Live data from Hacker News

Xfce is great

rubenerd.com

131–140 of 254 posts

Re: Xfce is great

#131

I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.

I’m still on xfce, but haven’t used KDE in more than 10 years. Hearing lots of good things about it lately so maybe it’s time to give it another shot.

Re: Xfce is great

#133

I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time to time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again. I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after tryi…

Wayland just seems really unstable to me. I try it occasionally, but glitches, freezes or crashes quickly drive me back to X.

Re: Xfce is great

#134
I used XFCE (MxLinux) for 5 years until recently when I moved to KDE Plasma (Fedora) because of Wayland support. Imo, KDE is better and more resource efficient. I also got a free 10 fps boost on DotA 2 on the same hardware and settings. Zed and a lot of other apps are better supported on Wayland.

Re: Xfce is great

#135

I really wanted to like XFCE, but the tiny tiny window grab area for resizing is just too damn frustrating.

Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.

Re: Xfce is great

#136
I used to use XFCE a lot, but since then, even though it sucks in its own ways quite a lot, Gnome defaults to a nicer environment nowadays and doesn't seem so resource intensive anymore.

Re: Xfce is great

#137

Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.

How high? What kind of problems? I very recently upgraded from a dual fullhd to a dual 4k setup and I was genuinely surprised how little problems I had setting everything up to the high DPI displays. I am genuinely interested in hearing what pitfalls might still await me.

Most HighDPI issues on X based DEs is from lack of fractional scaling, which means the scaling needs to happen in the applications instead (with separate configs for each UI toolkit), leading to lots of weird issues with inconsistently scaled UI elements on monitors sized such that integer scaling produces an inappropriate scale.

It doesn't affect all monitors, but some DPIs really don't play well with X. The fractional scaling you get on Wayland leads to some element of blur instead, but that's a far lesser evil, the jank is a bigger issue IMO.

Re: Xfce is great

#138
Years ago, one of the most intelligent and brightest guys I worked with was using xfce

His setup was almost non existent apart from few customisations.

I remember he told me that xfce was the best one could get, while not being unpolite, he implied the problem was that people liked too much too have bells and blinking lights.

I kept using for a while what I was using, but after giving a try, yeah, that was all I needed.

Re: Xfce is great

#139

I just discovered alt-scroll just by accident. Desktop Zoom (Xubuntu/Kubuntu): In Xfce (Xubuntu) and KDE (Kubuntu), Alt + Scroll is the default shortcut to zoom in and out of the entire desktop. This is an accessibility feature used to magnify specific parts of the screen.

Neat! Does someone know a way to implement this in hyprland?

Re: Xfce is great

#140
post #118

xfce way back in the day was trying to clone CDE which is open source and actively maintained these days https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (really. last release was in november 2025) Just in case you want an even more vintage experience. There's also people trying to keep the SGI experience alive, but this one is a clone: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/ As for as early xfce check out https://xteddy.org/…

Instead of Maxx Desktop, check EMWM plus the goodies: https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html I won't consider XFCE vintage but sane, boring but working. Vintage would be a vanilla FVWM, or MWM, or TWM/CTWM. But not so much, as things come full circle. EvilWM would look outdated and crappy under Slashdot threads in 2001 or close, because it looked something from the 80's, altough some bright users stated that it saved tons…

EMWM is really nice. Too bad that Wyaland will make alternative WMs like this one very hard to use and obsolete in the long run.
Post reply on HN