By far the best thing with XFCE is that it does not change, it merely improves. Other DEs and applications radically change the UI between releases.<p>I have my XFCE desktop working as I want now and I don't want to change it or having to learn where buttons are located after an update. With Gnome and Windows I feel like a lab rat for their UI experiments.
Xfce, the "Just Works" of Linux desktop environments not only the DE itself but also its suite of apps like Thunar.<p>They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.
XFCE is frankly the last full featured Desktop Environment, truly focusing on responsiveness and zero-lag SGI-style: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvbiBncmFwaGljcyBjb21tZXJjaWFs">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvb...</a>
MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying.<p>Really hope that Wayland integration works well for them.
I've been using Xubuntu for years - it just works, with no clutter. Absolutely my only complaint are the very thin window borders - this is a setting you cannot individually adjust. However, one quickly gets used to (alt + right-click + drag).
I used to use XFCE (specifically XUbuntu), but found that its handling of hi-dpi displays on laptops etc. wasn't very good, so switched to Plasma/KDE which seems to work better. Still have issues with certain flatpak apps not scaling properly though.
Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here.<p>I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.
I've been using XFCE for the last 15 years. Before that it was vtwm, fvwm, afterstep, but I could never get into GNOME or KDE. XFCE just does everything I need and I don't see any reason to switch.
> As long as Nvidia does not support Wayland<p>AFIK this problem was solved ~2 years ago when Nvidia added support for GBM in version 495.44 (<a href="https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en-us/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...</a>)
I really love XFCE. I used it on and off on low-resource machines since the late 00s, and then moved to it for my main desktop when the Gnome3 thing happened. I've never looked back (though I'll admit I'm also a macbook user!).<p>What do I like? It's never forced me to change the way I work. That's up to me.<p>So if Wayland is the future, then I look forward to using XFCE on Wayland somewhere down the line too.
I've recently been giving Xfce a try again on one of my machines, and even though I still prefer KDE on my main machine, I've been quite enjoying it. Especially the SPEED of it has been astonishing. Everything is just absolutely instant. I also really like the "spartan" feel of it.<p>Probably the main thing I'm missing from KDE is being able fo use Super+Number to switch between windows, i.e. Super+1 switches to the window at the first position in the taskbar, etc.. I've been searching around, but haven't found anything that'd be 100%. Would anyone happen to have a solution by any chance?
Just want to show massive appreciation for Xfce. Best DE ever. I'm currently forced to use macOS in the work laptop and I miss Xfce every second. It'd be amazing to have a Wayland version so we can enjoy it for many more years to come. Thanks to the developers of this fantastic piece of software.
Not an XFCE user (I'm comfortably satisfied with the simplicity that is Gnome) but I'm very happy to see XFCE's concrete plans to move towards Wayland!
The march to Wayland hopefully doesn’t complete until color management & DisplayLink are merged. I had to go back to X11 because of missing features.
My favorite combination is Mint + Xfce + openbox as the window manager which leaves the CPU at 0% when not doing anything, and is very responsive and versatile. I had to setup separate dark themes for each one but now it looks good.<p>The only thing I don't like is thunar freezing often when doing long blocking IO operations...
The most important points:<p>- It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).<p>- We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor<p>This should tell you everything. Since the Wayland ecosystem is extremely developer hostile it cements the KDE/GNOME duopoly and eliminates the long tail. XFCE might maybe make the push to Wayland but after that that's it. The rest of the tail is dead.
I hope this will be a slow transition but I am pretty sure it will since that's how xfce usually works.<p>I switched to xfce not so long ago after almost 15 years of using KDE for that slow pace exactly. I had small problems and annoyances with KDE on nvidia for a long time but it got worse over time and reached a breaking point lately. Not even talking about Wayland.<p>Anyways, I am happy to have a rock solid and stable alternative like xfce.
There are a couple reasons I can only back Gnome at this point, even though I loved/miss XFCE.<p>Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition
HDR + variable refresh
Fractional scaling (I think XFCE has some/all of this?)<p>We're just playing catchup to MacOS for over a decade, and soon enough Linux will have to compete with 3d desktop environments (Apple Vision Pro interface). I think we're almost to the point where the DE will be just a physics simulator (game engine) to help augment your reality.<p>Anyway, I still use XFCE on resource-limited hardware but Gnome has been the only option for a while because progress isn't being made by other DEs on these critical things (color, refresh, alpha-composition, and some wayland protocols missing in wlroots).<p>I'm just glad Gnome isn't the dependency hell it used to be, and has slimmed down. I really love what they've done with GJS but I believe there's a competing KDE bindings project.<p></naive>
i run xfce combine with i3. pretty happ with the setup <a href="https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w</a>
I'm glad to see there's a transition Roadmap in place. This is more than Cinnamon DE has at the moment.<p>You know you're behind the curve when even Xfce is ahead of you.
These days I can't be bothered to deviate from the happy path anymore as I've already spent too much time in my life customizing my desktops.<p>I just use whatever GNOME offers and maybe 1-2 extensions. A few months ago I switched from Fedora to Debian 12 and barely noticed it. Thanks to GNOME and systemd, which I hate independently for various reasons.<p>I do feel like a sellout (but not getting paid).
Tangentially, what does xfce (or any other DE for that matter) bring to the table if I already use i3 and have i3 status bar configured to fit my needs?<p>I mean, I do have NetworkManager, Blueman, Nautilus (file explorer), so why would I need a DE? I'm wondering if I'm missing something. (Honest question)
When I use AWS workspace in X11, The clipboard contents can be shared across host and guest VMs. In wayland, the clipboard is not syncing with AWS VM.<p>Is it the way like this? is there any workaround?
Could someone please enlighten me?