12 ms·

Xfce 4.14

380 points by severine 7y ago

mmrezaie 7y ago
wow! This was unexpected for me. Changes happen so rarely with xfce and for me it is a good thing. But I wonder with all the optimizations going with gnome will xfce be any lighter anymore? I mean the next gnome versions, even 3.32 is resource hungry sometimes.
- xendo 7y ago
  It's exactly because of these optimizations that Gnome is running slower. They have so many things to optimize that optimizing one makes two slower -- it's a vicious cycle.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Plus the amount of stuff that gets written in Python or JavaScript. If it is for the high level stuff, they could give Vala some love instead.
  - mmrezaie 7y ago
    I agree. I do not remember why did I switch away from xfce to this new gnome (3.32)? I hope they get faster with their progress.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    A story how early GTK3 was loosing so much to GTK2 even with first taking full advantage of fast Cairo rendering. GTK2 own renderers were managing to outdo external ones for many reasons
    - pferde 7y ago
      Not to mention that GTK3 is so over-optimized that it skips some important calculations and sometimes ends up with certain widgets positioned incorrectly. It's a mess.
jdsully 7y ago
I’m very excited about high DPI support. I switched to xfce on all my Linux boxes because I like the simplicity but the lack of proper high dpi was a nuisance.
unhammer 7y ago
> [session manager] can now run commands not only "autostart style" at login time, but also when your computer suspends, logs out etc. > larger thumbnails as well as support for a "folder.jpg" file altering the folder's icon > "Do Not Disturb" mode > HiDPI support
lemper 7y ago
I'm quite excited with this news. If this release is nice enough, i think i will migrate to xfce4 from kde plasma.
puzzlingcaptcha 7y ago
I've been testing it since 4.13-pre1 and it's a solid (if slightly overdue) release.
meddlepal 7y ago
I've been using XFCE for years now and it's just absolutely my favorite no thrills DE.
- zepearl 7y ago
  I used to use Enlightenment e16. Then some months ago e16 was superseded by e17 (with the various versions 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22) => e17 is very nice but I never ever managed to run a bug-free version of it (they could rename the software to "Bug"). Desperate for an alternative, I tested other window managers and XFCE was the only one that provided some features that were similar to e16 and that I wanted to keep using => using since then XFCE on all my PCs and notebooks with no problems (and I'm since today a patron of Sean Davis, yo). Really looking forward to the vsync of XFCE 4.14 :) "Alternatives" is one of the main reasons of why I love Linux - everybody can choose in a huge number of areas the type of software that fits him/her best.
ivanstame 7y ago
I just hope compositor works better now...
- severine 7y ago
  One would hope so, as there are several mentions of the compositor in the changelog: https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14 https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14
epberry 7y ago
Hell yes. Fastest desktop in the land.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I bet twm or fvwm would be even faster. :)
  - gattilorenz 7y ago
    Short sad personal story. I once entered in a class and heard the familiar Windows 95 startup sound. Thinking it was a VM, I went and checked: a group of students were customizing their Linux distribution to look like Win95. I asked them if they knew fvwm95, the window manager of my youth; they didn't, and I suddenly realized that a) it's not supported anymore b) they were all born after Windows 95 was released c) I'm slowly getting old.
    - jraph 7y ago
      “What is this Xorg stuff you are talking about already? Is it like Wayland? Oh you could run windows through the network? Nice! Wait, apps had to connect to a socket to draw stuff? So weird. Wasn't it inefficient as hell to send whole full screen windows at 100 Hz using this? Oh you could bypass this to have… what you call it again? “Direct rendering”? Sounds like a horrible hack.”
      - qplex 7y ago
        I get you're joking and while it seems to be trendy to put Xorg down, the reality is that it's actually the one that works. Wayland is still very buggy and not at all ready for mainstream use. I really don't get that Debian took it up as the default in Buster. Xwayland sucks also, it breaks applications that run fine under X.org and very few applications have native support for Wayland. </rant>
        jraph 7y ago
        Well, yes, I'm still using Xorg too :-) Middle click paste is not yet supported in KDE with Wayland [1], and it seems that KDE and Wayland don't like suspend / resume on my machine, and recently (after a bios update ?), adding a screen have made the system crash. Besides, as far as I know, it is not possible to run Wayland apps on Android (yet, but it seems that it is a hard problem [2]). [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 [2] http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-android/ http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-and...
alxlaz 7y ago
I stopped using GTK applications a while ago, so I don't use XFCE anymore, but I still love it, just... from a distance. It's an increasingly uncommon breed of software, which gets better with every release. No pointless shuffling of user interface features in the name of UX "innovation", no rationalizing bugs so that they look like deliberate design choices, just steady improvement. All this by an independent team with basically zero funding. IMHO, XFCE is one of the few relatively well-known projects that still embodies the spirit of free software as we once knew it. Kudos to the quiet and tenacious people behind it, who still manage to come up with one quality release after another, so many years down the road. If you want to support (at least some of) their work, Sean Davis has a Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre . Sean is one of XFCE's core developers and the Xubuntu tech lead. I don't know if there's a more official XFCE donation sink (this one is the only one I know of), but hey, it would be a great start!
