoulders of the BSD one. Then the GPL version gets some unique features the BSD variety doesn't have and the momentum shifts.

It's well and good to believe in the BSD philosophy but it's got to be boring and annoying to reimplement something someone else already wrote under a different open source license, namely the GPL. The easy way to scratch your itch is to just use the GPL tool rather than patch the BSD tool. But if enough people think like that, well naturally the BSD tool will simply stagnate. If "universal adoption by inclusion in proprietary products" isn't a goal then really I don't see the big value of insisting it be BSD, not GPL.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Cid Highwind]

If you want bad design, consider the overhead of several hundred extra fopen() calls to read all the separate .config files for your DE between typing your password and seeing a usable desktop. I'll take "configuration dialog looks superficially like Windows" over "log in, go get coffee, come back, wait, wait some more, read email" any day!

Besides, Microsoft's abuse of UUIDs in the Windows registry doesn't mean everything that looks like a registry is a mess of stupidly-long numbers. Gconf uses human-readable names for everything...

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[npsimons]

Every possible combination will have supporters; how do you reconcile them?

It's called freedom (or liberty; take your pick). And not "freedom to force my choice on others" but freedom to live and let live. This is why I don't have problems with people choosing Apple or Microsoft, as long as they know there are other options available, and they don't ask me to support them. The other day, I had a conversation with a friend who is going to get an iphone as soon as his current contract on his blackberry expires. I asked him if he had heard about Android; he had, and said that he felt like there were more apps for Apple. I let him know that there are probably just as many for Android, and that just because Apple keeps a tight fist on their app store doesn't mean they don't get the occasional trojan or virus, and let it go at that. Live and let live.

What I *do* have a problem with is when companies like Microsoft and Apple try to strongarm others (customers, competitors, unrelated third parties, etc) into giving up their freedoms, all for a false sense of a "sleeker", "more secure" user experience. I have problems with companies when they sue or otherwise prevent open source developers from exercising their right to share the fruits of their labor with others. I really hate being lied to (aka, advertised to) when I've already tried a companies' products and found them wanting (see my sig). What I want is to be able to write my software on the platform of my choice without having to worry about whether it infringes on someones' patents. What I want is not to be beholden to any company who thinks they have a right to my data, my money or my time.

I may not entirely agree with the BSD folks, but they are the least of my worries; they are not trying to take away my freedoms.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[butalearner]

Or do you just think that you know better than everyone else how they should spend their coding time?

This is a key point that pretty much anybody who is not a developer completely misses. Clearly, GP is not a developer. It's the same misunderstanding as thinking that if Valve and Epic and Infinity Ward and Bungie (or whoever develops the big FPSs today) all got together and made one FPS it would turn out better than anything they can do alone. Hopefully even non-developers can see the folly in that.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Really?

$ ls ~/.kde/share/config/ | wc -l
200
$ time cat ~/.kde/share/config/* > /dev/null
cat: /home/dave/.kde/share/config/colors: Is a directory
cat: /home/dave/.kde/share/config/kdm: Is a directory
cat: /home/dave/.kde/share/config/kresources: Is a directory
cat: /home/dave/.kde/share/config/session: Is a directory
 
real 0m0.069s
user 0m0.020s
sys 0m0.000s

I don't know about you, but I can afford to wait 0.069 seconds. Just because some filesystems suck handling small files dosen't mean it's a bad idea. Sure, my KDE login could be faster, but right now it takes less than five seconds.

And if you're saying you can go get coffee, come back, and still be waiting impatiently for those five seconds, I suppose it could be faster, but at least benchmark that it's actually fopen() before making unsubstantiated claims.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Must be why programmers all use "fill-in-the-blank"-style registries. Oh wait...

Before deciding it's only to make people feel "special", you might ask what the advantages actually are. For one, suppose we're configuring a server. Can your registry fit in version control? How easily can you add comments so people know why the hell you configured it the way you did? How many steps is it to clone a config from one machine to another, or back it up? How many tools do you have for working with registries, as opposed to text files?

