Xfce 4.8 Released 193
PerlDudeXL writes "Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6. [..] Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years. We hope that our efforts to drop pieces like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit will help bringing the Xfce desktop to modern distributions."
Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully all these new-fangled frameworks and technologies aren't going to turn Xfce into just another Gnome or KDE competitor. Xfce was always fast and light. Hopefully it stays that way.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:4, Informative)
The irony is that all these subsystems worked pretty damn well in QT3 years ago, and they've only gotten better, since. A lot of the long-running bugs in the various GTK wm subsystems were never really a problem for KDE, and things like the VFS implementations worked much, much better.
If only KDE wasn't such a general memory hog, eh?
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That was my immediate reaction. I use XFCE, but I still use Konqueror and Kwrite for browsing remote files systems and editing files on them because they work much better.
KDE is not as much of a memory hog as it is reputed to be. It depends on what you install and how you configure it.
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:5, Interesting)
For being memory hog, the "out of the box" installation is what counts. I install Ubuntu, comes with Gnome (but that's not the point), and don't want to start heavy configuring to make it less of a memory hog. I guess I could make it lighter, but it's too much effort for me. It has to just work.
You sound like a tinkerer (me too sometimes) but for most people stuff has to Just Work. And for most of my computers I also want them to Just Work. Which modern Linux distros luckily do more and more.
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And Ubuntu packs so much extra stuff, that unless you do a minimal install and then add what you want, it is virtually impossible to have a lightweight system. This isn't a slam against Ubuntu. They are trying to be all things to all people. As such they have a lot of services running and such to handle just about any situation. Need a hammer, it's in a default install Ubuntu, need a wrench it's in a default install Ubuntu, need a screwdriver, it's in a default install Ubuntu. However, if all you neede
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Absolutely true. That's what I like about Ubuntu, no (at least not much) tinkering needed. The only thing that needs serious work is the network login: it's not easy to set up a system to do kerberos login, and get user/group details from an ldap server. Previously I used Mandriva (really loved that distro - worried about the future and tried Ubuntu which works well too) - there you could set that up very easily when installing the system. A tick mark, enter a few settings (kerberos realm, ldap server name)
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hammer: command not found
tom@muon:~$ wrench
wrench: command not found
tom@muon:~$ screwdriver
screwdriver: command not found
tom@muon:~$ tweezers
tweezers: command not found
liar
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Ubuntu is a Gnome distribution. Did you try
gnome-hammer, gnome-wrench, gnone-screwdriver or gnome-tweezers?
It could even be
ghammer, gwrench, gscredriver or gtweezers
However
khammer, kwrench, kscredriver and ktweezers will not work till you do a apt-get install kubuntu desktop
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:4, Funny)
tom@muon:~$ hammer
hammer: command not found
tom@muon:~$ wrench
wrench: command not found
tom@muon:~$ screwdriver
screwdriver: command not found
tom@muon:~$ tweezers
tweezers: command not found
Obviously your system administrator doesn't trust you using such powerful tools and has removed access to them for your account. :)
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Silly me
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That was my immediate reaction. I use XFCE, but I still use Konqueror and Kwrite for browsing remote files systems and editing files on them because they work much better.
KDE is not as much of a memory hog as it is reputed to be. It depends on what you install and how you configure it.
So what you are saying is that by using Konqueror and Kwrite, you aren't concerned with the memory footprint and Xfce being lighter (or not) is irrelevant since you are loading most of the kdelibs anyway. Is that correct?
I do agree with the last part of your last statement about it depending on what is installed. It never ceases to amaze me that people will say they want a low resource desktop environment like Xfce or even LXDE and then install, say OpenOffice.org on it. While obviously, we want any desk
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I've done a lot of GTK programming and never programmed anything that hit frameworks like HAL as part of GTK. GTK deals with the screen and widgets and window managers. It doesn't care about HAL or VFS, etc. While GTK may not be as complete as QT, if any of these subsystems were causing a problem, it wouldn't matter whether QT or GTK were the toolkit used.
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The obvious solution is to add an abstraction layer that wraps them all. Perhaps a small set of intermediate layers to wrap various combinations of existing abstraction layers, and a loopback layer to deal wtih more complex circumstances, such as a many-world quantum computer?
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Great idea. We should call it PulseAudio!
