Xfce 4.12 Released

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.

Comments

The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[Anonymous Coward]

form over function these days and that just results in wasted system resources

Only if it is poorly optimized. For example the blur effect of Unity's Dash totally brings low-performance machines on their knees, but a similar blur effect in Windows 7 is extremely snappy even on those old 10" Atom netbooks.

Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[rochrist]

Never understood people who get butthurt over other people likely something they don't like.

Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[Blaskowicz]

Mate is rather fine, in terms of weight it's more like XP whereas Cinnamon is a bit more like Vista. It's just gnome 2, which used to be what went on machines with 512MB RAM back when that was the sweet spot for a PC.
Lately, the biggest issue I'm seeing is recent VLC takes a long time to start (2.x, or is that 2.1.x specifically), afterwards it works as usual. The first file manager window you open (caja) takes a few seconds on a slow HDD but then it's fine.
I go to LXDE if RAM saving is needed. Xfce is similar to both in UI (with the common denominator being, till now, GTK2)

Whatever you use, the PC is limited by disk I/O. On a I/O bound PC that is not CPU bound or memory bound, just be confident and wait a little.
It might all be a bit moot : the applications themselves may use more and bigger libraries. It's typical to use a mix of GTK2, Qt and GTK3 applications so there's more libraries to load that are not already in RAM or disk cache.

Re:The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[epyT-R]

Not sure what you mean. xfce is pretty simple and intuitive to use. It takes a minute or two in control panels and then gets out of your way. The interface conventions are easily toggled between various unix environments and microsoft ones as well.

Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use

[techno-vampire]

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 use Xfce for a number of reasons. One of them is the fact that it's easy to customize without installing third-party extensions. I also like the fact that if your needs are simple you can get rid of bells, whistles and gongs that you don't need. However, I fully understand that there are people who either need or want those tools (If anybody should understand that it's me; I use Compiz because I like the flashy desktop effects.) and I appreciate the fact that they're there if you need or want them. For me, one of the important traits of Linux is the ability to decide for yourself what tools you need or want instead of being stuck with what the developers think you want and I'll probably stick with Xfce as long as that's what it provides.

Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfce 4 has been a great desktop environment, but it's now clear that GTK+ is a dead end.

GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI to this hideous, unusable UI. You can even see a screenshot of this shitty UI in the Xfce 4.12 tour! It has, sadly, been infected by this bad UI design.

The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace. It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it. Inkscape is horrible. GIMP is horrible. Every other GTK+ app I've tried on Windows or OS X has been absolutely horrible.

It will be a lot of work, but they need to port Xfce from GTK+ to Qt. Qt is a much better toolkit. It looks great. It works (and actually works, in that the resulting software is perfectly usable!) pretty much everywhere.

GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Xfce devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.

Xfce 5 has to be based on Qt.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfce 5 has to be based on Qt.

And who's going to pay for the porting ? If it took 2 years for this update imagine just how many years we need to do a Qt port.
I'd say 10 years at the least. Same for Inkscape or Gimp.
If we want to save these projects not only must the devs be onboard to jump ship (GTk to Qt) they must be paid. No one is going to do such a tremendous work on their free time.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfce might be too big a project to simply switch gears like that. If you want a minimalist Qt-based DE, you might want to try LXQt. The 0.8 version has been pretty decent in my limited interactions with it, and I'm looking forward to trying out the 0.9 release sometime soon.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[drinkypoo]

The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish. X11 is the only platform where it isn't a disgrace.

The portability of GTK+ is also fairly irrelevant when it comes to a desktop for Unix. As long as you can use it with X11 today and either Wayland or X11 tomorrow, it's a suitable toolkit for the development of a Unix DE.

It would be nice to see GIMP and other apps move away from GTK, but uh, GIMP, GTK, etc. But I don't think it matters much for XFCE. If anything, what I want is for my DE not to be based on a major toolkit. This breaks down when it gets to the file manager, but it's not clear that the fm even needs to be closely integrated with the desktop unless you want icons on your desktop. I don't really feel that I need a "desktop", as it were. I only use it on Windows, and then only because it's easy to get to.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[dbIII]

GTK+ has also been used as a strawman for X. The Wayland people have used the slow startup of the new gedit as their example of how X is slow, and they have used the network transparency problems with the new gtk+ to say that only "old" software does not spam the network with full sized bitmaps.
I wish Wayland the best but the fanboys who pretend that the bar for it to reach is set low are hindering it.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Clsid]

You must work for Digia or something. If by portability you mean how well the interface looks, that is a moot point. Nobody would question that Java code was portable, and yet Java programs looked and behaved different (different dialogs, etc) than native software.