There are plenty of decent GUIs, many of which I'll use, which deal with textual config files. Still, having those config files has some decided advantages over a registry, especially as fucked-up as the Windows registry is.

Oh, and some Linux desktop environments do have a registry. Guess how much it's helped with the desktop market?

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[TangoMargarine]

For one thing, Linux isn't Unix. BSD is Unix, Linux is only Unix-like. So if you say "A Single Free Unix," Linux is technically straight out. I'm sure this distinction is important for a lot of technical reasons that I'm not cognizant of.

source (more specifically, "functional Unix"). And personally, it would seem to me to be a sort of personal insult to throw away the BSD developers' legal victory back in the 80's in being allowed to exist at all.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Chemisor]

> The easy way to scratch your itch is to just use the GPL tool rather than patch the BSD tool.

That's not the problem. The BSD maintainers will not let you patch the BSD tool because the interface must be kept stable: just like it was back in 1970 or whatever. That's the whole point of using BSD in the first place. It does not change. Some people like that. Those must be the people who still use BSD make. The rest of us like our tools to improve over time, so we use Linux.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[0racle]

If they can get a linux system, they could get a BSD, the array of free virtualization options make it even easier. They choose to use libraries and frameworks that do not exist on other OS's. It is pretty much unportable by design.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[tzanger]

You're seriously timing even a hundred file opens and closes when you're talking about ANY operation centered around a human clicking a button or using a keyboard? You're a fool. Registries are hideous single points of failure with no redeeming value. If you're doing some high speed repetitive operation and need to access data you MIGHT have an argument, but then again the VFS takes care of keeping that data in the filesystem cache already and you're not going to be hitting disk more than once.

Honestly... Do you optimize your code as you write it too?

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

WRONG. Based on that definition, BSD4 was Unix. FreeBSD isn't Unix either, it's just *Nix, or Unix-like. Why? Just because none of them put up with the stupid, bureaucratic and expensive certification process. Otherwise, they are POSIX-compliant.
Regarding the "personal insult" bullshit, I'm not saying that GNU/Linux or FreeBSD or any other OS has to disappear. I said merge. They've won their battles, and we've won ours, and it's time we join forces. And, please read where all of this began: He was complaining about Xfce's latest version being focused mostly on GNU/Linux. Well, of course it is. Free Software has a small userbase, and we work very hard to keep it going. Porting everything to 20 different platforms is stupid. If we ever want to become truly mainstream, we need all the people we can get to jump on the same boat. It's time to put our differences aside. Of course, it's not going to happen, but that doesn't mean we have to stop asking for it.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Byzantine]

A single Free Unix.

Get back to us when you get everyone to completely agree on the definition of "free" in this context.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[mvdwege]

Oh, and some Linux desktop environments do have a registry.

Which ones would those be? They must be obscure, as none of the major desktop environments that I know of uses a registry.

I hope you're not referring to Gnome though. A quick look at your posting history doesn't show you as stupid.

And to clarify for the audience: GConf is not the same as the Windows Registry. GConf is a method to manage configuration files, and the Gnome configuration is stored in human-readable text. That the default GUI tool has an interface that looks superficially similar to regedit does not make GConf a registry.

Mart

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[TangoMargarine]

I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but if the two were to ever merge, all I can see is that one of them will end up running the show while the other one more or less gets their stuff appropriated. The rest of your latter points I agree with, though.

And since the AT&T lawsuit, have there been any other legal things brought up about BSD? For what it's worth, Microsoft et. al. are still lurking around waiting for an opportunity to find something to sue Linux about. And because of the different licenses, it makes sense that they would see BSD as much less of a threat.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[bjourne]

Sure, they can verify that it compiles for other OS:es. Though if they do not use BSD as their primary OS their testing wont be particularily thorough. Can't blame them for not performing time wasting testing for N platforms when there aren't any users for those platforms that themselves bother with reporting bugs.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Urkki]

And don't tell me that there is a single valid reason why FreeBSD should exist as a separate operating system, because there isn't (and the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count).

