Slashdot Mirror
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.
All you have to do is not suck. Just don't completely fuck this up like gnome and ubuntu did and you'll be fine.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
XFCE is way better than Gnome or KDE for home use, in my opinion. Others may not agree. It has been in limbo for a while, so hearing that it is finally getting an update is great news.
Perhaps these schools used old distros which still shipped Gnome 2. After the Gnome 3 debacle pretty much everyone except perhaps a couple of Red Hat employees switched to Xfce. It's now more or less the standard Linux desktop, so yes it will matter.
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.
*Raises hand*
I've been supporting university and small business systems for twenty years now. For some small businesses who want to get stuff done but do not feel the need for all of the latest desktop whiz-bangetry I field Xubuntu LTS (14.04 nowadays). It just works, and they don't have to refresh their hardware every three years.
Agreed. At home I use lightweight WMs such as XFCE or Openbox. Not a fan of the bloat...
Why would the Xubuntu team not provide support for XFCE? Using XFCE is the whole point of their distro. Maybe you are confusing the main Ubuntu distro with Xubuntu?
I see XFCE every time I boot up my computer. They seem to be the only Linux desktop willing to maintain a working relationship with sanity.
to be fair, Win95 is a pinnacle when you put Gnome3 and KDE4 in the same room with them.
Wish qvwm continued.
xfce devs refuse to recognize things like this as a problem. Fuck those idiots and fuck xfce.
So you don't like the default for borders? Easily fixed in xfce using Settings Manager - Window Manager. Just pick one of the other pre-built styles, such as Daloa, or Kokodi, or Moheli.
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 have seen several KDE and GNOME desktops. I have come across zero XFCE installations!
I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too. There are lots of people that use it but I will admit it is not as popular as the big two.
Another thing that linux has lost over the years is the truly breathtaking desktops we used to have. I remember when if you wanted a gui for your linux box you had to roll your own. You had a frame work to work with but every ones desktop was truly there own creation at the end of the day.
Enlightenment. There was a truly breath taking windows manager. Window maker, and good old xfvm2. I know they are still alive but only on life support.
Best reason to use XFCE? It's not gnome or kde.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Xfce is for people that want a professional looking desktop that doesn't get in the way of getting real work done. A desktop that does it job and doesn't get in the way or consume to many resources that could best be dedicated to real work.
If you don't like the way XFCE you can change it. My desktop at one point did look like windows 95 then I changed it. Now it looks like a modern version of CDE. The other day I was playing with some settings and icons and I could make XFCE look like a modern mac desktop.
So yeah, its like anything else. You only get into it what you put out of it.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too.
In a video from 6 months ago where Supreme Penguin shows his treadmill desk setup, a GNOME3 desktop can be seen. It's true that he did use XFCE at some point though.
For those of us who prefer to roll our own distros or compile stuff ourselves, XFCE is far easier to build from scratch than any GNOME or KDE4 environment. The dependencies on libraries not shipped in XFCE directly are minimal and there aren't many snags to worry about.
at least on Linux MInt. I've been using Mint for about 8 years now and I always end up going back with XFCE when Gnone, Mate, Cinnamon end up having weird usability issues and glitches.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
My company has standardized on XFCE. When Debian switched to GNOME 3, my users revolted so I switched them to XFCE.
XFCE is seeing a resurgence now the gnome screwed the pooch and insists on depending on systemd.
or consume to many resources
Why, why is this still and issue? Are you using a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM? Otherwise I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015. Every OS works fine with decent hardware, and if you use computers for a living I can't believe you're not able to buy 8GB of RAM.
Spoken like someone who has never used a computer for anything that could not be done in a week's time with paper and pencil.
Computer graphics and animation. Audio editing (the high quality stuff, not mashing together lossy mp3s). Statistical analysis. To be brief, much of what is done today by many artists and small business owners. All of these are done measuably better on computers that do not waste resources on OS and GUI shiny distractions.
Will
Supposedly the consolekit support code is still there, but needs a maintainer.
Not helping tough that the person that put in the logind code is the same guy that maintains systemd as a whole, and used to maintain consolekit. And who very loudly declared consolekit dead and buried on the mailing list (to the point that if Canonical wanted to continue maintaining consolekit, they needed to find a new name and set up a new repo), and then finally shut down the same mailing list under the pretext of spam.
Yep, Poettering...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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
I have it on all my computers that run Linux and need a GUI. It could be making a bit more work of drag-and-drop in its own elements (panels etc) though.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I honestly hope the following is helpful...
It sounds like you just need a decent window manger, rather than a whole desktop environment.
You can configure it as one would have done with startx (editing ~/.xinitrc), and instead just edit ~/.xsession. For example, have it include:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
xterm &
exec xfwm4
You may have to tweak your desktop manager (gdm/xdm/kdm/lightdm/etc) to use an xsession. For lightdm (default in ubuntu 12.04), here's an example of how to do it:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Custom...
You can add on whatever panels, launchers, etc you'd like that way, and keep it as light or heavy as you want. Replace the xfwm4 with whatever window manger you want. NOTE: that xfwm4 won't run the whole xfce desktop... it's just the window manger. Personally, I'd suggest taking a look at sawfish, but to each their own.
If he just wants a good windows managers I would suggest going old school, really old school.
FVWM Home Page
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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).
That is the value of XFCE!!! They're not pushing a new paradigm onto unsuspecting users. Will a new version release "really matter?" No, never. Thank goodness for that! Users of something like XFCE don't want a new paradigm, they want shit that worked already to keep working, and they want the new shit to integrate with the old shit so people using the old shit can keep using it in exactly the same way that they used it before.
You came across zero XFCE as an end-user supporting end-user "desktops," that is normal. XFCE is heavily used, but by more technical people who want to make their own technical choices, and have their software respect those choices.
As a software developer, of course I encounter other XFCE users all the time. No, we don't care what you think of our choices. No, we're not asking you to run XFCE. If you don't already care about XFCE, or have a theory as to why you should care... please, don't care. It doesn't help us in any way.
Because the people behind gtk3 are actively hostile to everyone but the GNOME project. Not only breaking functionality that non-GNOME projects need, but seeking out GTK applications and pressuring them to remove functionality just because GNOME Shell no longer uses it.
Details and further criticisms are all over the web; a couple starting points are here or here .
GTK is generally seen as a dead end these days. Many if not most of the folks who develop GTK apps that aren't part of the core GNOME project are scrambling to port to QT or something else. And GNOME itself is a struggling project and has been bleeding market share for 4 years now.