On the other hand, you fail to mention why Gtk+ is so bad in your eyes besides shiny graphics, which imho, in Linux land looks better than Qt. Why on earth would the Xfce guys care how well a Qt app looks on Windows or OSX? It is a desktop environment for X11/Wayland for christ's sake.

But in any case a post from an anonymous coward, who probably have never used either toolkit, and maybe is not even a programmer. When you have to work with this stuff, in the end you realize that it is mostly about what was best for the team at the time they started the project (availabe skillset, docs, etc) and at this point both frameworks are the best the open source world has to offer. If you don't enjoy diversity you can go back to Win32, lol.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[fisted]

Nobody would question that Java code was portable

Really? Have they finally ported it to any platform other than the JVM?

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

The portability of GTK+ is also fairly irrelevant when it comes to a desktop for Unix. As long as you can use it with X11 today and either Wayland or X11 tomorrow, it's a suitable toolkit for the development of a Unix DE.

I have to disagree, choosing GTK+ as a base makes it easier to integrate GTK+ based applications and harder to integrate applications based on sane alternatives. Sure most applications will still be usable, however I still remember when the GNOME folks decided to roll their own close button and random applications suddenly hat two (the second one provided by the window manager as was normal and the ugly GNOME hack). To sum my opinion up its hard to fit a square peg into a round hole, so care has to be taken that outside projects can fit in nicely.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

> GTK+ had its place in the late 1990s. But we're well past that time now. Qt is the best toolkit to use these days. I truly wish that the Xfce devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X, as well as getting a much better experience under Linux.

Well, I thought Qt was better from the start (at least from KDE 2.0 which I remember), so I'm not the one to argue with you.

IIRC, Xfce was initially based on the XForms toolkit and changed to GTK+ because of the better GPL license.

This point became moot at the moment XForms was relicensed as LGPL, but I'm sure the Xfce folks have pondered whether to return to the old toolkit or not.

But Qt is not the only option. I think fltk as a lighter option could be nice, too. And it could be help those guys doing EDE, providing common functions, just like LXDE, Xfce and Gnome do.

I think fltk is the ugly duckling -- very underrated; I see fltk and Xfce as having the same overall philosophy.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[RightwingNutjob]

I'm sure there are, each with their own quirks and "language extensions." Kinda like C++11. A program that grew up around gcc's implementation needs to be ported to microsoft's implementation, even if it links in no libraries. Example: __asm__ vs asm(...); Neither is in the language spec, so both are extensions, and surprise! linux kernel code can't just be copy-pasted to windows kernel code.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Kjella]

If anything, what I want is for my DE not to be based on a major toolkit. This breaks down when it gets to the file manager

And the system settings, that one is much tighter integrated to the DE than the file manager. And it needs to manipulate the pointer. And context menus, arrange menu bars etc. so it need some kind of UI toolkit. I don't quite see what it has to gain by reinventing the wheel, it's not like pulling in Qt/Gtk drains that many resources by themselves.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Anonymous Coward]

I meant less than 1 MB, but the "less than" character was removed by Slashdot.

Yep, that's because the "less than" character is reserved to begin a HTML tag.

Use &lt; to get a '<'.
Use &gt; to get a '>'.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[binarstu]

Whoever this AC is, s/he evidently has a fill-in-the-blank comment template for bashing GTK+ that can be mindlessly reused for any software based on GTK+. Check out this AC comment from a recent story about Inkscape: http://news.slashdot.org/comme.... Notice that most of it is almost word-for-word identical to the parent post. Just do a search and replace to change "Inkscape" to "Xfce" and you end up with today's comment.

That's why the AC ends up making such stupid satements as:

I truly wish that the Xfce devs would port from GTK+ to Qt, so that we users can use it on Windows and OS X...

Huh? Who, exactly, is wanting to run XFCE on "Windows and OS X"? As others have already pointed out, this statement is neither insightful nor relevent. XFCE is a desktop/window management system for *Linux*, and there is absolutely no reason for its developers to care one whit about how easily it could be ported to Windows.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[drinkypoo]

I don't quite see what it has to gain by reinventing the wheel, it's not like pulling in Qt/Gtk drains that many resources by themselves.

