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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.