3 ms·

Hell yes. Fastest desktop in the land.

by epberry 7y ago

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...
  - farmerbb 7y ago
    For anyone that's interested in actually doing this, Chicago95 is the best way to make XFCE look and feel like Windows 95: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- Fnoord 7y ago
  As would xmonad, sway, i3, or whatever TUI WM. The wm in twm and fvwm stands for window manager. A desktop environment contains a window manager, though its much more than merely that. Just like an apple is a fruit, but not every fruit is an apple. Comparing a DE with a WM is apples to oranges. You can probably look up the exact differences in Wikipedia. One can try out Xfce on a Raspberry Pi as its the default DE on Raspbian (full default install). It is blazing fast. Since most people are accustomed to Windows 7 and Windows 10 (or Server equivalents) it works reasonably easy for them. You can't say the same for the two (or any) WMs you mention. My default "WM" is a TUI called Tmux. I use it on every practically every computer I use.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I surely know what a DE is all about. For example, a desktop environment also offers public APIs for the applications to plug into, which XFCE doesn't seem to offer other than D-BUS.
Zardoz84 7y ago
So you never try KDE
- jraph 7y ago
  I use Plasma 5 everyday, and it is nowhere as fast as Xfce. And this is telling for Xfce, because Plasma 5 is pretty fast (once started). I'd say Plasma 5 is pretty fast. Xfce is instant. Xfce 4 is kind of timeless. I could use Xfce 4.14 today, and then go back in time to 2005 and use Xfce 4.2 on my Pentium 2 (333 Mhz) laptop with 96 MiB of RAM and it would still feel very familiar and look quite the same. Actually, this is the opposite for me: current versions of Xfce still feel familiar to me. No such thing can be said of KDE and Gnome. Even of Gnome 2 between the different versions.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
To be honest, on my low-end laptop, Xfce doesn't seem any faster than Unity. I think Xfce lacks animations, which makes it feel 'snappier'. Gnome (even the Ubuntu Gnome variant) is unusable though, so sluggish.

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...
- farmerbb 7y ago
  For anyone that's interested in actually doing this, Chicago95 is the best way to make XFCE look and feel like Windows 95: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Fnoord 7y ago
As would xmonad, sway, i3, or whatever TUI WM. The wm in twm and fvwm stands for window manager. A desktop environment contains a window manager, though its much more than merely that. Just like an apple is a fruit, but not every fruit is an apple. Comparing a DE with a WM is apples to oranges. You can probably look up the exact differences in Wikipedia. One can try out Xfce on a Raspberry Pi as its the default DE on Raspbian (full default install). It is blazing fast. Since most people are accustomed to Windows 7 and Windows 10 (or Server equivalents) it works reasonably easy for them. You can't say the same for the two (or any) WMs you mention. My default "WM" is a TUI called Tmux. I use it on every practically every computer I use.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I surely know what a DE is all about. For example, a desktop environment also offers public APIs for the applications to plug into, which XFCE doesn't seem to offer other than D-BUS.

Zardoz84 7y ago

So you never try KDE

jraph 7y ago
I use Plasma 5 everyday, and it is nowhere as fast as Xfce. And this is telling for Xfce, because Plasma 5 is pretty fast (once started). I'd say Plasma 5 is pretty fast. Xfce is instant. Xfce 4 is kind of timeless. I could use Xfce 4.14 today, and then go back in time to 2005 and use Xfce 4.2 on my Pentium 2 (333 Mhz) laptop with 96 MiB of RAM and it would still feel very familiar and look quite the same. Actually, this is the opposite for me: current versions of Xfce still feel familiar to me. No such thing can be said of KDE and Gnome. Even of Gnome 2 between the different versions.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

To be honest, on my low-end laptop, Xfce doesn't seem any faster than Unity. I think Xfce lacks animations, which makes it feel 'snappier'. Gnome (even the Ubuntu Gnome variant) is unusable though, so sluggish.