- terminalhealth 7y ago
  > I stopped using GTK applications a while ago So you're only using something like ‎i3, ‎XMonad or ‎dwm?
  - Avery3R 7y ago
    KDE native apps are built on qt too
  - alxlaz 7y ago
    Ah, no, I'm using lxqt at the moment. It's not perfect but it's okay, and I trust its developers' common sense. Every once in a while I fire up Plasma 5, too, but I'm not convinced. In the last year or so it seems to have gone down the mobile-inspired UI rabbit hole and it's getting increasingly awkward to use. Other than that, I use the same kind of applications you'd expect any desktop user to use, from file managers to text editors and from office suites to web browsers. Only most of them are Qt-based :). The only GTK applications I still use are Firefox (GTK-ish) and Emacs, which can still be compiled against GTK2 which is a good enough compromise for me. It's nothing personal, I don't want to get into a big rant about how Linux used to be about choice and about how Gnome is a Red Hat conspiracy, or whatever flag is being waved in 4chan & friends. I just don't like GTK3's UX choices. Oversized widgets, awkward scrollbars and hamburger menus aren't pleasant to use on a 30" monitor. A few years ago I tried to get around that with a custom theme, but theming is... kind of frowned upon in GTK land, so it didn't end well. But, you know, their code -- their choice. I don't like the choices but I think it's a big step forward from the '90s and a big test of maturity for the open source community. Making (what I believe to be) our own mistakes is way better than cargo culting Microsoft and Apple, which is what we've done up until 5-6 years ago. Edit: also, why are you folks downvoting the parent comment? It's a productive question, even if it looks uninformed (i.e. I'm guessing the downvotes are because it's conflating "GTK applications" with "desktop applications", which looks silly but have you had a look at Ubuntu lately?). If you think that's a stupid question, fine, but are you really that sure you've never asked a stupid question in your life?
pjmlp 7y ago
It is my current WM, uses C, but at least isn't as slow as GNOME with JavaScript everywhere. Thanks to Canonical's decision, I ended up migrating to XFCE, I was actually quite happy with Unity before.
kbumsik 7y ago
So is it fully migrated to Gtk3 now?
- hpaavola 7y ago
  > In this 4.14 cycle the main goal was to port all core components to Gtk3 (over Gtk2) https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000 https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000 So depending on the definition of "fully", that would be yes or no :) Some details can be found here https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status
lol_jono 7y ago
this is the one project where point releases actually mean something
znpy 7y ago
Love Xfce, it's the only sane-minded desktop environment. I hope it will keep being awesome as it currently is!
- _0ffh 7y ago
  Hi, I also like xfce, and I've used it for a few years in the late noughties. But then I tried lxde, and I've stuck with that ever since. While I agree things like KDE and Gnome3 are atrocities, what makes you think so of lxde?
  - byuu 7y ago
    Not the original poster, but the trouble I had with lxde was that it never felt consistent. It felt more like openbox where you made a desktop out of dozens of indepedent projects that each did things their own way. Xfce, by comparison, feels like each program is part of a package. That is not to say it's perfect: I still have to pull in Mate applications for things like a task manager, archive manager, and calculator. I also had to write my own replacements for things like a text editor that doesn't open every new document in a new window. But I get a whole lot of mileage out of Xfce's file browser, desktop, panel, terminal, settings panel, etc. I'm a bit nervous about the Xfce move to GTK3, and I hope I won't end up with any client-side decorated windows, or the GTK3-style file picker.
    - kitsunesoba 7y ago
      I haven’t used LXDE/LxQt in several years but this has been my experience as well. XFCE feels like an intentional, designed singular “piece” where LxQt feels stitched together.
  - lousken 7y ago
    Also not OP but the window management in lxde felt a lot like windows xp. You couldn't even snap applications to one side.
    - _0ffh 7y ago
Insanity 7y ago
I switched to xfce about a year ago (from gnome) and have not looked back yet. It is great and I quite like the "oldschool" feel. Really recommend trying it out!
- kgwxd 7y ago
  I've been using Xubuntu for about 10 years now. Over the weekend, I tried to switch my main desktop to Ubuntu. The animations instantly drove me back. I didn't even bother looking if I could turn them off because I knew, even if there is an option, I'd be fighting with them after every update for the rest of my life.
ctack 7y ago
In hindsight my desktop experience peaked about 10 years ago when I started out as a dev using XFCE. The move away and subsequent desktops; Gnome, Mac, Windows have not touched that golden age of window management.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  Can't you just use Xfce again? You could still be riding that peak...
  - ctack 7y ago
    You're absolutely right. Have a company MBP for the time being but after this I will absolutely be looking at Xfce again.
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  For me the peak was when KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were around: probably just about when Ubuntu arrived on the scene.
severine 7y ago
I'd also like to mention the excellent community forum, with some of the most helpful mods and fellow users in the FOSS landscape.
- severine 7y ago
  Link: https://forum.xfce.org/ https://forum.xfce.org/
karatchov 7y ago