Just to provide contrast, I'd like to point out that above you're trying to tell people to do things in a certain, very sensible (which of course is the way you think things should be done, because after all, it's a very sensible way), or they're jerks.

Think about it for a moment.

I presume you also think that either GPL or BSD "believers" (those who strongly prefer one style of license over the other) should just reject their idea of open source and embrace an idea they don't like. Just out of curiosity, which group should give up their ideals in your opinion?

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

None of them. I believe we need to cooperate. We need to make all Free Software licenses compatible with each other, not necessarily by changing them, just by adding special clauses allowing linking to other FS licenses.

Nobody needs to let go their ideals. We just have to realize how similar our ideals are, and how different are THEIRS, and then together fight against THEM instead of individually fight each other. We have more things uniting us than separating us.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I know of all the reasons to keep the projects separate, and I know it's not going to happen. All I'm saying is that it's a bad use of our limited resources, and I was specifically telling this to some guy complaining about how a software that was born within GNU/Linux wasn't developing FreeBSD-specific functionality.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Simian Man]

What you said is mostly true, but you have obviously never even used Xfce, it gives you a lot of UI configuration options. Well more than Gnome does.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Tubal-Cain]

I've used Xubuntu.
I'm aware that Kubuntu is supposedly a lousy KDE distro; is Xubuntu the same way to XFCE? Meh, I'll try it in a Debian VM.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[SanityInAnarchy]

I hope you're not referring to Gnome though. A quick look at your posting history doesn't show you as stupid.

A quick Google for "gnome registry" shows that it's not exactly a new idea.

And to clarify for the audience: GConf is not the same as the Windows Registry.

I never claimed it was "the same." However, the differences are largely superficial. For instance:

GConf is a method to manage configuration files,

The Windows Registry manages configuration keys. I'm not seeing a significant difference.

and the Gnome configuration is stored in human-readable text.

It's stored as XML, so that's debatable.

The fact that Windows itself stores it in a binary database is an implementation detail -- Wine stores its registry as .reg files, which appear to be the same format that you get when dumping a key from the Windows Registry Editor. That format is at least as human-readable to me as XML, if not more so.

Fundamentally, however, gconf and the Windows Registry serve the same purpose, certainly considering the context of who I replied to -- anyone complaining that Linux lacks a registry could look at gconf.

In fact, the biggest difference seems to be that the Windows registry is abused far more than I imagine GConf is.

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[Mr. Slippery]

Just ask yourself why operating systems developed as a complete unit would want to merge with a kernel.

And this illustrates why RMS has a point when he harps on the "GNU/Linux" thing...

Re:What functionality are we BSD users ...

[jbolden]

Also remember Linux came out of the Minix world. The goals of Minix and the goals of BSD were very very different. BSD386 was trying to produce a freely available Unix for the 386's for professional use. It ran on better quality 386/486's. Minix was about educational use to teach operating system design and ran on much worse hardware.

Ideas like Linux running everywhere Windows would run came from the Minix community.

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

[Seumas]

I haven't used XFCE in a few years, but this tempts me to play with it, again. Last time I used it, I just deployed it on what was otherwise usually going to be a headless server that I just need CLI access to. It was such a joy, after the other hefty, bloated, overkill options out there (for these purposes, at least).

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Korin43]

You might find it interesting that Gnome feels the same way on Arch. Pretty much everything feels lighter when you're not using Ubuntu ;)

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 is amazing

[evilviper]

It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it...

Let me get you started, then.

You only get an icon on the panel. Descriptive text only shows up after a couple seconds of mouseover.

No themes that disable window borders. The included themes all have thick borders, and even modifying them some, I didn't find a way to drop it below that last 1 pixel width.

