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Xfce 4.12 Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

motang writes: After two years of hard work (and much to the dismay of naysayers who worried the project has been abandoned), the Xfce team has announced the release of Xfce 4.12. Highlights include improvements to the window switcher dialog, intelligent hiding of the panel, new wallpaper settings, better multi-monitor support, improved power settings, additions to the file manager, and a revamped task manager. Here is a quick tour, the full changelog, and the download page. I have been running it since Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1 was released two days ago. It is much improved over 4.10, and the new additions are great.

4 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. The Only Desktop Environment I Use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Has everything I want and nothing I don't. So many people seem to want form over function these days and that just results in wasted system resources.

    1. Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's probably because many users of XFCE don't need all the extra functions of other DEs and don't realize that other people do.

      I work in a STEM academic department and the Linux users are mostly very focused on their teaching or research. Most of them only want the basics. Anything more is unnecessarily slowing down their PCs. That is particularly an issue for those who are still, all by choice, using older PCs.

      It really comes down to what you need or want. I suspect many of the XFCE proponents don't need or want the extra features and don't understand why (1) other people need things that they themselves don't, and/or (2) why most other people want things that are not needed.

      I noticed there's an increase in features in XFCE. If those extra features came with a performance hit, you will actually see some XFCE users switch to LXDE. I suspect the loss will be surpassed by the number of users switching to XFCE due to the gain in features. But I could be wrong.

  2. Is XFCE going the bloat-path? What happened to E? by Qbertino · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is XFCE going down the bloat path? ... I'm not trolling here, this is an honest question. To me it looks like they're building a dekstop environment and slowing piling features on. My impression is, that we have enough of those with Gnome, KDE and Enlightenment 17 and perhaps a few others.

    Or what is the upside of XFCE? Is it like a "light-weight" KDE or something? And what's with LXDE? Wasn't that the hippest kid on the WM/DE block these days?

    BTW, what happened to E17? I remember Enlightenment being the darling-child of WMs in the Linux community. Is it nowadays to difficult to configure and/or install?

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  3. Re:Is XFCE going the bloat-path? What happened to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As a long time XFCE user, I have a little of this concern as well. However, with how XFCE was designed, all these 'improvements' , should be manageable. The problem I guess then, is footprint. If 4.12 starts to feel, heavy, and I don't think it would really be bloat because these 'improvements' don't sound ilke massive code implementations, but I will be looking at pre, and post upgrade memory usage numbers on my systems.

    I hope XFCE doesn't go down the path of 'feature creep' , because it's always been to me, a minimalist interface, but not TOO lightweight. I hope it's just in reading all the features that it feels like 'creep' , but I, we'll, only really know once we have it installed.