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Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems? Is there a point to it besides just making it harder to use applications not native to said GUI system? Or do the developers just like adding redirection layers to make their codebase look bigger?
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Why do GUI systems on Linux have their own VFS systems?
The normal excuse is that all other methods of making a VFS are Linux-specific (such as using FUSE). But you certainly could at least offer a FUSE solution on Linux and a library-only one on other systems. Also the only main alternative is BSD and it has methods for this, too.
However I think the real reason is that they already started writing it that way and don't want to do the work of splitting it away from their other libraries.
Linux would be MUCH b
Re:Making it just as heavy as Gnome and KDE now? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how the further Xfce develops, the more it resembles Gnome... the way it's meant to be - full-featured yet fast and configurable.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a good thing. It means that, when Gnome goes for that crazy "shell" thing in 3.0, and what with KDE guys still trying to make their stuff not crash every other day, there will still be a sane DE to fall back to.
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I've got my wife/kids running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS because they are familiar with the Start Menu motif, while I run Xfce on Sid.
When it's time to upgrade their OS, it'll probably be to xbuntu 12.04.
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Oh, come on. It has worked reasonably well since 4.1, and just fine since 4.2. I guess you haven't used it (certainly not since after 4.1).
The plural of anecdote is not data but KDE 4.1 crashed for me and so did 4.2, even with the 4.2.x updates. Whatever my issue was, it was fixed in 4.3 and since then I've not had any stability problems. In any case, 4.6 is about to be released so we're talking about what it was like two years ago, not how it is today.
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I still get Konqueror crashes almost daily. It all seems to point back to Nepomuk and Akonadi. I'm going to give 4.6 a shot when Natty comes out, and if they haven't figured out Akonadi by then I give up.
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I have been trying every KDE 4.x release since 4.2 (I skipped the first two because of all the horror stories), and I still haven't seen one that would be stable for me. YMMV.
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Hopefully all these new-fangled frameworks and technologies aren't going to turn Xfce into just another Gnome or KDE competitor. Xfce was always fast and light. Hopefully it stays that way.
More than that: its turning into Gnome.
Meanwhile Canonical writes their own desktop environment...
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That has already happened. I tried Xubuntu 10.04 on an old laptop, and it was terribly slow. Slower than KDE3 (Trinity) in fact.
So I had to move on to Lubuntu with LXDE. It is lightning fast and very small now, but even there you have to be careful not to pull in to many Gnome dependencies. Unfortunately I need Nautilus, because I really like it, and it is the only file manager that Dropbox will cooperate with.
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Hilarious post - it sums up modern desktop computing.
"X has become bloated and now I use Y which is great unless you use Z with it, which I have to because I like it, and it's the only thing that W works with."
No offense, after all we're all users, but you have to see the irony of it all here...
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Dropbox works with thunar just fine.
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The big thing is that many of the distros are shifting to these "new-fangled frameworks and technologies" and Xfce needs to change to support them, regardless of the impact. If the major distro's drop HAL, for instance, and Xfce would still require it, then Xfce could rightly be called bloated as it would load additional frameworks that nothing else used and possibly would conflict with what was already installed.
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It would not be just the fact that HAL would be a dependency that takes up extra room and resources. The larger issue is it is becoming outdated, and broke. What happens when HAL no longer compiles cleanly on a particular distro? Who will fix it? The HAL folks? The XFCE folks? The distro? The more nonstandard a package becomes the more of a risk it is to rely on it. Moving away from HAL can't be considered a bad thing.
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There's nothing that says you have to run one or the other if you want a fully-featured desktop environment. You can cherry-pick the features you want. For instance, I run compiz-fusion wirh Emerald, use various panels according to how I feel about them, but use Nautilus to draw my desktop. Easy enough on Arch Linux, and probably at least as easy on some of the more popular distros.
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I do the same thing but with avant-window-navigator as well. On Ubuntu you have to mess with gconf-editor to make gnome-panel not a required component. I like GNOME but not GNOME panels.
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Why is it garbage?
The WM is unstable, and many of the apps still don't have as much functionality as their KDE3 counterparts. Many of the really nice KDE3 apps, such as Kaffeine and Amarok, now seem to be unmaintained and/or stripped of their functionality and gutted.
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Agree.