No easy way to quickly disable all keyboard shortcuts... one unnoticed minor version upgrade added a zillion new shortcuts that caused several nasty mysteries (at work, over the phone), and once I tracked it down, I had to spend 5 mintues on one station disabling all the shortcuts, one by one, because there's no "none" preset included to start from, only the default/all.

I could come up with a dozen more if I was in front of an XFce system right now, but that'll have to do.

As you may have guessed, my main interest in XFce is something of a Kiosk environment. It works reasonably well, but the above issues are rather significant. #1 in particular makes it hard to recomend, since keywords are easier to convey than icons, and can be much more self explanatory.

For my own part. I loved XFce many years ago when it was an (improved) CDE clone, and used it as my DE for a couple years, until the small bugs finally drove me nuts, and made me a blackbox convert for life.

Going back to it though, it's become much heavier and less responsive, and the great ease of use, like right-clicking on an icon to bring up properties allowing configuration in a matter of seconds. Now, you've got to launch a configuration app, which presents 15 configuration apps, and each is plenty complex. Adding icons to the panel? No problem, but it'll turn into a bunch of random numbered xml files on your hard drive (something like LauncherAJDJFSDEFFCD.xml) making hand-editing tempting, and nearly necessary...

So, for all its years of progress, many of the basic issues still haven't been addressed, and other very basic things they can't get right. This may be intentional, someone convinced they know better than the end users what your desktop should and shouldn't look like. Other stuff is probably just laziness, or lack of forethough. Some certainly are copying GNOME, but just being way behind the curve (GNOME v1.x was mighty small, fast sleek and simple, too.).

Not that any of this is to say it isn't a good DE. It just never seems to be complete for any particular use case, and I'm not all that encouraged by the direction it has gone over the years.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[ProbablyJoe]

Hmm.. I used Xubuntu when I first started using Linux as my main OS and it seemed like a decent balance, though the config options were a bit confusing to me at the time.

I've been using Fluxbox for the last 6 months or so since installing Gentoo on my new computer, and I like the simplicity to a point but it is a bit bare, and also it's been giving me some issues.

The main issue I had with XFCE is it seemed to have issues dealing with multiple monitors. The task bar was spread across both screens, which I didn't want, and I couldn't see any way to change that. Just gave LXDE a try and that did seem to get around that issue. Maybe I'll try this new XFCE.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Lumpy]

Ubuntu Server edition is pretty speedy, but nothing beats a slackware install in speed.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Lumpy]

Kiosk environment... Why are you using a WM?

Launch X with your App. Tada!

Done it many times, if a user figures a way to crash the app, it relaunches X and the app. Never EVER use a WM if you are not going to use one.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Hatta]

It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it...

Here's one. There's no way to permanently turn off the trash bin in XFCE. Fuckin trash nazis.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Draek]

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.

No, not really. I use Debian with LXDE on a Pentium II 300mhz with 160 MBs of RAM for University, and it has worked perfectly so far other than the lack of integrated wifi. Used to run fairly well with Xfce too, except the lack of available RAM hurt when trying to browse more than ~7-8 webpages at the same time.

Do keep in mind as well that Xubuntu is known for being the 'heaviest' Xfce distro around, vanilla Xfce on top of Arch or Debian is much lighter.

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?

Poorly.

Still, as you should know Linux is heavily RAM-dependant and trying to run a GUI on anything less than 128 MBs is for masochists only, which was likely your case. And then you went ahead and made it worse by using the single, most RAM-heavy web browser on the face of Earth. Upgrade that thing to 128 MBs of RAM, put Opera or a Webkit-based browser like Arora or Midori and you'll get much better results, trust me.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[dlsso]

+1 for XFCE on Arch. Installed on an old laptop that the family had deemed too old to be useful. It is now snappier than any of their new laptops. :)

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Foresto]

FYI: I disabled antialiasing (but left hinting enabled) on xubuntu, and switched to Microsoft Core Fonts (Arial, Tahoma, etc.) It looks great.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[pandrijeczko]

Me too.

