Xfce 4.16

https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1608595200

by KindOne • 6 years ago

351 105 6 years ago

m8s• 6 years ago

This seems like a ton of work and a great achievement. XFCE, for whatever reason, is always my go to desktop environment and really just "feels like home". Thank you to everyone who contributed.

himujjal• 6 years ago

Curious here. Advantages of XFCE over KDE or Gnome. I use KDE. I need to know from a regular user. VM is not enough.

mixmastamyk• 6 years ago

Lighter, simpler.

ChuckNorris893• 6 years ago

I'm also curious.

In the old days XFCE was the go-to DE for the low spec systems back when KDE and Gnome were massive bloats, but KDE slimmed down lately due to massive development efforts to the point of using less ram than XFCE so I'm curious which would be better for a laptop with 4GB of RAM since IIRC, XFCE apps do use less memory but that's because they also do way less than the KDE ones.

Hopefully there are some up to date DE connoisseurs on HN to shed some light.

lexa1979• 6 years ago

Not OP, and I've never used KDE. But I used Gnome 2, when it was the default DE for Ubuntu. Then Ubuntu switched to that DE-which-I-cant-recall-the-name, with the sidebar and what appeared to me to be a strange desktop which made me lose some reflexes. So I switched over to Xubuntu and it made me feel more at home, it was a desktop as simple as I could ever hope, in fact, its logic was (for me) intuitive. I never felt the need to customise it beyond its defaults: it just worked. It's been ~8 years now, and I never looked back. So, to answer your question: the main advantage is that it looks and works like a known paradigm for someone coming from Gnome2 or Windows 9x/Me/2000/XP.

pacamara619• 6 years ago

KDE and Gnome are significantly more expensive resource wise.

anezch• 6 years ago

My experience on ubuntu and arch, while memory usage is almost similar, KDE startup time is significantly slower. Turning off balloo helped, but not much.

mongol• 6 years ago

It just feels simple and keeps out of the way. I used KDE way back, before v4, and it was my favourite DE then. But it always had these broken glitches and an over abundance of settings and utilities that were not always on par with the core KDE. I have learned that I prefer less with even quality than more with uneven.

ohazi2• 6 years ago

I switched to XFCE after Gnome 3 was released and have used it ever since. There's been enough said here recently about the problems with Gnome 3 and the attitude of the Gnome developers, but the 10,000 ft view is that they refuse to stop pretending that my desktop PC is an iPad. Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8 / Metro, but at least they eventually backpedaled.

If you think Windows usability peaked around Windows XP, XFCE might be worth trying.

All I want is an application menu, some launchers, a window list, a widget/notification area, and some reasonable keybindings. Gnome 2 had these things, and then early Gnome 3 got rid of basically all of them. If some fancypants UX researchers want to experiment with replacing menu bars with hamburgers, that's fine, but I'm just not interested.

I've done more than my fair share of WM hopping (I still use i3 on my laptop because I like being able to resize windows with my keyboard when I don't have a mouse), but XFCE is my workhorse. It may look boring, but it's reliable. It has more than enough features for working productively, and I appreciate the fact that the development team doesn't completely change the way everything works every few years just to chase the latest flashy trend.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment that uses GTK. It has its own GTK engine, window manager (XFWM), and its own set of apps built on top of GTK... most of them much are faster than their Gnome counterparts.

Thunar is much faster than Nautilus, XFWM is faster than Mutter, XFCE panels are much faster than the Gnome Shell, XFCE GTK engine is much faster than Adwaita... and the list just goes on and on. The result is a really fast and responsive user experience, that will run fast even in low spec machines.

I am not a fan of the default panel layout and overall configuration, but XFCE panels are easy to configure as well as highly configurable. You can create as many panels you want, position them anywhere you want and put any elements on them... There's even a way to create a macOS-like global menu, although I don't recommend it.

bayindirh• 6 years ago

I'm a die hard KDE user but, my office workstation runs on XFCE (because I like to use different things overall).

My main reason is not presence of advantages but absence of disadvantages.

I like XFCE's simplicity and stability. It's as stable as the big boys in the town. I like how it looks in default configuration (I started this thing with C64. I love how old computing looks).

You can work relatively fast in XFCE. While it doesn't go above and beyond like Dolphin, Akonadi and KDE in general, it can accomplish what it needs to do out of the box. Thunar is capable enough (4.16 brings per folder view preferences, which is important).

XFCE, because lack of sheer eye-candy, uses screen space very efficiently. So, it provides you massive amount of space especially in big screens.

