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Xfce 4.16

xfce.org

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Re: Xfce 4.16

#21

Post by mongol »

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.

It just feels simple and keeps out of the way. I used KDE way back, before v4, and it was my favourite DE then. But it always had these broken glitches and an over abundance of settings and utilities that were not always on par with the core KDE. I have learned that I prefer less with even quality than more with uneven.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#22

Post by ohazi »

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 switched to XFCE after Gnome 3 was released and have used it ever since. There's been enough said here recently about the problems with Gnome 3 and the attitude of the Gnome developers, but the 10,000 ft view is that they refuse to stop pretending that my desktop PC is an iPad. Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8 / Metro, but at least they eventually backpedaled.

If you think Windows usability peaked around Windows XP, XFCE might be worth trying.

All I want is an application menu, some launchers, a window list, a widget/notification area, and some reasonable keybindings. Gnome 2 had these things, and then early Gnome 3 got rid of basically all of them. If some fancypants UX researchers want to experiment with replacing menu bars with hamburgers, that's fine, but I'm just not interested.

I've done more than my fair share of WM hopping (I still use i3 on my laptop because I like being able to resize windows with my keyboard when I don't have a mouse), but XFCE is my workhorse. It may look boring, but it's reliable. It has more than enough features for working productively, and I appreciate the fact that the development team doesn't completely change the way everything works every few years just to chase the latest flashy trend.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#23

Post by Ygg2 »

ohazi wrote: post #22
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 switched to XFCE after Gnome 3 was released and have used it ever since. There's been enough said here recently about the problems with Gnome 3 and the attitude of the Gnome developers, but the 10,000 ft view is that they refuse to stop pretending that my desktop PC is an iPad. Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8 / Metro, but at least they eventually backpedaled. If you think Windows usability peaked aro…

Funny you say that, but on a limited Linux VM, it's the only environment that runs and looks relatively decent.

KDE - Looks great, runs like a slug stuck in molasses.

Gnome - Looks meh, runs slightly better.

Unity - Looks great, same performance as KDE.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#24

Post by miku86 »

anezch wrote: post #19
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.

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.

What do you mean by "startup time"? Booting into Linux? Opening a window?

Re: Xfce 4.16

#25

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Xfce 4.16

#26

Post by 74d-fe6-2c6 »

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.

Same here. I use it with LM20. I just love its simplicity. For me the peak of desktop UX was Windows 98. No feature since then convinced me. Tiles, docks, animations, ... just NO! Except for [Super] triggering a search for applications ... [Super], [f][i], [Enter] -> Firefox opens up. IIRC that didn't exist in Windows 98.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#27

Post by ohazi »

Ygg2 wrote: post #23
ohazi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to XFCE after Gnome 3 was released and have used it ever since. There's been enough said here recently about the problems with Gnome 3 and the attitude of the Gnome developers, but the 10,000 ft view is that they refuse to stop pretending that my desktop PC is an iPad. Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8 / Metro, but at least they eventually backpedaled. If you think Windows usability peaked aro…

Funny you say that, but on a limited Linux VM, it's the only environment that runs and looks relatively decent. KDE - Looks great, runs like a slug stuck in molasses. Gnome - Looks meh, runs slightly better. Unity - Looks great, same performance as KDE.

For whatever reason XFCE gets accused of looking ugly, but I tend to agree with you. It looks fine out of the box, better with some minor tweaking, and is fully themeable if you're into that sort of thing.

KDE always had a reputation for being a bit of a resource hog. Gnome 3 was a rewrite in Javascript, so no surprises there. I never personally used Unity, but it always felt a little annoying when I had to use it on other computers, probably due to the layout and corner gestures.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#28

Post by 29athrowaway »

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.

XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment that uses GTK. It has its own GTK engine, window manager (XFWM), and its own set of apps built on top of GTK... most of them much are faster than their Gnome counterparts.

Thunar is much faster than Nautilus, XFWM is faster than Mutter, XFCE panels are much faster than the Gnome Shell, XFCE GTK engine is much faster than Adwaita... and the list just goes on and on. The result is a really fast and responsive user experience, that will run fast even in low spec machines.

I am not a fan of the default panel layout and overall configuration, but XFCE panels are easy to configure as well as highly configurable. You can create as many panels you want, position them anywhere you want and put any elements on them... There's even a way to create a macOS-like global menu, although I don't recommend it.

Re: Xfce 4.16

#29

Post by tetek »

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.

same here. I always install Xfce if I need to use linux with GUI

Re: Xfce 4.16

#30

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

Icons are trivial to change in Linux. If you preferred the Tango icon pack then just set the icon pack to Tango. There are GUI utilities to manage this for you too.
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