I recently did a Gentoo Linux Gnome build on my Asus netbook and whilst it's quite stable and usable, it does feel a bit more sluggish than Gnome on my desktop PCs - I think it might be time to try XFCE on it, especially with the new version.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[Rich0]

My Gentoo desktop begs to disagree with you. Actually, right now it is just begging for a break from compiling chromium and xfce... :)

You can't get much lighter than a tailored Gentoo install. The amount of stuff that actually eats RAM that is required is very minimal. Granted, some would argue a full toolchain isn't light, but that only slows down the system when you're actually using it, which I've found to be a better tradeoff.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[evilviper]

Kiosk environment... Why are you using a WM?

With a couple windows open at the same time (eg. any pop-up windows from your main Kiosk app) X11 without a WM is an absolute nightmare. XFwm is nice enough to allow you to customize (ie. remove all) which buttons appear on the title bar. Keyboard shortcuts should be dealt with as well...

The PANEL is the important part in this case, though. We need to allow the user to launch one of several apps of their choice. We could have written a launcher app, but that seems incredibly unnecessary when nearly every DE out there launches app. Seemed pretty straight forward to reuse a common DE, and a custom theme. Got us 99% of the way there. The last 1% was a huge nightmare, as some of the examples above hopefully conveys.

Re:XFCE is amazing

[bzipitidoo]

Upgrade that thing to 128 MBs of RAM

Can't. It is a nettop. Even if I could find memory for it, 96M is the maximum it supports, and that's what I put in it when I bought it 12 years ago. But you know upgrading old computers is a waste of time. About the only upgrading worth considering is robbing components from a similar computer of the same age to beef up another.

I know I should throw it away. But I have hopes that laptop thieves wouldn't bother to steal it, and so it'd be safer for trips. Odds are they'd grab first and find out how obsolete it is later. And whatever data may be on it could still be valuable.

I occasionally use old computers to measure how bloated our software has become. But there's been enough qualitative changes over the years to make that suspect. For example, the integration of the math coprocessor starting with the 486 made it pointless to rag on math heavy software for being too slow on older machines. Today, graphics are so much more capable that perhaps constant computing and rendering of fonts is no big deal. And with so much more RAM, why bother being careful with memory allocation? So what if all the font work takes up a few piddly megabytes of RAM?

Stellarium is unusable on that 133MHz Pentium. Takes 5 minutes (!) to come up, and then the frame rate is slower than the movement of stars, and so it never catches the display up. Xmms is okay, but if the display is enabled, that strains it to the limit. Can't move the mouse pointer around and display the frequencies at the same time without the music cutting out. It would seem that because Doom runs fine on such a machine, it should be able to handle a mere star gazing program. But Doom uses a lot of tricks to work around the limitations of early 90's graphics. Many of those are useless or even counterproductive with today's graphics. No one is going to do a highly optimized, shortcut riddled, 2nd rate rendering job in software when a modern GPU can do it better, faster, and easier. You're right in that playing around with such old computers is masochism.

VFS eh?

[Erik Fish]

All I ask is that ThunarVFS not suck.

One of the main reasons I don't use GNOME anymore is because GnomeVFS was such a godawful piece of shit for years and years, with nobody seeming particularly concerned about it.

I would be all "Hey, I'll use the GUI to copy these files from one drive to another" and GnomeVFS would be all "Sure thing! I'll have that done sometime after the heat death of the universe!"

Don't even get me started on the SMB performance.

Re:VFS eh?

[countertrolling]

All I ask is that ThunarVFS not suck.

Don't worry. It'll be like it's not even there

Re:VFS eh?

[Simon80]

ThunarVFS isn't new, it's one of the things they've replaced and removed.

Re:VFS eh?