I don't miss KDE's interconnectedness and integration while using XFCE but, it needs different solutions. Again I want to emphasize that it's not a disadvantage, but a mere difference.

If you want a straight, run of the mill but well refined desktop environment, XFCE is the top choice in my book. It can provide you what you need without bloat. I personally don't understand why people continuously torture themselves by re-configuring various WMs over and over. I understand i3 and other managers are nice but, they're not practical in my book.

nine_k3• 6 years ago

Xfce is lighter weight than Gnome 3, and actually allows you to customize things that matter (to me). You can set it up in various ways visually, even though the default look is usable out of the box.

Xfce's window manager is the best of all I've tried. Maybe not as configurable as e.g. Sawmill, it has a lot of useful functions that are missing from Gnome-based offerings, and from macOS: window snapping, automatic window resizing to grab available space (in several ways), simple automatic tiling, easy putting a window above others, etc. They all can be configured to have arbitrary shortcuts.

Xfce has fewer ambitions to integrate things and have their own everything. It allows you to just work with your apps without distraction.

Most importantly, Xfce is not trying to imitate macOS, but does its own thing, and stays consistent. It has very little magic in it.

Also, bugs are quite few and far between. They do not seem to rush to release new stuff.

coldpie• 6 years ago

It shows windows, has a bunch of great QOL and power-user features, and doesn't have a bunch of bells and whistles. I don't want my DE to have a bunch of animations and transparency effects and things popping up in every corner every five seconds. I just want a thing to show windows and let me efficiently navigate them. XFCE does that perfectly.

bluedino• 6 years ago

KDE feels like Windows 10 to me, and that's a bad thing. It's so disorganized. But, Gnome 3 screwed up input, mostly trackpad scrolling, so I use KDE or XFCE.

adkadskhj• 6 years ago

New Linux user here. I switched from Mac a few months ago and wanted to try out Linux on a spare machine. It's not a beast, but it has a decent graphics card (1060), lots of ram, fast storage, etc. I found GNOME to be shockingly sluggish. KDE was better, but the animations still felt far from clean, snappy, fast.

Eventually i found my way to XFCE because i couldn't make it slow. Everything felt very snappy, no feeling of slow FPS.

That's about it for me, honestly. I haven't configured it much, yet. I use the desktops to shove some non-interactive apps like Spotify to the background. Nothing special, really. XFCE just works. Sure, the other desktops are more pretty .. but that wasn't worth the low FPS to me.

Kototama• 6 years ago

Me too but I can tell you why.

- Coherency: the way it works and is presented does not change much over the years. It's important for me. I don't want to adapt everytime a designer thinks he has a good idea.

- Simplicity: it just works and is well configured out of the box

- Efficiency: not the lightest Desktop Manager in the market but it is light enough so it won't eat resources for nothing

- Right level of complexity: there is enough to configure it to adapt it to your needs but not too much to make it a mess. Take the xfce console for example: you can rename tabs, move them and search text in them. Last time I check these features were not available in Gnome Terminal. But at the same time I don't want much more than that.

Coherency is really important for me: Xfce has been there when Gnome / Unity / Gnome 3 / Mate / Cinnamon were confusing me by offering all the same but not really the same.

Edit: I wrote "consistency" instead of "coherency" but I guess the right term is coherency in this context.

spaniard89277• 6 years ago

I agree, XFCE is there when you need it. No weird experiments, always consistent.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

Same. We had this 2010s bubble of design space exploration and constant 'disruption' but in the end .. the good old paradigm is still way more than enough.

kieckerjan2• 6 years ago

Wow, I just learned from your casual remark that you can actually search in the xfce console. Awesome!

74d-fe6-2c6• 6 years ago

Same here. I use it with LM20. I just love its simplicity. For me the peak of desktop UX was Windows 98. No feature since then convinced me. Tiles, docks, animations, ... just NO! Except for [Super] triggering a search for applications ... [Super], [f][i], [Enter] -> Firefox opens up. IIRC that didn't exist in Windows 98.

tetek• 6 years ago

same here. I always install Xfce if I need to use linux with GUI

stjohnswarts6• 6 years ago

One of the few that doesn't give me fits when I run remote vnc sessions (independent of main "desktop" session)

tibudiyanto• 6 years ago

Finally fractional scaling support! Kudos to XFCE team

dang• 6 years ago

If curious see also

started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21329632

4.14 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890

oops https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13948228

releases https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13642857

4.12 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9125474

debian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6675945

not debian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762472

debian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4374089

debian https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4356197

4.10 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3904201

linus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2843366

4.8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111106

OscarCunningham2• 6 years ago

Will this make it into the upcoming Debian Bullseye release?

int_19h2• 6 years ago

They haven't even had soft-freeze yet, it's only happening in February.