I've tried using linux desktop for daily use multiple times. Xfce was usually my choice for its simplicity and snappiness. But, there was this 1 simple thing that made me lose faith in the linux desktop: For xfce's default folder viewer: Thunar, there was no possibility to adjust a per-folder view settings. At first I did not beleive it, but there were multiple discussion complaining about the same issue, including a 12-years old bug report(https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521 https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521 ) For a desktop manager endorsed by major distrubitions, I find this to be mind blowing and enraging. It gave me the feeling that linux desktop is an un-finisehd, unpolished, hacky piece of software
- aflag 7y ago
  So you used a somewhat obscure window manager, found a missing feature in the folder viewer you were using and jumped to the conclusion that Linux has a broken desktop experience?
  - karatchov 7y ago
    I used the default window manager that comes with xfce. I tried setting up other window managers in xfce, and come to the conclusion it is not straightfoward, and the integration with the rest of the system is not perfect. Also it was a feeling of imperfection that pushed me back (I am sure you can setup the linux desktop for your liking if you tried enough)
    - jraph 7y ago
      I would not recommend Xfce to a newcomer, though I know some people who started using Linux with it and kept it. I think I would recommend Cinnamon (I don't like it personally but people seem to like it) or Unity (especially since they came back to Gnome. This desktop looks nice and easy to use). I like Plasma 5, I find it's the best general purpose desktop environment across all the major OSes, but somehow non-technical people don't seem to like it so much. All these observations are anecdotal and should be taken with a grain of salt. I didn't conduct a study and the number of people is low. There is a ongoing effort in the KDE community to improve usability and usability and they are doing a great job. I recommend reading https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/
koyote 7y ago
By far one of the best windows managers out there! Looking forward to using the new version once it hits Xubuntu.
garrettt1979 7y ago
Log in to Twitter The email and password you entered did not match our records. Please double-check and try again. Log in jbsbjpbr549 ••••••••• Log in Remember me · Forgot password? New to Twitter? Sign up now » Already using Twitter via text message? Activate your account »
llcoolv 7y ago
It sounds funny, but I waited for this for years :D Great news. EDIT: The below text is actually fake news - a rebuild of appmenu/vala against latest xfce seems to solve this. However, if you are using valapanel/AppMenu, maybe you'd like to wait with the upgrade until a compatible version is released[1]. 1. https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/issues/309 https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/iss...
lousken 7y ago
I used to really like XFCE and it was my daily driver on my laptop for 6years because it was no compromises on performance type of GUI. Also worked amazing in VMs if you needed to test something and WSL on windows didn't exist. But then they started working on GTK v3 and things started to fall apart (my experience is only from xubuntu but i think it doesn't matter). Thunar got really buggy, often crashed in random locations and it was painful to use. This one at least got fixed. Then mousepad. It used to be really fast editor but after i switched from old xubuntu to 18.04 it feels extremly sluggish when opening lager document with syntax highlight. E.g. download html of youtube and open it in mousepad, it's unusuable. And then the clipboard issues and large image (screenshot) killed it for me and I had to switch to KDE. It takes ~0.5-1s more to load apps like dolphin compared to thunar but at least once you load them they just work. I still hope I'll be able to come back, the zero animation GUI is appealing to me.
- bwat49 7y ago
  thunar got buggy/crashy long before the switch to gtk3
  - lousken 7y ago
    I remember it was around the time the work started on porting to gtk3, maybe it wasn't tied directly into it but I remember it was xubuntu 16.04 that released really buggy thunar version that shouldn't have been released to LTS. I'd say that was a major oversight that xubuntu team had made. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/FinalRelease/Xubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/FinalRelease/Xubuntu
- theodre 7y ago
  Really curious, this is the first release with GTK3. Is it not? XFCE 4.12 was still with GTk2 (unless you were using XFCE 4.13 which is a development version). I could be wrong. But AFAIK, this is the first XFCE release with GTK3. Was xubuntu using dev version of XFCE which is 4.13?
  - lousken 7y ago
Nursie 7y ago
Nice! Congrats to the team and I look forward to trying it out later on. XFCE has been my DE of choice since the Gnome 3 thing, and I love how it still gives me the (relatively modest) options to arrange things as I like, without attempting to re-educate me on how I should use my computer. I first tried XFCE when I was looking for somethign lightweight to run on an eeePc 901 (the first consumer atom machine, IIRC). Keep up the good work :)
gnulinux 7y ago
My issue with using "lightweight" DEs in linux is they're so badly polished. VSync is way off. There are minor glitches all around the place. I used to use AwesomeWM which was by far the best DE experience I had in my life. Currently I use OSX and even though OSX looks more aesthetic I can never achieve the simplicity and efficiency of AwesomeWM. Even then, when I occasionally go back to lightweight DEs and say watch a movie, I immediately realize the VSync issue. Gnome and KDE does NOT have these minor issue but they're also not nearly as efficient as awesome, XMonad, ratpoison, xfce, lxde etc.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Most lightweight X DEs or window managers like awesome in Linux don’t make any attempt to implement vsync, it’s up to you to use another standalone compositor to enable it, usually compton. If it’s not working even then it’s probably a problem with the graphics driver not the DE, and a heavyweight DE likely wouldn’t fare any better. Personally I have never been able to make nVidia cards vsync reliably and my Intel laptop is also never quite right. Only AMD with their newer driver has been perfect for me.