I have systems which have a GUI and yet have no Qt/GTK stuff whatsoever. The less code I can have on the system at all, the less chance that some of it will go wrong. But sometimes you really need a gui config tool of some kind for sanity's sake.

Of course, more and more of those are GTK or Qt apps now so I guess it's not really that important.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[armanox]

With the exception of the GIMP, maybe they should have used Qt to begin with then. (I would expect the GIMP to use the GIMP Tool Kit, after all).

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[armanox]

Well, Seeing stuff using Motif is getting rare, and not a whole lot uses TCL/TK or LessTif either...

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[dbIII]

obscene amount of CPU time is uses for doing just about anything.

Yes, the obscene amount on a Nokia N900 phone, on an older Kindle, on a thin client, on a Pentium fucking 60 - maybe up to 5% of CPU at times. How is a modern system with GHz instead of 60 MHz and multiple cores going to cope?
It's best to think before posting Mr AC.

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[Tranzistors]

I was wondering, it GNOME devs were that crazy to break their apps everywhere, and they aren't. On fedora xfce installed gedit 3.14 http://pbrd.co/1FQXEGT
There are some goofs, like duplication of minimize, maximize and close buttons. The xfce window decoration is there and works. Menu items, that were in the global menu, are now in the window menu (except for "new window", that seems to be gone, but Ctlr+N and tab detaching works just fine).
Can you point to the DE, where gedit is really broken?

Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt.

[rdnetto]

When you have to work with this stuff, in the end you realize that it is mostly about what was best for the team at the time they started the project (availabe skillset, docs, etc) and at this point both frameworks are the best the open source world has to offer.

Which means that the most useful data points are the projects which went through the effort of migrating between libraries. e.g. Subsurface which moved from GTK+ to Qt, and written by Linus Torvalds (among others). The reasons for doing so are given here. This is particularly interesting given that both Linus and Dirk prefer C

In my experience, the Qt libraries and tools are just as easy to use as .NET Framework + Visual Studio, which I think is excellent (and particularly impressive, given that Qt definitely doesn't have the same resources as Microsoft). I haven't used GTK+, but looking at the Hello World tutorial for it, it doesn't seem particularly intuitive. (e.g. why is the button label set with a callback?) Admittedly, there is some bias due to familiarity here, but I think my point is valid.

My desktop of choice

[Anonymous Coward]

Working on a VM over Win 8.1. Xfce works like a charm, no unnecessary eye candy plus all the benefits of a Linux environment. Thanks Xfce team for all the hard work!!!!

Re:How does one pronounce this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always heard it pronounced like:

EHKS-FEE-SEAS

Wonder when it will hit the repos

[Sesostris III]

Running both LMDE XFCE and Xubuntu 14.04 LTE I'll look forward to when this hits the repos. Unfortunately I'll probably have to change Distros to use it as LMDE is changing to using Debian Stable (Jessie) and it probably won't be backported. Similarly for Xubuntu and it probably won't be in Xubuntu LTE until 16.04.

I really ought to change to Arch or something!

That said,I'm pleased it's still being developed. I was worried that it was going to fade away and I'd have to start using Mate, Cinnamon or even Unity.

Re:Wonder when it will hit the repos

[Artemis3]

LMDE XFCE/KDE was forked into SolydXK and that is the distro you should try instead.

For Xubuntu this nice PPA should do.

yay file manager improvements

[drinkypoo]

The woeful file manager has been the weakest point of the non-GNOME/KDE Linux desktop for ever and ever amen, pretty much regardless of which one you're talking about. I'm using lubuntu right now and I can't say I'm in love with the one I get there.

Re:yay file manager improvements

[ckatko]

Xfce's file manager Thunar (unlike my experience with LXDE/pcmanfm) works just fine. I have absolutely no idea what you're complaining about.

Re:yay file manager improvements

[drinkypoo]

I have absolutely no idea what you're complaining about.

I guess the devs didn't either, that's why they made numerous improvements to the file manager.