OscarCunningham2• 6 years ago

That's good then. I'd thought it was was going to be earlier than that.

anthk3• 6 years ago

Enable the Debian Backports repo and give it the highest priority. Ask the #debian users in Freenode for help in order to set it up right.

cosmotic• 6 years ago

Oh no, those icons. Shadows and depth without perspective looks really awkward. Lots of the icons blend into the background because of low contrast and lack of border or drop shadow. I really liked the tango icons.

ChuckNorris893• 6 years ago

Agreed. I didn't know what was wrong with them at a first glance but now I see it.

They look more like the icons from a phone from 2004, like a Motorola or Symbian OS.

Still love XFCE.

ptx• 6 years ago

At least they're easily distinguishable by both shape and color.

vanderZwan• 6 years ago

Well, I don't have a strong opinion on them myself, but I can offer you some reassurance: this is Linux. There's always at least a few programmers grumpy enough in response to any kind of change that they'll do something about it and provide some option to use the old thing. I'm sure the tango icons will have their own legacy icon theme soon enough, if not already.

zamalek• 6 years ago

There are dozens of icon themes available. They should already mostly work because, according to the post, XFCE has moved to the standardized icon naming.

hnlmorg• 6 years ago

Icons are trivial to change in Linux. If you preferred the Tango icon pack then just set the icon pack to Tango. There are GUI utilities to manage this for you too.

nine_k3• 6 years ago

Xfce happily uses whatever icon set you name in the settings app.

Same with GTK themes.

int_19h2• 6 years ago

So, is this the first version of Xfce without a dependency on Gtk2 (i.e. Gtk3-only)?

wwwhizz• 6 years ago

Yes!

alekq• 6 years ago

In case you are interested to try it in VM, OpenSuSE images are good option. Vanilla is available here:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/xfce:/rat:/i...

bsg75• 6 years ago

Easy conversion to a VirtualBox image (.vdi)

Had previously been testing in a Docker image [1], but this is a bit more convenient. OpenSuSE has a number of useful options I was previously unaware of.

[1] https://github.com/schuellerf/xfce-test

Vinnl• 6 years ago

I haven't used Xfce in a long time, but it will always have a soft spot in my heart. It kept my computer usable when I was a teenager, and was the first open source project I contributed to (translations). Congrats to the Xfce team on the new release, and on having hit their stride again, it seems, with the move to GitLab.

mysterydip2• 6 years ago

Same. I've since moved on to LXDE and then LXQt, but XFCE was there for me first.

cies3• 6 years ago

LXQt as daily driver? May I ask what distro? Any annoyances?

geek_at• 6 years ago

Same! I wonder if they added in the ability to make the window resize edges wider than 1pixel yet. So many wasted hours trying to find the resize pixel on all the windows

greggyb3• 6 years ago

You can assign a key chord with left and right mouse click-and-drag for window movement and resize. Configuring this is one of the first things I do.

I can hold Alt and left-click-and-drag to move the window, or Alt and right-click-and-drag to resize. This works from anywhere in the target window. Resize will move the nearest edge or corner to your click.

kgwxd• 6 years ago

They did not :) I usually use the Resize window menu to do it but I usually use full size windows so I haven't taken the time to find a faster way or maybe a fix.

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

Thanks to all contributors, I have found a home in XFCE after Ubuntu drop Unity.

ragnese3• 6 years ago

I liked the design of Unity. But I'm honestly surprised you'd pick Xfce over Gnome if you liked Unity.

Unless, of course, your preferences just changed, or you didn't really like Unity either.

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

Easy, GNOME 3 has too much JavaScript bloat, broken workspace concept, requires extensions for simple stuff like collapsing windows into their header bar, a basic feature in almost every X Windows window manager since forever.

Neither Unity nor XFCE suffer from that.

severine• 6 years ago

Xfce has another little detail not mentioned here: a very friendly forum with one of the best moderators of the whole internet.

"Moderator" doesn't make him justice, though: ToZ will help you achieve almost anything imaginable when it comes to Xfce, and then some!

Big kudos to all the Xfce team and community, and extra sweet love to ToZ, you rock!

utxaa3• 6 years ago

well said.

xfce is a gem. ToZ is the man.

bflesch• 6 years ago

Does anybody know how hard is it to switch from gnome to xfce on arch linux? Is it just removing gnome and installing xfce?