  - hedora 7y ago
    For me, AMD with no compositor is fine. I think it always double buffers. I have a freesync enabled (and my monitor supports it)
- hedora 7y ago
  The release notes for this version of XFCE mention improved vsync support. (Though the amd opensource drivers have an option that just “fixes” vsync across the board for me, and I only use lightweight WMs that don’t do anything special to support vsync).
  - ac29 7y ago
    For what its worth, XFCE 4.14 still has tearing for me on a Skylake Intel iGPU.
squarefoot 7y ago
Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to use rox-filer rather than Thunar for operations on most used directories for it being faster than Thunar (although Thunar did improve a lot). To do so I keep those 4 or 5 icons on the panel each of which calls rox-filer and one of the paths as the argument (example: "rox-filer Documents" as command with "~/Documents" as working directory). This makes it much faster especially with crowded dirs.
Andrex 7y ago
Is it normal for Xfce stable releases to take 4+ years? If I was a user waiting for HiDPI support I probably would have just given up.
- edoceo 7y ago
  Yep, but they are all high quality. Xfce has been my daily driver for over 10 years now. I've just had to wait patiently to buy HiDPI hardware - and now it's cheaper so for me win/win
- ivank 7y ago
  I've been using Xfce on hidpi since 2015 with just font scaling (using the DPI setting in xfce4 settings/Xorg), and it has worked fine, other than the minor issue of unscaled icons in the Window Buttons panel.
bgorman 7y ago
Amazing news. Unfortunately, without HiDPI support, most Linux DEs other than Gnome and KDE have been unusable for years.
Slackwise 7y ago
Haven't used Xfce in a few years... is there finally a native Dock/SuperBar or a proper plugin that isn't some hack that nests alternative docks inside a panel?
- severine 7y ago
  No, there isn't. I guess you're alluding to DockbarX [1] and xfce4-dockbarx-plugin [2]. Those, and specific dock apps (there are quite a few) are the alternatives as of today. [1] https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx [2] https://github.com/TiZ-EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin https://github.com/TiZ-EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin
hedora 7y ago
No mention of systemd or logind! :-)
dinghy 7y ago
I was waiting for this update!
stcredzero 7y ago
Xfce is my daily driver for cloud development. I use Xubuntu running in VirtualBox on a Windows gaming laptop. (I know, I know, Oracle and all that!) Running in seamless mode works quite well. Since I code in Golang, I don't need the fastest machine around for fast compiles. Also, since I run ubuntu VMs on AWS, I have nearly zero mismatches between my development environment and deployment. I can even run my full IDE/debugger (I use Goland) in a deployed environment for debugging. Which brings me to a segue: This seems like a good place to ask what's the lightest weight developer-cromulent environment possible that would support a GUI? When I bring up an IntelliJ IDE on a VM, I see that I'm using just short of 6.5 GB of disk. Most of that seems to be the OS, which at the moment is Xubuntu. What's lighter weight, but not outdated and annoying? (When I incorporate Docker, 6.5GB is going to be a bit heavyweight.) Back in the Smalltalk days, the Visual Smalltalk image with some libraries loaded could basically do the same thing as VNC, but with no OS dependencies and with a much smaller footprint. People were already debugging server deployments with a full IDE back in the early 2000's.
- severine 7y ago
  It advertises itself as midweight, so of course you can find lighter distros/DEs out there, but the snappiest desktop Linux I've used recently is MX Linux, with comes with a very polished Xfce... Try it, it has a lot of pro-user features! Link: https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/ https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/
s_m 7y ago
I like xfce as much as the next casual Linux user, but how big a deal is it really? How impactful on the world is the not-even-first-rank Linux desktop? Is its usership even in the tens of thousands?
- foresto 7y ago
  The stats at popcon.ubuntu.com show Thunar and XFWM installations at around a quarter of a million. Of course, that only includes Ubuntu users who opted in to stats tracking, so the global count would be higher.
  - vunie 7y ago
    How does this number relate to the number of KDE and LXQT/LXDE installations?
Grollicus 7y ago
Does that mean they'll start with Wayland support now?
- severine 7y ago
  Someone is on it: > Xfway Aims To Provide A Wayland Compositor Inspired By Xfce's Xfwm4 [1] > While it doesn't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager. Xfway was pointed out on the Wayland mailing list [2] for this Xfce window manager inspired compositor. The code appears to have started out from the Weston code-base but adding support for Sway's WLROOTS among other changes inspired from Xfwm4. Those wanting to give this Wayland compositor a whirl can find it on GitHub [3]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-Xfce-Xfwm4-Compositor https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-Xf... [2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-June/040668.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Ju... [3] https://github.com/adlocode/xfway https://github.com/adlocode/xfway
kazinator 7y ago
> Most components also received GObject Introspection support. In case anyone doesn't know what this is. GI is a system for accompanying system components (i.e. shared libraries) with XML meta-data (in separate files) that describes their API's: types, functions, arguments, and argument semantics (in/out pointers: who owns/allocates/frees, and whatnot). Here is the significance: if the GI info for a component is correct, and if you can parse it in your language, from that info you can generate accurate FFI bindings, without manual work. The accurate, detailed semantic information cannot be gleaned even if you parse the C headers. Without something like GObject Introspection, you're looking at a lot of manual work.

