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Xfce Getting a New Version Soon
jones_supa writes It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize. It has been about two and half years since the last stable release. There is now a concerted effort underway to ship a new release of this lightweight GTK+2 desktop environment out around the end of February or early March. "As we have discussed the status and progress of core components with many of you individually, we feel confident that the state of Xfce is good enough to polish some final edges and push more translations until then," wrote Simon Steinbeiß on the xfce4-dev mailing list. The official list of showstopper bugs does not look too bad either. However, looking at the long time between releases certainly makes one think if the project could have use for some extra resources.
I'll let some pictures show why GTK+3 is an abomination.
This is a GTK+ 2 UI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png
This is the GTK+ 3 UI of a later version of the same application: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png
The GTK+ 2 UI is a good one. It follows widely-used conventions, with toolbars containing frequently-used functionality (with relevant icons and descriptive text), and menus containing additional functionality that may not be used as often. This results in an application that's easy to use.
The GTK+ 3 UI is an awful one. There's no consistency. It's difficult to tell what's a button that results in an immediate action, and that is merely a menu. The icons don't describe the corresponding action. The application is nearly impossible to use.
Going from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 was a total regression for gedit. Its UI was trashed, rendering it unusable. I sure hope that the Xfce developers don't make the same mistake.
Agreed. At home I use lightweight WMs such as XFCE or Openbox. Not a fan of the bloat...
all I need for a windows manager is extreme stability, low footprint, a slick way to organize menues, the ability to configure and independence of as many other components as possible. No gimmicks like fullscreen modus if a window is moved to the bottom. Light weight windows managers fullfill all this already nicely. I still use blackbox and have essentially not changed my setup since 15 years. Its all I ever need. fluxbox, xfce are very similar and would work for me too. Nice to have one text file .blackboxmenu which gives the menu and one file .blackboxrc which controls the features. There is nothing to learn about it
except that right clicking anywhere on the desktop produces the menu. Also nice, the finder in OSX can be configured so that the workflow is essentially identical on both platforms (the doc is the essential difference). But its important for the workflow to not lose fractions of seconds here and there due to poor or `clever' interface design or when moving from one operating system to an other.The problem of designing a good user interface on the desktop is solved and its based on KISS.
On the phone it took longer.
Best reason to use XFCE? It's not KDE or Gnome.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I realize Lennert is your new god and all, but really! I know someone hacked a way to postpone the dependency, but by then a lot of people had already switched. Even more are switching now that it's been made clear that the intent is to be dependent on systemd
Why should I have to alt+rclick, dig into the window manager settings, find a theme, etc, etc etc. when XFCE could do what every other decent UI does - PROVIDE A GRABBABLE WINDOW BORDER OUT OF THE BOX.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think you're confusing XFCE and XUbuntu. The distribution, XUbuntu, chose the default theme. For 12.04, that's Greybird, which has 1px wide borders. I've honestly been quite annoyed with that, and I had tried other themes in the past (much much older installs), and just learned to deal with it. HOWEVER, I just tried the theme's again, and "Default-4.6", which I assume is the default XFCE theme, has 5px wide borders... those seem just right to me.
So, complain to XUbuntu. XFCE provides a default theme that fits your default needs. In addition, it's REALLY easy to change your theme. If they had set it to the 5px wide one, I'm sure someone else would be complaining because the border is taking up all their precious screen space and why should they have to go into a menu to ... blah blah blah. The fact is, there is an easy to use settings manager, and it's a couple click to change it. THey're not burying settings like so many other apps these days (gnome, firefox, chrome, etc).