Maybe someone could share their experience who has made the switch recently. If it is not a big thing that could potentially break everything, then I'd be happy to try it out.

filmor• 6 years ago

You can probably just install them alongside each other.

lukeschlather• 6 years ago

In Xubuntu the login manager lets you switch between whatever DE you like. I think the Xubuntu login manager is lightdm so if you set that up properly you should be able to have both XFCE and Gnome easily. There were some ways Lightdm and XFCE didn't play very nicely together, especially around screen locking, but it's possible they've been fixed.

ragnese3• 6 years ago

Start by just installing the xfce4 packages. Then when you're on the login screen, I believe there is a "cog" icon somewhere that let's you choose your session. Choose Xfce. Enjoy.

If you enjoy it enough, you can uninstall Gnome packages. Just make sure not to uninstall GDM unless you want to replace it with something else. I'm sure the Arch wiki has suggestions on the Xfce page.

stjohnswarts6• 6 years ago

Find the Arch page on installing XFCE and it will tell you the combination of packages you want and after the install log out and you should be able to select your desktop via your login manager. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce

renke1• 6 years ago

Fractional scaling finally arrived, I will try it ASAP. Last time I looked in to Xfce there was no way to have a fixed workspace on a secondary display (something that possible in Gnome, for instance). Since I use workspace a lot having a secondary display is kind of useless because it switches workspace at the same time. I since started to use the rather fine Xfce+Awesome combination, but should Xfce get a fixed workspace feature I might go with pure Xfce again.

December_Stars• 6 years ago

Odd how no one has mentioned the addition of client side decorations. Personally it's a huge dealbreaker for me, I really dislike how they look. It's a shame, because the release and Xfce in general otherwise seems really good. Guess I'll stick to MATE for now.

tux2• 6 years ago

Yeah I agree, I been using XFCE for many years but I think that CSD is a bad move! I hope they at least remove search bar from titles. If they don't improve it, I may have to switch to i3.

Zimtstern• 6 years ago

I agree. But there is hope. You can also switch to this fork: https://github.com/Xfce-Classic/libxfce4ui-nocsd

wayneftw• 6 years ago

Maybe there will be an option to disable it?

mrpotato• 6 years ago

I like the xfce look and the xfce specific apps unfortunately I tried using xfce on a dell xps 15 laptop and had problems with screen tearing while scrolling up/down. I never found a fix so ended up on KDE.

greggyb3• 6 years ago

    xrandr --output <display> --set TearFree on

Fixes that on most monitors and display adapters for me.

ChuckNorris893• 6 years ago

Wait a second, why wouldn't TearFree be enabled by default?

Are there people who wish to have screen tearing out of the box?

tux2• 6 years ago

Try disabling XFCE composor in "Windows Manager Tweaks" it fixes tearing issues.

sigzero• 6 years ago

It sounds like their move to GitLab is really helping development. I hope that trends continues for them. Xfce is a great DE.

Der_Einzige• 6 years ago

Ah, the best non tiling desktop environment on linux just got an update. Nice!

Not slow, not bloated, just a DE as it should be.

The alternatives simply don't work for me. lxde or lxqt are horribly ugly to me.

stjohnswarts6• 6 years ago

lxde is so dang light (especially installation and memory wise) though :) . It is my go to for a VM where I need GUI stuff but don't want to pay too much for it.

atum47• 6 years ago

I've been using xfce for about 5 years now and I love it. Simple and minimalist.

anthk3• 6 years ago

I hope they redo the old GTK and XFWM themes for XFCE but for GTK3. Some themes had no match, specially that one yellow/lavender one with a gradient window close to the XP colours, but with no bezels.

stunt• 6 years ago

One of the great things about Xfce is that everything is just a standalone component.

My desktop is Xmonad and xfce-panel works great on it. I use panel, settings, power-manager from Xfce (probably a few more). It's very stable and its simple and flat design makes it a great fit for tiling window managers.

hakfoo• 6 years ago

Was I the only one who shed a tear when XFCE stopped having the CDE-alike panel design?

I wonder if it's sort of a signal of the evolution of the free-software desktop experience.

A lot of the '90s/'00s paradigms were pretty strongly "we're trying to replicate the experience of a lustworthy expensive system" -- see WindowMaker/AfterStep to look like a NeXT, FVWM to look like Motif back when that was expensive and proprietary, IceWM offering OS/2 style themes, and how everyone went to make workalike themes when the QNX Photon "full desktop on a 1.44M floppy" demo disc dropped.

Now, they just have their own styles, but at the same time, they seem less uniquely identifiable.

Xfce 4.16

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