Re:yay file manager improvements

[Blaskowicz]

LXDE's file manager is a piece of software I like very much, at least if you only use it in detailed view. Perhaps not very visible is it will run in restrained conditions such as a Pentium II 233 and less than 128MB RAM, and still be quick. It has had tabs support from the beginning and seems to have about the features of nautilus 2.x.
Well, I happen to not like the choice of themes in lubuntu very much (GTK, icons..)
The file manager - pcmanfm - can look better with another theme, "crumbs bar" to display the folder location (if you like that) and it shines with the left side panel disabled : can show a lot of files and folders while not using too much horizontal pixel space. With the speed, even on OLD or limited computers, that makes it my favourite tool for browsing a large music collection.
With the low footprint and desktop independance it's also about the right tool for a VM or headless server.

For browsing video and documents etc. in icon mode I've grown used to caja, now.

Re:How does one pronounce this?

[Culture20]

Ex Face (faster than ex ef see ee)

Is XFCE going the bloat-path? What happened to E?

[Qbertino]

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?

Re:Is XFCE going the bloat-path? What happened to

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1 doesn't come with Xfce 4.12

[loosescrews]

I am running it now. It is still on Xfce 4.10. Not saying that it isn't possible to install though.

Kudos

[sandoval88419]

... for the good work.

XFCE is light, doesn't get in your way. Yet it is customisable.

I'm looking forward to testing this version.

IMHO it should be the default DE for Debian.

Re:Kudos

[msobkow]

No matter what the DE, the people who use it always want it to be the default for their distro.

What is so damned hard about doing "apt-get install de-of-choice"?

Re:Kudos

[Sesostris III]

Indeed, I've never understood why there are numerous versions of Ubuntu. (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc). Why not just get plain old Ubuntu and do "apt-get install de-of-choice" (where de-of-choice is KDE, XFCE or LXDE, etc.)?

The answer of course is that, perhaps, possibly, maybe, things are just a wee bit more complicated than that!

Re:Kudos

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because some DE's interfere with others, especially those that use different versions of GTK or QT. I miss just choosing which DE(s) I wanted during installation.

LXDE

[jbolden]

I think this comment is silly but LXDE merged with Razor-Qt and is now creating the lightweight desktop based on Qt. This is pretty good coverage:

Heavy Qt = KDE
Heavy GTK+ = Gnome
Light Qt = LXDE
Light GTK+ = XFCE

Enlightenment where is it now?

[jbolden]

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?

There is an OS called Tizen, Enlightenment Foundation Libraries are the core of it. Enlightenment still exists is getting better but its been moving away from just a cool window manager to a full on GUI for its OS.

Re:Is XFCE going the bloat-path? What happened to

[bn557]

I've always been under the impression that all of the 'bloat' is packaged as additional packages in XFCE. At least in my experience, if you install just the minimum of xfce packages, you get no bloat, but also *SHOCK* are completely lacking in any features beyond the basic window management, task bar, and program launcher.

Hear Hear!

[sjames]

From the announcement (bold mine):

Our session manager was updated to use logind and/or upower if available for hibernate/suspend support. For portability and to respect our users' choices, fallback modes were implemented relying on os-specific backends.

Attention freedeskto.org: Commit that to memory, brand it on your foreheads, tattoo it on each other's butt cheeks, whatever it takes!

Re:Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1 doesn't come with Xfce 4.1

[motang]

I am running it as well on Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1. It seems to have all of Xfce 4.12 features, but still says 4.10 in About Xfce. I am sure that will change to reflect that DE version, as after all the beta came out last Thursday and Xfce 4.12 came out yesterday.

FCEUX

[tepples]

That'd look too similar to the NES emulator FCEUX.

Is there a light-weight XFCE distro?

[billstewart]

Yes, XFCE is a nice light-weight window manager. Is there a light-weight distro that uses it? Ubuntu wants 5-10GB of disk, even for Xubuntu and Lubuntu. TinyCore can do a graphical environment with maybe 100MB, but is a bit too minimalist for me - I want something that can keep security update working with no more work than apt-get/yum/etc. I need a window manager, browser, shell, and maybe a C compiler or so, and I want something under 0.5 GB so I can keep a few spares on a desktop and spin up lots of cloud instances as well.

Re:Is there a light-weight XFCE distro?

[Hognoxious]

Roll your own with Debian live-build. I haven't used it for your particular use case (I was making a non-pae version with mate for an old Win XP lappie) but it seems pretty solid and well documented.