I stopped using GTK applications a while ago, so I don't use XFCE anymore, but I still love it, just... from a distance. It's an increasingly uncommon breed of software, which gets better with every release. No pointless shuffling of user interface features in the name of UX "innovation", no rationalizing bugs so that they look like deliberate design choices, just steady improvement. All this by an independent team with basically zero funding.<p>IMHO, XFCE is one of the few relatively well-known projects that still embodies the spirit of free software as we once knew it. Kudos to the quiet and tenacious people behind it, who still manage to come up with one quality release after another, so many years down the road.<p>If you want to support (at least some of) their work, Sean Davis has a Patreon account: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre</a> . Sean is one of XFCE's core developers and the Xubuntu tech lead. I don't know if there's a more official XFCE donation sink (this one is the only one I know of), but hey, it would be a great start!
I used to really like XFCE and it was my daily driver on my laptop for 6years because it was no compromises on performance type of GUI. Also worked amazing in VMs if you needed to test something and WSL on windows didn't exist.<p>But then they started working on GTK v3 and things started to fall apart (my experience is only from xubuntu but i think it doesn't matter).
Thunar got really buggy, often crashed in random locations and it was painful to use. This one at least got fixed.<p>Then mousepad. It used to be really fast editor but after i switched from old xubuntu to 18.04 it feels extremly sluggish when opening lager document with syntax highlight. E.g. download html of youtube and open it in mousepad, it's unusuable.<p>And then the clipboard issues and large image (screenshot) killed it for me and I had to switch to KDE. It takes ~0.5-1s more to load apps like dolphin compared to thunar but at least once you load them they just work. I still hope I'll be able to come back, the zero animation GUI is appealing to me.
My issue with using "lightweight" DEs in linux is they're so badly polished. VSync is way off. There are minor glitches all around the place. I used to use AwesomeWM which was by far the best DE experience I had in my life. Currently I use OSX and even though OSX looks more aesthetic I can never achieve the simplicity and efficiency of AwesomeWM. Even then, when I occasionally go back to lightweight DEs and say watch a movie, I immediately realize the VSync issue. Gnome and KDE does NOT have these minor issue but they're also not nearly as efficient as awesome, XMonad, ratpoison, xfce, lxde etc.
I’m very excited about high DPI support. I switched to xfce on all my Linux boxes because I like the simplicity but the lack of proper high dpi was a nuisance.
> [session manager] can now run commands not only "autostart style" at login time, but also when your computer suspends, logs out etc.<p>> larger thumbnails as well as support for a "folder.jpg" file altering the folder's icon<p>> "Do Not Disturb" mode<p>> HiDPI support
I switched to xfce about a year ago (from gnome) and have not looked back yet. It is great and I quite like the "oldschool" feel. Really recommend trying it out!
In hindsight my desktop experience peaked about 10 years ago when I started out as a dev using XFCE. The move away and subsequent desktops; Gnome, Mac, Windows have not touched that golden age of window management.
It is my current WM, uses C, but at least isn't as slow as GNOME with JavaScript everywhere.<p>Thanks to Canonical's decision, I ended up migrating to XFCE, I was actually quite happy with Unity before.
> <i>Most components also received GObject Introspection support.</i><p>In case anyone doesn't know what this is. GI is a system for accompanying system components (i.e. shared libraries) with XML meta-data (in separate files) that describes their API's: types, functions, arguments, and argument semantics (in/out pointers: who owns/allocates/frees, and whatnot).<p>Here is the significance: if the GI info for a component is correct, and if you can parse it in your language, from that info you can generate accurate FFI bindings, without manual work.<p>The accurate, detailed semantic information cannot be gleaned even if you parse the C headers. Without something like GObject Introspection, you're looking at a lot of manual work.
Xfce is my daily driver for cloud development. I use Xubuntu running in VirtualBox on a Windows gaming laptop. (I know, I know, Oracle and all that!) Running in seamless mode works quite well. Since I code in Golang, I don't need the fastest machine around for fast compiles. Also, since I run ubuntu VMs on AWS, I have nearly zero mismatches between my development environment and deployment. I can even run my full IDE/debugger (I use Goland) in a deployed environment for debugging.<p>Which brings me to a segue: This seems like a good place to ask what's the lightest weight developer-cromulent environment possible that would support a GUI? When I bring up an IntelliJ IDE on a VM, I see that I'm using just short of 6.5 GB of disk. Most of that seems to be the OS, which at the moment is Xubuntu. What's lighter weight, but not outdated and annoying? (When I incorporate Docker, 6.5GB is going to be a bit heavyweight.)<p>Back in the Smalltalk days, the Visual Smalltalk image with some libraries loaded could basically do the same thing as VNC, but with no OS dependencies and with a much smaller footprint. People were already debugging server deployments with a full IDE back in the early 2000's.
Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to use rox-filer rather than Thunar for operations on most used directories for it being faster than Thunar (although Thunar did improve a lot). To do so I keep those 4 or 5 icons on the panel each of which calls rox-filer and one of the paths as the argument (example: "rox-filer Documents" as command with "~/Documents" as working directory). This makes it much faster especially with crowded dirs.
Nice! Congrats to the team and I look forward to trying it out later on.<p>XFCE has been my DE of choice since the Gnome 3 thing, and I love how it still gives me the (relatively modest) options to arrange things as I like, without attempting to re-educate me on how I should use my computer.<p>I first tried XFCE when I was looking for somethign lightweight to run on an eeePc 901 (the first consumer atom machine, IIRC).<p>Keep up the good work :)
wow! This was unexpected for me. Changes happen so rarely with xfce and for me it is a good thing. But I wonder with all the optimizations going with gnome will xfce be any lighter anymore? I mean the next gnome versions, even 3.32 is resource hungry sometimes.
Haven't used Xfce in a few years... is there finally a native Dock/SuperBar or a proper plugin that isn't some hack that nests alternative docks inside a panel?
I like xfce as much as the next casual Linux user, but how big a deal is it <i>really</i>? How impactful on the world is the not-even-first-rank Linux desktop? Is its usership even in the tens of thousands?
It sounds funny, but I waited for this for years :D Great news.<p>EDIT: The below text is actually fake news - a rebuild of appmenu/vala against latest xfce seems to solve this.<p>However, if you are using valapanel/AppMenu, maybe you'd like to wait with the upgrade until a compatible version is released[1].<p>1. <a href="https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/issues/309" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/iss...</a>
I've tried using linux desktop for daily use multiple times.
Xfce was usually my choice for its simplicity and snappiness.<p>But, there was this 1 simple thing that made me lose faith in the linux desktop:<p>For xfce's default folder viewer: Thunar, there was no possibility to adjust a per-folder view settings.
At first I did not beleive it, but there were multiple discussion complaining about the same issue, including a 12-years old bug report(<a href="https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521" rel="nofollow">https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521</a> )<p>For a desktop manager endorsed by major distrubitions, I find this to be mind blowing and enraging.<p>It gave me the feeling that linux desktop is an un-finisehd, unpolished, hacky piece of software