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.

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.

[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.

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?

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.

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