Xfce 4.16 • Hacker News Board

Re: Xfce 4.16

#11

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

himujjal wrote: post #9

m8s wrote: post #2

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.

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

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.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#12

Post by int_19h » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

OscarCunningham wrote: post #5

Will this make it into the upcoming Debian Bullseye release?

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

Re: Xfce 4.16

#13

Post by int_19h » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

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

Re: Xfce 4.16

#14

Post by OscarCunningham » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #12

OscarCunningham wrote: post #5

Will this make it into the upcoming Debian Bullseye release?

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

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

Re: Xfce 4.16

#15

Post by vanderZwan » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:19 AM UTC

cosmotic wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#16

Post by lexa1979 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

himujjal wrote: post #9

m8s wrote: post #2

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.

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

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.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#17

Post by pacamara619 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

himujjal wrote: post #9

m8s wrote: post #2

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.

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

KDE and Gnome are significantly more expensive resource wise.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#18

Post by alxlaz » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #11

himujjal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 som…

If you mostly use GTK applications, it's a great way to use them in a well-rounded desktop environment that isn't Gnome. That's appealing enough for a lot of people, even 10 years after the first Gnome 3 release. Some people (like yours truly) just ditched the applications and moved to other things, like KDE land. Some didn't and just ditched the DE.

They have very legitimate reasons -- e.g. Thunderbird (and Evolution, for all its faults) kindda work with Exchange if you jump through some hoops, whereas KMail 2 still barely works with anything.

Other than that: it's very stable, very fast (QML and QtQuick, as it turns out, aren't very good at giving you a fast, low-latency interface and permanent iteration by lots of developers), easy to setup.

In many ways, XFCE is to Gnome 3 what KDE 3.x was to KDE 4.x and the Plasma series (except it's also maintained [1]): a solid, traditional platform that modestly aims to build things with the tools we have right now for the computers we have right now, instead of developing an advanced technological and design framework that will also work on the machines that the design hive mind says we'll have tomorrow.

[1] Yes, I know about TDE :-).

Re: Xfce 4.16

#19

Post by anezch » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

himujjal wrote: post #9

m8s wrote: post #2

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.

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

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.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#20

Post by Kototama » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 9:29 AM UTC

m8s wrote: post #2

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.

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.