[Hatta]

Why the hell are GUI layers providing virtual filesystems anyway? What happens if I want to pop open a console and manipulate the files I've been manipulating on a VFS? Why not just use FUSE which will work whether you're on the GUI or on the console. It'll work whether you use XFCE, GNOME, or KDE.

There's way, way too many features dependent on a GUI these days.

Re:VFS eh?

[badkarmadayaccount]

Some sort of sick idea of portability, I believe - though if someone is arsed to port the platform libraries to use FUSE, I don't think they would refuse to use it.

Xfce seems to be a pretty good compromise...

[Just Brew It!]

...between functionality and bloat. I have not used it as my primary desktop environment, but I do sometimes install it when I want a reasonably full-featured desktop in a VM without causing the size of the VM disk image to balloon too much.

For a truly minimalist lightweight desktop, LXDE seems to be showing a lot of promise.

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.

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

[macshit]

Hmm, things I like about Gnome: (1) gtk, and (2) gnome-panel
Things I don't like about Gnome: Their continuing descent into the abyss

As xfce uses gtk, it's always sort of on my radar as something to use instead of gnome, but in the past their panel has always been a little clunkier and uglier than gnome-panel. I'd always try it out, but go back to gnome after a while.

Gnome 3 is looking pretty awful, so here's hoping for xfce 4.8!

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

[Dcnjoe60]

The problem with LXDE is that by the time you add all of the features that it does not provide, it gets pretty heavy, too. You could install openbox and add just XFCE's panel and pretty much recreate LXDE's footprint.

Don't get me wrong, LXDE is very good, very fast. It's just that it doesn't provide a lot of the services that people have come to expect in a full desktop environment.

However, if I were installing a server and wanted to have a GUI, LXDE would certainly be a consideration.

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

[Just Brew It!]

Picky, picky... if you're going to be that minimalist, you might as well just use something like screen. :D

Re:Good grief...

[hedwards]

You do realize that Xfce has been around since 1996, right? It's hardly a new addition, personally I like it.

What about 4.7?

[hoytak]

Or was "4.7" already taken by KDE and thus they had to use "4.8"?

Re:What about 4.7?

[jensend]

Like a lot of open-source software (most famously Linux before they decided everything from here on out would be 2.6), the odd point releases are the development branches.

Re:What about 4.7?

[dmbasso]

odd version numbers = unstable/development
even version numbers = stable/release

IceWM and pcmanfm

[enter to exit]

Whenever i want a light desktop i almost always go with a combination of IceWM, pcmanfm for desktop icons and the lxde apps.

I don't need any GUI configuration tool and iceWM has well documented conf files.
It's familiar enough that someone who has only ever used windows can navigate enough and lite enough for me to ignore it in favour of a command line.

Re:And Xfce is...?

[Nutria]

You really couldn't try http://www.xfce.org/ ?

Anyway, it's a middle-weight DE based on Gtk.

Re:And Xfce is...?

[Tubal-Cain]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=xfce

FTFY.

in time for Xubuntu 11.04?

[Tumbleweed]

Anyone know if this is in time to make it into the next Xubuntu in April?

Re:in time for Xubuntu 11.04?

[heidaro]

From the Xubuntu blog: "The new version of Xfce is scheduled to be included in Xubuntu 11.04, to be released in April of this year."

Re:in time for Xubuntu 11.04?

[Foresto]

Yes, it's already in the Natty package repository.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xfce4

Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[DrMorris]

Are there any resources that actually back Xfce's claim of being "light" in comparison to GNOME?

I tried Xfce several years ago and while it was nice and easy and all, I had the feeling that with a bit more memory I could just as well run GNOME with obvious benefits (feature-wise).

Today the situation is still the same IMHO. Sure, Xfce has probably a lot more features nowadays, but so does GNOME. I see the benefit in the GNOME framework: it's mature and stable, and more or less customizable. I guess it would be possible to strip out some GNOME services (e.g. desktop search) if memory is of concern. CPU usage shouldn't be an issue with GNOME (unless some background service runs, which again could be turned off if not wanted).