I gave up on KDE back when the various distros decided to drop KDE3. I haven't really kept up since I switched (first to xfce, then GNOME, but my next build may be xfce again), but AFAIK KDE4 does not yet have all the functionality that KDE3 did, and is not as stable, even now.
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Amarok and Kaffeine are both actively developed, and none of them are stripped of functionality (Amarok has been rewritten, though, which is not the same). Kwin is stable, but demands decent graphics drivers.
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Fluxbox is a window manager. XFCE does ship with it's own window manager (but you can use whatever window manager you want). A desktop environment is significantly more than just a window manger.
Enlightenment is very good, however, there is very little software that does things in an enlightenment way. Slapping gtk or qt apps on top of enlightenment ruins the beauty that enlightenment presents.
People who think xfce is heavy, are mainly Ubuntu users, where a lot of extra stuff from Ubuntu has been thrown
What functionality are we BSD users ... (Score:3, Insightful)
What functionality are we BSD users going to be missing? It didn't really say in the article at all other than that apparently there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world. As a developer I am saddened by this fact, that what I have available for use on Linux won't work the same on FreeBSD for example making my life as a developer and porter much harder.
Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers? What can be done to change the situation? Where are some places we can start looking?
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I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue:
Merge. Free Software is powerful, but not that powerful, and we are split. Thousands of distros, Linux + 3 flavors of BSD, Android, ChromeOS, plus countless other half-dead projects like Hurd. We need to stop being dicks about it and merge it all down. A single Free Unix. Then we can have a few flavors of it, for example: Desktop, Server, Lightweight, Mobile, Realtime (but all coming from the same codebase). Then we would be unstoppable. But, instead, we ha
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ... (Score:4, Funny)
I will tell you what can be done to fix this issue:
...blah blah blah...
good luck with that.
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You seem to be missing the point entirely..
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BTW, there are 4 major flavors of BSD.
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ... (Score:5, Insightful)
the fact that people like Theo and Linus are jerks doesn't count
Why not? That's the main reason right that there are so many variants of basically the same thing. Everyone has their own idea about the best way it should be, few are sufficiently humble or diplomatic to accept consensus decisions, and so you get a million shades of red.
You can argue that the continual splintering is worthwhile--natural selection of projects, in effect--but you can't deny that the basic motive behind most forks is "fuck you if you won't do it my way".
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Linus claimed he wasn't aware of the existing BSD projects,
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Our goals are varied and often incompatible.
Ubuntu wants to be up-to-date and user friendly, and will tolerate proprietary elements to make it happen. Debian sacrifices the cutting edge for the sake of stability, and user-friendliness for the sake of openness. Red Hat and Novell want to simplify support by controlling their codebases. DSL wants to be smaller than 50 MB, and Yellow Dog wants to run on PS3s.
Apt and Yum handle dependency resolution for you. Slackware hands you a pile of .tgz/.txz files and lets you figure out what you need for yourself. LFS has you compile every piece by hand.
KDE wants every config option to be controllable from the UI. Gnome gives you a UI for some config options, and a registry for the rest. XFCE gives you practically no UI config options whatsoever. The independent WMs are mostly adjusted by editing config files.
KDE uses the Qt toolkit. Gnome and XFCE use GTK. The independent WMs stay lean and fast by not using any toolkits.
GPL wants to ensure that what you write isn't simply forked into a proprietary product. BSD is less concerned about proprietary forks, as long as what they've built on their own is still available to whomever wants it.
This, incidentally, is why FreeBSD should exist: because there is a fundamental disagreement about what "free" software is, and FreeBSD is the largest project in the BSD camp. It's differences in principles such as this one that lead to, for example, Apple choosing to base itself on the FreeBSD kernel rather than Linux.
So we should have a Single Unified Unix, eh? That's great. Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, CDE or LXDE? Or maybe BlackBox, OpenBox, Fluxbox, JWM, or IceWM, Ratpoison, FVWM, or xmonad? Yum, Apt or Emerge? Should there be any proprietary binaries (like drivers) in the default install? Should any proprietary binaries be available in the repos at all? Do we accept Mozilla's terms regarding their trademark, or do we fork it a la Iceweasel? BSD, GPL, or Apache license? Microkernel or Macrokernel? Benevolent Dictator for Life or democratically-selected project leaders? How do we accommodate companies like Canonical, Red Hat, and Novell?
Every possible combination will have supporters; how do you reconcile them?
