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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.

19 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. Re: The Only Desktop Environment I Use by rochrist · · Score: 2

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

  2. Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by dbIII · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by Clsid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by RightwingNutjob · · Score: 2

      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.

    7. Re:Xfce 5 should be based on Qt. by binarstu · · Score: 2

      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.

  3. Re:How does one pronounce this? by Culture20 · · Score: 2

    Ex Face (faster than ex ef see ee)

  4. 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
  5. 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.

  6. Kudos by sandoval88419 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... 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.

    1. Re:Kudos by msobkow · · Score: 2

      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"?

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
  7. LXDE by jbolden · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  8. Re:yay file manager improvements by ckatko · · Score: 2

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

  9. Hear Hear! by sjames · · Score: 2

    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!