380 points by severine 7y ago

wow! This was unexpected for me. Changes happen so rarely with xfce and for me it is a good thing. But I wonder with all the optimizations going with gnome will xfce be any lighter anymore? I mean the next gnome versions, even 3.32 is resource hungry sometimes.

xendo 7y ago
It's exactly because of these optimizations that Gnome is running slower. They have so many things to optimize that optimizing one makes two slower -- it's a vicious cycle.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Plus the amount of stuff that gets written in Python or JavaScript. If it is for the high level stuff, they could give Vala some love instead.
- mmrezaie 7y ago
  I agree. I do not remember why did I switch away from xfce to this new gnome (3.32)? I hope they get faster with their progress.
- baybal2 7y ago
  A story how early GTK3 was loosing so much to GTK2 even with first taking full advantage of fast Cairo rendering. GTK2 own renderers were managing to outdo external ones for many reasons
  - pferde 7y ago
    Not to mention that GTK3 is so over-optimized that it skips some important calculations and sometimes ends up with certain widgets positioned incorrectly. It's a mess.

jdsully 7y ago

I’m very excited about high DPI support. I switched to xfce on all my Linux boxes because I like the simplicity but the lack of proper high dpi was a nuisance.

unhammer 7y ago

> [session manager] can now run commands not only "autostart style" at login time, but also when your computer suspends, logs out etc. > larger thumbnails as well as support for a "folder.jpg" file altering the folder's icon > "Do Not Disturb" mode > HiDPI support

lemper 7y ago

I'm quite excited with this news. If this release is nice enough, i think i will migrate to xfce4 from kde plasma.

puzzlingcaptcha 7y ago

I've been testing it since 4.13-pre1 and it's a solid (if slightly overdue) release.

meddlepal 7y ago

I've been using XFCE for years now and it's just absolutely my favorite no thrills DE.

zepearl 7y ago
I used to use Enlightenment e16. Then some months ago e16 was superseded by e17 (with the various versions 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22) => e17 is very nice but I never ever managed to run a bug-free version of it (they could rename the software to "Bug"). Desperate for an alternative, I tested other window managers and XFCE was the only one that provided some features that were similar to e16 and that I wanted to keep using => using since then XFCE on all my PCs and notebooks with no problems (and I'm since today a patron of Sean Davis, yo). Really looking forward to the vsync of XFCE 4.14 :) "Alternatives" is one of the main reasons of why I love Linux - everybody can choose in a huge number of areas the type of software that fits him/her best.

ivanstame 7y ago

I just hope compositor works better now...

severine 7y ago
One would hope so, as there are several mentions of the compositor in the changelog: https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14 https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14

epberry 7y ago

Hell yes. Fastest desktop in the land.

pjmlp 7y ago
I bet twm or fvwm would be even faster. :)
- gattilorenz 7y ago
  Short sad personal story. I once entered in a class and heard the familiar Windows 95 startup sound. Thinking it was a VM, I went and checked: a group of students were customizing their Linux distribution to look like Win95. I asked them if they knew fvwm95, the window manager of my youth; they didn't, and I suddenly realized that a) it's not supported anymore b) they were all born after Windows 95 was released c) I'm slowly getting old.
  - jraph 7y ago
    “What is this Xorg stuff you are talking about already? Is it like Wayland? Oh you could run windows through the network? Nice! Wait, apps had to connect to a socket to draw stuff? So weird. Wasn't it inefficient as hell to send whole full screen windows at 100 Hz using this? Oh you could bypass this to have… what you call it again? “Direct rendering”? Sounds like a horrible hack.”
    - qplex 7y ago
      I get you're joking and while it seems to be trendy to put Xorg down, the reality is that it's actually the one that works. Wayland is still very buggy and not at all ready for mainstream use. I really don't get that Debian took it up as the default in Buster. Xwayland sucks also, it breaks applications that run fine under X.org and very few applications have native support for Wayland. </rant>
      - jraph 7y ago
        Well, yes, I'm still using Xorg too :-) Middle click paste is not yet supported in KDE with Wayland [1], and it seems that KDE and Wayland don't like suspend / resume on my machine, and recently (after a bios update ?), adding a screen have made the system crash. Besides, as far as I know, it is not possible to run Wayland apps on Android (yet, but it seems that it is a hard problem [2]). [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907 [2] http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-android/ http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-and...

alxlaz 7y ago

I stopped using GTK applications a while ago, so I don't use XFCE anymore, but I still love it, just... from a distance. It's an increasingly uncommon breed of software, which gets better with every release. No pointless shuffling of user interface features in the name of UX "innovation", no rationalizing bugs so that they look like deliberate design choices, just steady improvement. All this by an independent team with basically zero funding. IMHO, XFCE is one of the few relatively well-known projects that still embodies the spirit of free software as we once knew it. Kudos to the quiet and tenacious people behind it, who still manage to come up with one quality release after another, so many years down the road. If you want to support (at least some of) their work, Sean Davis has a Patreon account: https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre . Sean is one of XFCE's core developers and the Xubuntu tech lead. I don't know if there's a more official XFCE donation sink (this one is the only one I know of), but hey, it would be a great start!