With that in mind: how does Xfce compare to [a minimalistic] GNOME regarding resource usage?

Note that I'm not a GNOME fanboy (I use a plain window manager), but right now it's the desktop environment I'd recommend to others.

Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[Fallingcow]

It used to be much lighter, I think.

Then again, I ran it on Gentoo, so who knows. When I tried it a couple years later in Ubuntu it looked way different (worse) and felt way more bloated, but I'm not sure whether it's because XFCE changed or because the Ubuntu team configured it that way.

Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[Dcnjoe60]

I am guessing from your post that you run Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives. Xfce on Ubuntu is not much better than Gnome, becaue Ubuntu packs a lot of stuff in to their Xfec impleimenation besides Xfce. Ubuntu, is not a distribution you want to use for a memory constrained or slow CPU system.

However, if you run Xfce on Debian, Fedora, Arch, etc. it simply flies and uses fewer resources than gnome.

Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[hey!]

Sorry, but it turns out that all the facts about XFCE's resource usage are warm and squishy, and a lot of folks prefer it that way.

Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[pandrijeczko]

Last time I ran Xfce on Gentoo was probably around the 4.4/4.5 version and it was exceptionally whizzy and fast compared to the Gnome version of the time.

There's probably a case to be made that if your platform is struggling with Gnome and Ubuntu, then you'd probably be best putting Xfce on *AND* Gentoo Linux so you can also get some additional speed with clever compiler optimisations and USE flags.

Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage?

[DrMorris]

You guessed wrong, I tried Xfce on Debian.

Looking forward to running this on my PS3

[calagan800xl]

With the current absence of GPU hardware acceleration and low memory available, Xfce has been the desktop environment of choice for my 3.15 PS3's OtherOS. I'm really excited to try this new version which seems vey promising.

The "two features" thread starts here ...

[KMSelf]

There are two, hopefully simple, things XFCE4 could provide which would make it a tenable desktop for me. Otherwise, I'll stick with WindowMaker:

Pinnable window lists. In WindowMaker, the feature provided by hitting the middle mouse button, or F11 key. A window menu with a list of all available windows. Allows you to scroll through these, click on likely subjects, etc., trying to find that 24th rxvt instance or the 7th Iceweasel window that you'd lost track of somewhere. Without this, managing the mess of windows my typical desktop devolves to after a day or so (and sessions typically run weeks to months) becomes an utter nightmare.

Circulate-and-raise alt-tab navigation. Similar rationale to above, and also implemented in WindowMaker (or Mac OS X or the Windows desktop). Under XFCE4, an outline of the window raises. Utterly .... useless.

Really, of all the alternative desktops (and I regularly revisit GNOME, KDE, XFCE4, OpenBox, ionwm, and others) XFCE4 comes the closest to a replacement for WindowMaker. But 12 years after having first tried that old standard, it still provides a light, fast, stable, configurable (from a keybindings and behavior standpoint), extremely workable desktop.

My one concern is that WindowMaker's seen no development since 2008, though it is very nearly feature complete, and is certainly very highly usable. I recommend it particularly for newbies.

Otherwise, congrats to the XFCE4 team for their milestone. Anyone else missing features (if I dare ask)?

Re:The "two features" thread starts here ...

[Fallingcow]

Go WindowMaker fans! *high five*

I thought I was the only one. Everyone else seems to use the hideous *box window managers for ultra-light GUI work.

Re:The "two features" thread starts here ...

[MrLizardo]

Not at all. I tend to use it on any machine that has 1GB of RAM or less. Even on more powerful machines I tend to oscillate back and forth between WM and GNOME ever couple years. Also, a couple months ago I did a new install of it on a laptop I inherited from someone upgrading and was pleased to see that http://dockapps.org/ is still up, which made me all sorts of happy. :D

Re:The "two features" thread starts here ...