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Only bad designers will use a "registry"
Keep the configs in Config files where they belong.
DesktopIconSize=Large
is better than
{12433242354435435.3245324534253245.345456.5467345643567435643256.34256.3456.34562456324.2546.4356.4356} Option 0
Only a complete nutjob likes the former compared to the latter.
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If you want bad design, consider the overhead of several hundred extra fopen() calls to read all the separate .config files for your DE between typing your password and seeing a usable desktop. I'll take "configuration dialog looks superficially like Windows" over "log in, go get coffee, come back, wait, wait some more, read email" any day!
Besides, Microsoft's abuse of UUIDs in the Windows registry doesn't mean everything that looks like a registry is a mess of stupidly-long numbers. Gconf uses human-read
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Really?
I don't know about you, but I can afford to wait 0.069 seconds. Just because some filesystems suck handling small files dosen't mean it's a bad i
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Must be why programmers all use "fill-in-the-blank"-style registries. Oh wait...
Before deciding it's only to make people feel "special", you might ask what the advantages actually are. For one, suppose we're configuring a server. Can your registry fit in version control? How easily can you add comments so people know why the hell you configured it the way you did? How many steps is it to clone a config from one machine to another, or back it up? How many tools do you have for working with registries, as opp
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I agree that there is an ideological split between the BSD and GPL camp. But apart from that you're throwing up a million kinds of problems that equally well apply to the Linux kernel but that is running on everything from desktops to servers, with or without binary modules on lots of distros that want different things.
KDE and Gnome may have their holy flamewars over UI design, but if that was the only thing splitting them apart we'd long since see a unification and the different UIs as different skins/sett
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It's called freedom (or liberty; take your pick). And not "freedom to force my choice on others" but freedom to live and let live. This is why I don't have problems with people choosing Apple or Microsoft, as long as they know there are other options available, and they don't ask me to support them. The other day, I had a conversation with a friend who is going to get an iphone as soon as his current contract on his blackberry exp
Re:What functionality are we BSD users ... (Score:4, Informative)
Welcome to Unix. You seem to be confused about a great many things. I'm not more than a novice myself, but I must recommend Eric S. Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming [faqs.org] , because for better or worse Unix and F/LOSS count most of your complaints as strengths. Core principles, even.
Your view of the One True Unix implies that there is only one correct way to implement an OS. If there's only one way to implement an OS, doesn't that imply that all computer usage is pretty similar? Perhaps we can optimize for all use-cases at once? Or do you just think that you know better than everyone else how they should spend their coding time?
It's likely that if you've raised this argument here before that people have mentioned the UNIX certification process as well as the Linux Standard Base. In what way do these entities fall short in defining a common standard?
Oh, fuck it. Don't have this argument with me. Don't have it with anyone on slashdot. Go have it out with Theo de Raadt, Linus, Eric Raymond, and RMS. If you want to change the world and change people's minds, start at the top. Alternately, close your mouth, open your mind, and start with the first chapter of that book.
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Or do you just think that you know better than everyone else how they should spend their coding time?
This is a key point that pretty much anybody who is not a developer completely misses. Clearly, GP is not a developer. It's the same misunderstanding as thinking that if Valve and Epic and Infinity Ward and Bungie (or whoever develops the big FPSs today) all got together and made one FPS it would turn out better than anything they can do alone. Hopefully even non-developers can see the folly in that.
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For one thing, Linux isn't Unix. BSD is Unix, Linux is only Unix-like. So if you say "A Single Free Unix," Linux is technically straight out. I'm sure this distinction is important for a lot of technical reasons that I'm not cognizant of.
source [wikipedia.org] (more specifically, "functional Unix"). And personally, it would seem to me to be a sort of personal insult to throw away the BSD developers' legal victory back in the 80's in being allowed to exist at all.
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Not true; Marx (and Engels) defended that the state is a tool of the oppression of a class by another and both defended a decentralized, stateless society. To them, the idea of a communist state is an oxymoron.
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According to the 3rd paragraph, udev replaces HAL.
So, since udev is Linux-only, apparently none of the devices that it manages and exposes to the WM can be seen by BSD.
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I wonder if removing the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) makes Xfce more specific to one OS (Linux) and harder to port.