terminalhealth 7y ago
> I stopped using GTK applications a while ago So you're only using something like ‎i3, ‎XMonad or ‎dwm?
- Avery3R 7y ago
  KDE native apps are built on qt too
- alxlaz 7y ago
  Ah, no, I'm using lxqt at the moment. It's not perfect but it's okay, and I trust its developers' common sense. Every once in a while I fire up Plasma 5, too, but I'm not convinced. In the last year or so it seems to have gone down the mobile-inspired UI rabbit hole and it's getting increasingly awkward to use. Other than that, I use the same kind of applications you'd expect any desktop user to use, from file managers to text editors and from office suites to web browsers. Only most of them are Qt-based :). The only GTK applications I still use are Firefox (GTK-ish) and Emacs, which can still be compiled against GTK2 which is a good enough compromise for me. It's nothing personal, I don't want to get into a big rant about how Linux used to be about choice and about how Gnome is a Red Hat conspiracy, or whatever flag is being waved in 4chan & friends. I just don't like GTK3's UX choices. Oversized widgets, awkward scrollbars and hamburger menus aren't pleasant to use on a 30" monitor. A few years ago I tried to get around that with a custom theme, but theming is... kind of frowned upon in GTK land, so it didn't end well. But, you know, their code -- their choice. I don't like the choices but I think it's a big step forward from the '90s and a big test of maturity for the open source community. Making (what I believe to be) our own mistakes is way better than cargo culting Microsoft and Apple, which is what we've done up until 5-6 years ago. Edit: also, why are you folks downvoting the parent comment? It's a productive question, even if it looks uninformed (i.e. I'm guessing the downvotes are because it's conflating "GTK applications" with "desktop applications", which looks silly but have you had a look at Ubuntu lately?). If you think that's a stupid question, fine, but are you really that sure you've never asked a stupid question in your life?

pjmlp 7y ago

It is my current WM, uses C, but at least isn't as slow as GNOME with JavaScript everywhere. Thanks to Canonical's decision, I ended up migrating to XFCE, I was actually quite happy with Unity before.

kbumsik 7y ago

So is it fully migrated to Gtk3 now?

hpaavola 7y ago
> In this 4.14 cycle the main goal was to port all core components to Gtk3 (over Gtk2) https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000 https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000 So depending on the definition of "fully", that would be yes or no :) Some details can be found here https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status

lol_jono 7y ago

this is the one project where point releases actually mean something

znpy 7y ago

Love Xfce, it's the only sane-minded desktop environment. I hope it will keep being awesome as it currently is!

_0ffh 7y ago
Hi, I also like xfce, and I've used it for a few years in the late noughties. But then I tried lxde, and I've stuck with that ever since. While I agree things like KDE and Gnome3 are atrocities, what makes you think so of lxde?
- byuu 7y ago
  Not the original poster, but the trouble I had with lxde was that it never felt consistent. It felt more like openbox where you made a desktop out of dozens of indepedent projects that each did things their own way. Xfce, by comparison, feels like each program is part of a package. That is not to say it's perfect: I still have to pull in Mate applications for things like a task manager, archive manager, and calculator. I also had to write my own replacements for things like a text editor that doesn't open every new document in a new window. But I get a whole lot of mileage out of Xfce's file browser, desktop, panel, terminal, settings panel, etc. I'm a bit nervous about the Xfce move to GTK3, and I hope I won't end up with any client-side decorated windows, or the GTK3-style file picker.
  - kitsunesoba 7y ago
    I haven’t used LXDE/LxQt in several years but this has been my experience as well. XFCE feels like an intentional, designed singular “piece” where LxQt feels stitched together.
- lousken 7y ago
  Also not OP but the window management in lxde felt a lot like windows xp. You couldn't even snap applications to one side.
  - _0ffh 7y ago

Insanity 7y ago

I switched to xfce about a year ago (from gnome) and have not looked back yet. It is great and I quite like the "oldschool" feel. Really recommend trying it out!

kgwxd 7y ago
I've been using Xubuntu for about 10 years now. Over the weekend, I tried to switch my main desktop to Ubuntu. The animations instantly drove me back. I didn't even bother looking if I could turn them off because I knew, even if there is an option, I'd be fighting with them after every update for the rest of my life.

ctack 7y ago

In hindsight my desktop experience peaked about 10 years ago when I started out as a dev using XFCE. The move away and subsequent desktops; Gnome, Mac, Windows have not touched that golden age of window management.

Vinnl 7y ago
Can't you just use Xfce again? You could still be riding that peak...
- ctack 7y ago
  You're absolutely right. Have a company MBP for the time being but after this I will absolutely be looking at Xfce again.
fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
For me the peak was when KDE 3 and Gnome 2 were around: probably just about when Ubuntu arrived on the scene.

severine 7y ago

I'd also like to mention the excellent community forum, with some of the most helpful mods and fellow users in the FOSS landscape.

