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Xfce is great

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Re: Xfce is great

#41

Post by cosmic_cheese »

dangus wrote: post #27
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome is only similar to macOS in the most superficial of ways. You don't even have to go beyond skin-deep for the illusion to start to fall apart. It compares more closely to iPadOS or Android in desktop mode. Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.

I’m wildly confused at this claim. More like iPadOS, really??

Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.

Re: Xfce is great

#42

Post by nine_k »

esseph wrote: post #33
nine_k wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need. (Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive F…

But maybe people want to run XFCE AND play competitive fps? It would be embarrassing for gnome to be more performant there than XFCE.

Don't full-screen apps sidestep the DE compositor anyway?

Re: Xfce is great

#43

Post by Nursie »

I concur with the author - XFCE is a great desktop.

I first used it on an eeepc because something light was the order of the day. But then Gnome 3 happened and I made the switch on my full-strength machines too.

It works and it works well. It's theme-able. It's not opinionated about how I should use it so I can put bars wherever I want, launchers, menus, systrays wherever I like, and I can do it all with a few clicks and dragging and dropping stuff.

Generally a great DE and one that won't screw you over on update, which is something I've come to value.

Re: Xfce is great

#44

Post by andrewflnr »

ntnsndr wrote: post #34
andrewflnr wrote: post #2

If anyone is actually switching to Linux in the current hype cycle, I'd very much recommend starting with XFCE if you can. In my experience it really does seem to be the lowest-BS desktop out there, like the good parts of Windows XP.

I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points. I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best app…

> the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need

Who is actually getting this impression? What thing that they "need" is in doubt?

> I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to,"

You assume incorrectly. Every OS and DE finds some way to be obnoxious, even when you've learned the tricks and keyboard shortcuts. XFCE just seems to have the least of them. It's predictable. I think a new user will be able to navigate it immediately. I don't know about KDE, but I sure couldn't say the same about Gnome 3.

Re: Xfce is great

#45

Post by iberator »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #40
readthenotes1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you quantify those performance problems? Would I notice them on a 2018 vintage laptop?

I am running XFCE on a 2019 vintage desktop. CachyOS and 16GB RAM. It is snappy and very performant for my needs and I work on it daily for software development

16gb of memory an. 2019 is not vintage lol.

Re: Xfce is great

#46

Post by usr1106 »

Fiveplus wrote: post #11

While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency . It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a perf…

Xfce runs decently on my 10 year old 2-core Atom laptop with 2GB of RAM. It might use some inefficient patterns, not sure about that. But all the modern bloat software has brought basically little added value while eating much more resources, despite the claimed efficiency improvements.

Re: Xfce is great

#47

Post by segphault »

Fiveplus wrote: post #11

While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency . It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a perf…

What? The window manger and the panel (plasmashell) are separate processes in a Plasma desktop. In Sway, users typically choose from a range of totally separate applications like swaybar or quickshell for the panel. There’s absolutely no reason the panel has to be coupled with the compositor under Wayland and nobody actually does it that way that I’ve seen.

Re: Xfce is great

#48

Post by margalabargala »

Fiveplus wrote: post #22
readthenotes1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you quantify those performance problems? Would I notice them on a 2018 vintage laptop?

Hmm, I'd say that on a 2018-era machine, you won't measure this in raw CPU throughput. In all probablity, your cores are fast enough to mask the context switching. The performance deficit here is strictly in the domain of motion-to-photon latency or frame pacing. I guess my point is that in xfce's split architecture, the compositor acts as just another X11 client. This enforces a path where window contents often roun…

My newer desktop (2020 era with a 3070) has 4x 4k monitors attached running XFCE and I have never noticed the lag you speak of. I don't run external monitors on it but my thinkpad x200 with a core 2 duo also does great with xfce.

I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.

Re: Xfce is great

#49

Post by deathanatos »

dangus wrote: post #26
GrowingSideways wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome is still a windows knockoff yea? Can you use readline bindings in a textfield? Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application. > You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome? Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguisha…

I am more confused than when we started, what exactly are you saying macOS is doing that nobody else is doing? > use readline bindings in a textfield I don’t even know what this means.

They mean pretty much like they say.

readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line.

bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically.

macOS adopted some (but not all) of the common keybinds from that era into their UI. I.e., in a GUI text entry field in macOS, you can hit ^A to move the cursor to the start of the text entry.

(I don't know that this particular UI-ism would make or break an OS for me, personally, though.)

Given how UI is implemented, this would be up to the toolkit. In GTK3, this was called "key themes"; there was, I think, an "Emacs" theme that would do what they desire. I do not know if GTK4 still has this, however (and I suspect it was removed).

(I think more users are going to expect ^A to be select-all, and home/end and ^← for word navigation, etc. These are the defaults. Thus key themes were probably little used.)

Re: Xfce is great

#50

Post by teiferer »

Fiveplus wrote: post #11

While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency . It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a perf…

I understand what you are saying about efficiency in theory.

Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?

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