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If my Linux Xfce 4.7 install is any indication (I exorcised PAM long ago, so none of this fancy bloat actually works), you'll just lose the ability to shut down from the menu. And maybe automounting.
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> there is a lot of Linux only stuff out there in the open source world
> Where does the problem lie? Is it in the library developers or in the OS developers?
It lies in the BSD philosophy of stability, which the OS developers have translated into stagnation. The native BSD development environment is unusable until you install the GNU toolchain. The BSD desktop is unusable until you install a bunch of GPL software. Even the shell tools suck. And once you get that far, why bother keeping the BSD kernel?
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I think more that GPL code can use BSD code, but BSD code can't use GPL code. So in practice the GPL tools tend to do everything the BSD tools do, plus whatever was made by people that only want to release code under the GPL. Same goes for projects, if there's a BSD project someone probably started a similar GPL project that could stand on the shoulders of the BSD one. Then the GPL version gets some unique features the BSD variety doesn't have and the momentum shifts.
It's well and good to believe in the BSD
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> The easy way to scratch your itch is to just use the GPL tool rather than patch the BSD tool.
That's not the problem. The BSD maintainers will not let you patch the BSD tool because the interface must be kept stable: just like it was back in 1970 or whatever. That's the whole point of using BSD in the first place. It does not change. Some people like that. Those must be the people who still use BSD make. The rest of us like our tools to improve over time, so we use Linux.
XFCE is amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Everytime I think about it, I'm totally shocked by how good XFCE is. I was a bit misled when I was using Xubuntu (not as lightweght as I had hoped) so I dropped it for a bit, but then I came back when I installed Arch on my netbook. It makes Debian superfast and Arch superstable (and yes, I use both). And on top of all that are all the config tools, which are exceedingly comprehensive, the panel, with a plethora of widgets, and a really good WM (not as powerful as I wish, but I'm so satisfied with it that I can't convince myself to replace it with Openbox). And on top of it all, it's remarkably elegant and simple. Hot damn, it even has its own built-in compositor.
It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it... I do wish some of the config settings were more intuitive, or if they could all be placed in one spot so you could search for what you need... but other than that, for me at least, it's as close to perfect as could ever be hoped. It is, quite frankly, awesome. Sorry for the pun. Here's to hoping that 4.8 is just as good.
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I haven't used XFCE in a few years, but this tempts me to play with it, again. Last time I used it, I just deployed it on what was otherwise usually going to be a headless server that I just need CLI access to. It was such a joy, after the other hefty, bloated, overkill options out there (for these purposes, at least).
Re:XFCE is amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. Xubuntu was not light enough. Among the many advantages of Linux that is trumpeted, particularly around the time of the advent of Windows Vista, is the ability to make old computers usable again. But it rings hollow. Seems a lot of desktop environments, including XFCE, do font work on the fly, and that's a real drag on old systems. If you turn off the anti-aliasing, the environment looks horrible unless you switch to a fixed or terminal font. A while ago, I tried Firefox 3.5 on a 133 MHz Pentium. Took 30 seconds just to come up. How the heck did we ever surf the Internet on 40MHz 486s with VGA graphics?
I switched from XFCE to LXDE on Arch Linux about 2 years ago. LXDE does seem faster, but it has issues too. Have tried KDE 3 and 4, Gnome, and various bare window managers. Good to know there's a new version of XFCE to check out.
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Agreed. Xubuntu was not light enough. Among the many advantages of Linux that is trumpeted, particularly around the time of the advent of Windows Vista, is the ability to make old computers usable again. But it rings hollow. Seems a lot of desktop environments, including XFCE, do font work on the fly, and that's a real drag on old systems. If you turn off the anti-aliasing, the environment looks horrible unless you switch to a fixed or terminal font.
No, not really. I use Debian with LXDE on a Pentium II 300mhz with 160 MBs of RAM for University, and it has worked perfectly so far other than the lack of integrated wifi. Used to run fairly well with Xfce too, except the lack of available RAM hurt when trying to browse more than ~7-8 webpages at the same time.
Do keep in mind as well that Xubuntu is known for being the 'heaviest' Xfce distro around, vanilla Xfce on top of Arch or Debian is much lighter.
A while ago, I tried Firefox 3.5 on a 133 MHz Pentium. Took 30 seconds just to come up. How the heck did we ever surf the Internet on 40MHz 486s with VGA graphics?
Poorly.
