I'm very impressed and happy for the continued support for non-Linux systems. It's very heartening that when necessary, they are coding backends for other systems, instead of buying in to the Linux-only systemd lock-in.<p>I was also very surprised to see how decent the UI looks even under GTK+ 3. I was afraid they would get sucked into the horrible catastrophe that has befallen Gnome with things like client-side decorations.<p>Gedit, for instance, went from this: <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png" rel="nofollow">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit226...</a> ... to this: <a href="http://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-csd.png" rel="nofollow">http://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-csd.png</a> ... the horror.<p>Has anyone given this a try yet? I would like to know if the common dialogs (eg file open, file save) use proper window decorations, or if they too now look like the Gnome 3 CSD garbage.<p>Also, it's still possible to use Clearlooks-Phenix, right? They're just saying they discontinued the Xfce-* themes, right? Adwaita is such a dull theme.
<i>The desktop has a new wallpaper settings dialog</i><p>I would like to apologetically take blame for designing and implementing the old dialog 6+ years ago, and thank the team for finally replacing it with something that looks actually usable.<p>Congrats on 4.12! Hopefully it'll be in Debian jessie soon...
My new work (a government research lab) has some strict policy (no installing own OS) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 on the desktop workstations. And the RHEL 6.5 has Gnome 2. So I was thrown back in time to the long lost paradise (since 2011) that is Gnome 2. It brought back memories, and now that I again use it, I must say that Gnome 2 is not bad at all.<p>On my laptop I use Xubuntu (Xfce desktop), and I also must say that modern Xfce is better at the Gnome 2 thing, than Gnome 2.
I'm so sad to say this is looking worse for every release. And by looking, I mean looking. I'm starting to think this is going to be just as unbearingly ugly as the current iterations of GNOME and KDE in a few versions. It might be getting more functional, but I don't know.<p>Xfce was the option I was so happy to have. It used to be a no frills, minimalistic (but not conceptually minimalistic) interface that simply did the job. Now the interface is getting more complicated and innovative. More complicated designs requires better designers, and they don't seem to be around except for in the Elementary OS community.<p>I haven't looked into MATE yet, perhaps I'll do that.
There's a visual tour here of the new version here:<p><a href="http://xfce.org/about/tour" rel="nofollow">http://xfce.org/about/tour</a>
Glad to see that support work for a GTK3 version is coming along -- I'm looking forward to that.<p>I've always been a fan of XFCE -- it's lightweight, but not <i>so</i> lightweight that you have to make a ton of sacrifices. Plus, XFWM is the only window manager I know of that supports compositing, but doesn't have any animations or other fancy effects (on slower computers, this can be surprisingly beneficial).
I used to love XFCE for being a light weight alternative to Gnome and KDE. The last time I used it on a linux system it had gotten quite a bit porkier.<p>Can anyone speak to if the new release has slimmed things down or is it still, at least to my reading, becoming bulkier still?
Oooh. List mode alt-tab looks interesting. One of the features <i>still</i> keeping me on WindowMaker is the fact that I can pin windowlists, which makes tracking down a specific window (across multiple desktops) far easier.<p>And <i>after</i> WindowMaker, xfce remains my preferred full-desktop environment. I like that it's avoided the feature-bloat and power-user hostility of GNOME and KDE.
And here I just got around to upgrading to 4.10!<p>I've been running Crouton (XFCE/Xubuntu) on my Samsung Chromebook 13" for about a year now. XFCE is a godsend for Chromebooks... instantly transformed from a light browsing laptop into a serious work machine.
I'm very excited! Can't wait to see this in official Arch repos ^_^ I've been using XFCE as my main DE since 2011 Thank you everyone in linux community who made this release possible. This release has tons of bug fixes and features according to changelog here; <a href="http://xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.12" rel="nofollow">http://xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.12</a>
As someone who has used xfce 4.10 before switching to i3, I am <i>very</i> impressed of the progress the Xfce team has made, especially UI improvements. They are consistently picking up the latest good designs and implementing them in their simple, no-bullshit manner. Great job!
I haven't used Linux for a few years now (KDE was always my go-to GUI), but after reading this article[1], I've decided to go back.<p>What is the hot new Linux distro on the block? Elementary OS? Tails? Steam OS?<p>[1] <a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-apple-google-and-microsoft-78af12071bd" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/backchannel/why-i-m-saying-goodbye-to-app...</a>