[MareLooke]

There's still us Fvwm using oddballs out there as well.

Re:The "two features" thread starts here ...

[davek]

Love the dockapps! My preferred setup is to run windowmaker inside of gnome just so I can get by 64x64 dockapps, but sometimes that causes too much hassle and I just end up running windowmaker by itself. There's a few ways to switch gnome's window manager, the most reliable is to set the registry key to what you want:

  1. run gconf-editor
  2. find the key "/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager", and change that to /usr/bin/wmaker
  3. create the window maker desktop file at /usr/share/xsessions/wmaker.desktop, something like

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Window maker
Comment=This session logs you into Window Maker
Exec=/usr/bin/wmaker
# no icon yet, only the top three are currently used
Icon=
Type=Application

Re:The "two features" thread starts here ...

[phantomfive]

Wow, another windowmaker fan. I thought I was the only one (although my favorite feature is focus follow mouse; maybe other window managers can do that now, but I don't check around as much as you do).

Re:And Xfce is...?

[Relyx]

I did - that's where I found out it was a "light-weight desktop environment" :) Still would have been nice to have that information in the summary though.

Re:Xfce has been fast and light since when?

[Dcnjoe60]

Fluxbox is a window manager. XFCE does ship with it's own window manager (but you can use whatever window manager you want). A desktop environment is significantly more than just a window manger.

Enlightenment is very good, however, there is very little software that does things in an enlightenment way. Slapping gtk or qt apps on top of enlightenment ruins the beauty that enlightenment presents.

People who think xfce is heavy, are mainly Ubuntu users, where a lot of extra stuff from Ubuntu has been thrown in. Debian, Redhat, Gentoo, Arch, etc. all show a lean and fast XFCE implementation.

Cool...

[disi]

I dropped Xfce 4.6 about a month ago because of HAL
Xfce and WindowMaker are the only two who have windowmanagers that allow me to minimize windows to the Desktop as icon (I know of). I hate Taskbars!

Let's see :)

FVWM

[KMSelf]

Y'know, I'm tempted back into the fold, I really am.

fvwm's config file format is powerful, but also somewhat opaque. Might still just grab that bull.

As for old school, one of the most tricked-out desktops I've ever seen is Steve Hand's twm configuration (he's one of the core Xen developers). Multiple desktops, all hot-keyed, flying back and forth between windows and desktops while coding up a storm, building sources, and running VMs. Just goes to show you don't need to ran teh new hawt an shinay for a productive desktop.

The answer is simple

[rigorrogue]

And is, like all good answers, contained in the question.

We show generosity of spirit. We give our work and so improve the collective.

I would refer you to Knuth. And then to Gauss, Lamport, and Dijkstra (it's better than a pun).

The great generosity of developers means that over the last 18 years I've used Enlightenment (my longest favorite), X-Windows (my oldest favorite), KDE (my favorite favorite), Gnome (my current favorite), XFCE (my usability favorite), Ratpoison (my ideological favorite), and xmonad (my functional favorite). Give me such variety amongst propriety systems.

If you don't get this you are not an appreciator of the joy of thought, and I feel sorry for you. We possess a marvelous coalescence of thought previously un-dreamt. We, our forbears, have created a communications mechanism so powerful and clear as to transcend previous perception of intercourse. We are rough and ready, as we have always been. And we are better.

So, in blunt, go study. Go study algorithms, YACC, LISP, and Haskell. And then come chat.

P.S. I've suffered such brief dispatch, I've taken the intellectual knocks. That's where real learning begins.

Re:Xfce has been fast and light since when?

[Sadsfae]

In my experience on XFCE 4.6.x and Fedora (11 to 14+) it is much faster than GNOME on several different laptop/desktop hardware configurations. Average startup from login to usable desktop is 1/2 the time it takes GNOME at least, and that's with compiz + emerald running.