Still, as you should know Linux is heavily RAM-
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FYI: I disabled antialiasing (but left hinting enabled) on xubuntu, and switched to Microsoft Core Fonts (Arial, Tahoma, etc.) It looks great.
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You might find it interesting that Gnome feels the same way on Arch. Pretty much everything feels lighter when you're not using Ubuntu ;)
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Ubuntu Server edition is pretty speedy, but nothing beats a slackware install in speed.
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Let me get you started, then.
You only get an icon on the panel. Descriptive text only shows up after a couple seconds of mouseover.
No themes that disable window borders. The included themes all have thick borders, and even modifying them some, I didn't find a way to drop it below that last 1 pixel width.
No easy way to quickly disable all keyboard shortcuts... one unnoticed minor version upgrade added a zillion new shortcuts that caused several nas
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Kiosk environment... Why are you using a WM?
Launch X with your App. Tada!
Done it many times, if a user figures a way to crash the app, it relaunches X and the app. Never EVER use a WM if you are not going to use one.
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It's hard to think of things that I don't like about it...
Here's one. There's no way to permanently turn off the trash bin in XFCE. Fuckin trash nazis.
VFS eh? (Score:5, Funny)
All I ask is that ThunarVFS not suck.
One of the main reasons I don't use GNOME anymore is because GnomeVFS was such a godawful piece of shit for years and years, with nobody seeming particularly concerned about it.
I would be all "Hey, I'll use the GUI to copy these files from one drive to another" and GnomeVFS would be all "Sure thing! I'll have that done sometime after the heat death of the universe!"
Don't even get me started on the SMB performance.
Re:VFS eh? (Score:5, Funny)
All I ask is that ThunarVFS not suck.
Don't worry. It'll be like it's not even there
Re:VFS eh? (Score:5, Informative)
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Why the hell are GUI layers providing virtual filesystems anyway? What happens if I want to pop open a console and manipulate the files I've been manipulating on a VFS? Why not just use FUSE which will work whether you're on the GUI or on the console. It'll work whether you use XFCE, GNOME, or KDE.
There's way, way too many features dependent on a GUI these days.
Xfce seems to be a pretty good compromise... (Score:5, Informative)
...between functionality and bloat. I have not used it as my primary desktop environment, but I do sometimes install it when I want a reasonably full-featured desktop in a VM without causing the size of the VM disk image to balloon too much.
For a truly minimalist lightweight desktop, LXDE seems to be showing a lot of promise.
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I agree. I see Xfce more as becoming a replacement for the "Classical GNOME", as Ubuntu people call it. Lxde is much more light-weight. From a user perspective, I really like the way of the gnome-panel and xfce4-panel. Gnome-panel is dead, though, and obvious and very visible bugs have remained untouched for years. I really think Xfce4 can be a really good replacement for it.
I'm very much looking forward to trying this out.
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Hmm, things I like about Gnome: (1) gtk, and (2) gnome-panel
Things I don't like about Gnome: Their continuing descent into the abyss
As xfce uses gtk, it's always sort of on my radar as something to use instead of gnome, but in the past their panel has always been a little clunkier and uglier than gnome-panel. I'd always try it out, but go back to gnome after a while.
Gnome 3 is looking pretty awful, so here's hoping for xfce 4.8!
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The problem with LXDE is that by the time you add all of the features that it does not provide, it gets pretty heavy, too. You could install openbox and add just XFCE's panel and pretty much recreate LXDE's footprint.
Don't get me wrong, LXDE is very good, very fast. It's just that it doesn't provide a lot of the services that people have come to expect in a full desktop environment.
However, if I were installing a server and wanted to have a GUI, LXDE would certainly be a consideration.
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What about 4.7? (Score:2)
Or was "4.7" already taken by KDE and thus they had to use "4.8"?
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Like a lot of open-source software (most famously Linux before they decided everything from here on out would be 2.6), the odd point releases are the development branches.
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odd version numbers = unstable/development
even version numbers = stable/release
in time for Xubuntu 11.04? (Score:3)
Anyone know if this is in time to make it into the next Xubuntu in April?
Re:in time for Xubuntu 11.04? (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes, it's already in the Natty package repository.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xfce4 [ubuntu.com]
Cold hard facts about resource usage? (Score:3)
Are there any resources that actually back Xfce's claim of being "light" in comparison to GNOME?