severine 7y ago
Link: https://forum.xfce.org/ https://forum.xfce.org/

karatchov 7y ago

I've tried using linux desktop for daily use multiple times. Xfce was usually my choice for its simplicity and snappiness. But, there was this 1 simple thing that made me lose faith in the linux desktop: For xfce's default folder viewer: Thunar, there was no possibility to adjust a per-folder view settings. At first I did not beleive it, but there were multiple discussion complaining about the same issue, including a 12-years old bug report(https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521 https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521 ) For a desktop manager endorsed by major distrubitions, I find this to be mind blowing and enraging. It gave me the feeling that linux desktop is an un-finisehd, unpolished, hacky piece of software

aflag 7y ago
So you used a somewhat obscure window manager, found a missing feature in the folder viewer you were using and jumped to the conclusion that Linux has a broken desktop experience?
- karatchov 7y ago
  I used the default window manager that comes with xfce. I tried setting up other window managers in xfce, and come to the conclusion it is not straightfoward, and the integration with the rest of the system is not perfect. Also it was a feeling of imperfection that pushed me back (I am sure you can setup the linux desktop for your liking if you tried enough)
  - jraph 7y ago
    I would not recommend Xfce to a newcomer, though I know some people who started using Linux with it and kept it. I think I would recommend Cinnamon (I don't like it personally but people seem to like it) or Unity (especially since they came back to Gnome. This desktop looks nice and easy to use). I like Plasma 5, I find it's the best general purpose desktop environment across all the major OSes, but somehow non-technical people don't seem to like it so much. All these observations are anecdotal and should be taken with a grain of salt. I didn't conduct a study and the number of people is low. There is a ongoing effort in the KDE community to improve usability and usability and they are doing a great job. I recommend reading https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/

koyote 7y ago

By far one of the best windows managers out there! Looking forward to using the new version once it hits Xubuntu.

garrettt1979 7y ago

Log in to Twitter The email and password you entered did not match our records. Please double-check and try again. Log in jbsbjpbr549 ••••••••• Log in Remember me · Forgot password? New to Twitter? Sign up now » Already using Twitter via text message? Activate your account »

llcoolv 7y ago

It sounds funny, but I waited for this for years :D Great news. EDIT: The below text is actually fake news - a rebuild of appmenu/vala against latest xfce seems to solve this. However, if you are using valapanel/AppMenu, maybe you'd like to wait with the upgrade until a compatible version is released[1]. 1. https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/issues/309 https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/iss...

lousken 7y ago

I used to really like XFCE and it was my daily driver on my laptop for 6years because it was no compromises on performance type of GUI. Also worked amazing in VMs if you needed to test something and WSL on windows didn't exist. But then they started working on GTK v3 and things started to fall apart (my experience is only from xubuntu but i think it doesn't matter). Thunar got really buggy, often crashed in random locations and it was painful to use. This one at least got fixed. Then mousepad. It used to be really fast editor but after i switched from old xubuntu to 18.04 it feels extremly sluggish when opening lager document with syntax highlight. E.g. download html of youtube and open it in mousepad, it's unusuable. And then the clipboard issues and large image (screenshot) killed it for me and I had to switch to KDE. It takes ~0.5-1s more to load apps like dolphin compared to thunar but at least once you load them they just work. I still hope I'll be able to come back, the zero animation GUI is appealing to me.

bwat49 7y ago
thunar got buggy/crashy long before the switch to gtk3
- lousken 7y ago
  I remember it was around the time the work started on porting to gtk3, maybe it wasn't tied directly into it but I remember it was xubuntu 16.04 that released really buggy thunar version that shouldn't have been released to LTS. I'd say that was a major oversight that xubuntu team had made. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/FinalRelease/Xubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/FinalRelease/Xubuntu
theodre 7y ago
Really curious, this is the first release with GTK3. Is it not? XFCE 4.12 was still with GTk2 (unless you were using XFCE 4.13 which is a development version). I could be wrong. But AFAIK, this is the first XFCE release with GTK3. Was xubuntu using dev version of XFCE which is 4.13?
- lousken 7y ago

Nursie 7y ago

Nice! Congrats to the team and I look forward to trying it out later on. XFCE has been my DE of choice since the Gnome 3 thing, and I love how it still gives me the (relatively modest) options to arrange things as I like, without attempting to re-educate me on how I should use my computer. I first tried XFCE when I was looking for somethign lightweight to run on an eeePc 901 (the first consumer atom machine, IIRC). Keep up the good work :)

gnulinux 7y ago

My issue with using "lightweight" DEs in linux is they're so badly polished. VSync is way off. There are minor glitches all around the place. I used to use AwesomeWM which was by far the best DE experience I had in my life. Currently I use OSX and even though OSX looks more aesthetic I can never achieve the simplicity and efficiency of AwesomeWM. Even then, when I occasionally go back to lightweight DEs and say watch a movie, I immediately realize the VSync issue. Gnome and KDE does NOT have these minor issue but they're also not nearly as efficient as awesome, XMonad, ratpoison, xfce, lxde etc.

ubercow13 7y ago
Most lightweight X DEs or window managers like awesome in Linux don’t make any attempt to implement vsync, it’s up to you to use another standalone compositor to enable it, usually compton. If it’s not working even then it’s probably a problem with the graphics driver not the DE, and a heavyweight DE likely wouldn’t fare any better. Personally I have never been able to make nVidia cards vsync reliably and my Intel laptop is also never quite right. Only AMD with their newer driver has been perfect for me.
- hedora 7y ago
  For me, AMD with no compositor is fine. I think it always double buffers. I have a freesync enabled (and my monitor supports it)
hedora 7y ago
The release notes for this version of XFCE mention improved vsync support. (Though the amd opensource drivers have an option that just “fixes” vsync across the board for me, and I only use lightweight WMs that don’t do anything special to support vsync).
- ac29 7y ago
  For what its worth, XFCE 4.14 still has tearing for me on a Skylake Intel iGPU.

squarefoot 7y ago

Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to use rox-filer rather than Thunar for operations on most used directories for it being faster than Thunar (although Thunar did improve a lot). To do so I keep those 4 or 5 icons on the panel each of which calls rox-filer and one of the paths as the argument (example: "rox-filer Documents" as command with "~/Documents" as working directory). This makes it much faster especially with crowded dirs.

Andrex 7y ago

Is it normal for Xfce stable releases to take 4+ years? If I was a user waiting for HiDPI support I probably would have just given up.

edoceo 7y ago
Yep, but they are all high quality. Xfce has been my daily driver for over 10 years now. I've just had to wait patiently to buy HiDPI hardware - and now it's cheaper so for me win/win
ivank 7y ago
I've been using Xfce on hidpi since 2015 with just font scaling (using the DPI setting in xfce4 settings/Xorg), and it has worked fine, other than the minor issue of unscaled icons in the Window Buttons panel.

bgorman 7y ago

Amazing news. Unfortunately, without HiDPI support, most Linux DEs other than Gnome and KDE have been unusable for years.

Slackwise 7y ago

Haven't used Xfce in a few years... is there finally a native Dock/SuperBar or a proper plugin that isn't some hack that nests alternative docks inside a panel?

severine 7y ago
No, there isn't. I guess you're alluding to DockbarX [1] and xfce4-dockbarx-plugin [2]. Those, and specific dock apps (there are quite a few) are the alternatives as of today. [1] https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx [2] https://github.com/TiZ-EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin https://github.com/TiZ-EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin

hedora 7y ago

No mention of systemd or logind! :-)

dinghy 7y ago

I was waiting for this update!

stcredzero 7y ago

Xfce is my daily driver for cloud development. I use Xubuntu running in VirtualBox on a Windows gaming laptop. (I know, I know, Oracle and all that!) Running in seamless mode works quite well. Since I code in Golang, I don't need the fastest machine around for fast compiles. Also, since I run ubuntu VMs on AWS, I have nearly zero mismatches between my development environment and deployment. I can even run my full IDE/debugger (I use Goland) in a deployed environment for debugging. Which brings me to a segue: This seems like a good place to ask what's the lightest weight developer-cromulent environment possible that would support a GUI? When I bring up an IntelliJ IDE on a VM, I see that I'm using just short of 6.5 GB of disk. Most of that seems to be the OS, which at the moment is Xubuntu. What's lighter weight, but not outdated and annoying? (When I incorporate Docker, 6.5GB is going to be a bit heavyweight.) Back in the Smalltalk days, the Visual Smalltalk image with some libraries loaded could basically do the same thing as VNC, but with no OS dependencies and with a much smaller footprint. People were already debugging server deployments with a full IDE back in the early 2000's.

severine 7y ago
It advertises itself as midweight, so of course you can find lighter distros/DEs out there, but the snappiest desktop Linux I've used recently is MX Linux, with comes with a very polished Xfce... Try it, it has a lot of pro-user features! Link: https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/ https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/

s_m 7y ago

I like xfce as much as the next casual Linux user, but how big a deal is it really? How impactful on the world is the not-even-first-rank Linux desktop? Is its usership even in the tens of thousands?

foresto 7y ago
The stats at popcon.ubuntu.com show Thunar and XFWM installations at around a quarter of a million. Of course, that only includes Ubuntu users who opted in to stats tracking, so the global count would be higher.
- vunie 7y ago
  How does this number relate to the number of KDE and LXQT/LXDE installations?

Grollicus 7y ago

Does that mean they'll start with Wayland support now?

severine 7y ago
Someone is on it: > Xfway Aims To Provide A Wayland Compositor Inspired By Xfce's Xfwm4 [1] > While it doesn't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager. Xfway was pointed out on the Wayland mailing list [2] for this Xfce window manager inspired compositor. The code appears to have started out from the Weston code-base but adding support for Sway's WLROOTS among other changes inspired from Xfwm4. Those wanting to give this Wayland compositor a whirl can find it on GitHub [3]. [1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-Xfce-Xfwm4-Compositor https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-Xf... [2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-June/040668.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Ju... [3] https://github.com/adlocode/xfway https://github.com/adlocode/xfway

kazinator 7y ago

> Most components also received GObject Introspection support. In case anyone doesn't know what this is. GI is a system for accompanying system components (i.e. shared libraries) with XML meta-data (in separate files) that describes their API's: types, functions, arguments, and argument semantics (in/out pointers: who owns/allocates/frees, and whatnot). Here is the significance: if the GI info for a component is correct, and if you can parse it in your language, from that info you can generate accurate FFI bindings, without manual work. The accurate, detailed semantic information cannot be gleaned even if you parse the C headers. Without something like GObject Introspection, you're looking at a lot of manual work.