I tried Xfce several years ago and while it was nice and easy and all, I had the feeling that with a bit more memory I could just as well run GNOME with obvious benefits (feature-wise).
Today the situation is still the same IMHO. Sure, Xfce has probably a lot more features nowadays, but so does GNOME. I see the benefit in the GNOME framework: it's mature and stable, and more or less customizable. I guess it would be possible to strip out some GNOME services (e.g. desktop search) if memory is of concern. CPU usage shouldn't be an issue with GNOME (unless some background service runs, which again could be turned off if not wanted).
With that in mind: how does Xfce compare to [a minimalistic] GNOME regarding resource usage?
Note that I'm not a GNOME fanboy (I use a plain window manager), but right now it's the desktop environment I'd recommend to others.
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It used to be much lighter, I think.
Then again, I ran it on Gentoo, so who knows. When I tried it a couple years later in Ubuntu it looked way different (worse) and felt way more bloated, but I'm not sure whether it's because XFCE changed or because the Ubuntu team configured it that way.
Re:Cold hard facts about resource usage? (Score:5, Informative)
I am guessing from your post that you run Ubuntu or one of it's derivatives. Xfce on Ubuntu is not much better than Gnome, becaue Ubuntu packs a lot of stuff in to their Xfec impleimenation besides Xfce. Ubuntu, is not a distribution you want to use for a memory constrained or slow CPU system.
However, if you run Xfce on Debian, Fedora, Arch, etc. it simply flies and uses fewer resources than gnome.
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Sorry, but it turns out that all the facts about XFCE's resource usage are warm and squishy, and a lot of folks prefer it that way.
Looking forward to running this on my PS3 (Score:2)
The "two features" thread starts here ... (Score:3)
There are two, hopefully simple, things XFCE4 could provide which would make it a tenable desktop for me. Otherwise, I'll stick with WindowMaker:
Pinnable window lists. In WindowMaker, the feature provided by hitting the middle mouse button, or F11 key. A window menu with a list of all available windows. Allows you to scroll through these, click on likely subjects, etc., trying to find that 24th rxvt instance or the 7th Iceweasel window that you'd lost track of somewhere. Without this, managing the mess of windows my typical desktop devolves to after a day or so (and sessions typically run weeks to months) becomes an utter nightmare.
Circulate-and-raise alt-tab navigation. Similar rationale to above, and also implemented in WindowMaker (or Mac OS X or the Windows desktop). Under XFCE4, an outline of the window raises. Utterly .... useless.
Really, of all the alternative desktops (and I regularly revisit GNOME, KDE, XFCE4, OpenBox, ionwm, and others) XFCE4 comes the closest to a replacement for WindowMaker. But 12 years after having first tried that old standard, it still provides a light, fast, stable, configurable (from a keybindings and behavior standpoint), extremely workable desktop.
My one concern is that WindowMaker's seen no development since 2008, though it is very nearly feature complete, and is certainly very highly usable. I recommend it particularly for newbies.
Otherwise, congrats to the XFCE4 team for their milestone. Anyone else missing features (if I dare ask)?
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Go WindowMaker fans! *high five*
I thought I was the only one. Everyone else seems to use the hideous *box window managers for ultra-light GUI work.
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Love the dockapps! My preferred setup is to run windowmaker inside of gnome just so I can get by 64x64 dockapps, but sometimes that causes too much hassle and I just end up running windowmaker by itself. There's a few ways to switch gnome's window manager, the most reliable is to set the registry key to what you want:
1. run gconf-editor /usr/bin/wmaker
2. find the key "/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager", and change that to
3. create the window maker desktop fil
FVWM (Score:2)
Y'know, I'm tempted back into the fold, I really am.
fvwm's config file format is powerful, but also somewhat opaque. Might still just grab that bull.
As for old school, one of the most tricked-out desktops I've ever seen is Steve Hand's twm configuration (he's one of the core Xen developers). Multiple desktops, all hot-keyed, flying back and forth between windows and desktops while coding up a storm, building sources, and running VMs. Just goes to show you don't need to ran teh new hawt an shinay for a p
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Re:Good grief... (Score:4, Informative)
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You really couldn't try http://www.xfce.org/ [xfce.org] ?
Anyway, it's a middle-weight DE based on Gtk.