4 ms·

Xfce 4.16 development phase starting

44 points by Chaekyung 7y ago

katmannthree 7y ago
Part of me is happy to see this, IMO CSDs do make applications look cleaner and more aesthetic. The other part though expects this to be a compatibility nightmare. Are XFCE CSDs going to work out of the box in GNOME? KDE? Are we going to fragment Linux applications a third time, adding in XFCE-specific apps to the GNOME and KDE/QT fragmentation we already have?
kelnos 7y ago
Much better article, from the source: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/10/19/xfce-4-15-development-phase-starting/ https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/10/19/xfce-4-15-develo... Not sure why the linked article is describing all this stuff as some big "secret"; the Xfce development list has been public forever. It's also weird to call Simon's public blog "secret".
- jammygit 7y ago
  > Let’s start with one very important and obvious change: we will drop Gtk2 support with Xfce 4.16. This will have a concrete effect on old Panel plugins or Gtk2 applications that rely on libxfce4ui. I read a blog by dedoimedo who complains constantly at how willing Linux developers are to break things / not maintain compatibility. It makes me think of how I take for granted how so many of my old pc games will still run on windows 10. Not that the telemetry is acceptable
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    I like Gtk2 but it has big problems in HiDPI scenarios, and is not Wayland native. It's quite worthwhile by now to standardize on the Gtk3 series, at least provided that reliable theming is added back in - and Gtk3 developers seem to be aware that this is widely considered to be a real issue.
  - jolmg 7y ago
    I wouldn't say "Linux developers". To me, it seems that not only are the Linux kernel developers incredibly concerned with backwards compatibility, but so are many other projects. In my view, it's only in the context of DE stuff like Gtk/Gnome that backwards compatibility seems to go out the window.
  - jplayer01 7y ago
    I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t play games from the 90s. Recently discovered Imperium Galactica 2 and Space Empires 4 - from 99 and 2000 - and they both run great on Win10, 20 years later.
  - ac29 7y ago
    GTK3 came out in 2011, which was also the year of the last major GTK2 release. Its not implausible that GTK4 will be out before Xfce 4.16. How long should older software like GTK2 be supported by upstream developers? Keep in mind XFCE is more or less a volunteer-run software effort.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, we've changed to that from https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce4-panel_4.15.0_kicks_off_Xfces_march_towars_a_4.16_release https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce4-panel_4.15.0_kicks_off_Xfces_.... Thanks!
thiccly 7y ago
Creepy website. I bet those women didn't consent to having their pictures being used like that. This isn't /g/.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Those look like pictures take from movies and popular media?
  - thiccly 7y ago
    I guess now I just learned they are members of a Korean girl group. Not sure they'd approve of their pictures being used to promote "linuxreviews.org".
    - DrJokepu 7y ago
      Doesn’t matter if they approve it or not, they almost certainly signed a release form, whoever owns the copyright gets to decide what use is allowed.
    - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
      Most likely they are not the copyright holders so there's nothing to approve. Why so obsessed about random k pop pictures?
      - thiccly 7y ago
        There is something to approve. There is a copyright holder and the way these images of the women are being used is a creepy form of advertising.
        newnewpdro 7y ago
        Would you describe it as creepy if these were a bunch of images containing popular anime characters instead of kpop band members?
    - deleted 7y ago
jammygit 7y ago
The main reason I use gnome is the keyboard shortcuts. I tried most other desktop environments and I just needed the mouse too often. Being able to see all open applications with Super is really nice too.
- crispinb 7y ago
  I'm relatively new to recent desktop Linux, having been on macs for past decade or so. As Gnome is my distro's default, I've stayed with it for simplicity and am having a hard time finding what so many people dislike about it. As you write, it's very keyboard-navigable. It's quick on my (fastish) laptop. It's kind of spartan & minimalistic compared to macOS & Windows 10, which seems like a good thing. I can see the appeal of i3 etc, but if all you want is a relatively mainstream DE that works & stays out of the way, Gnome seems about right to me.
ohazi 7y ago
If you like client-side decorations, the annoying part is that every application you use needs to be modified to draw their own windows in this new style. This takes years, and the intermediate period looks inconsistent. Even in the ideal "endgame" state where all of your apps have switched over to the new style, each app draws their decorations and organizes their menus and buttons slightly differently, so this state also feels inconsistent. If you don't like client-side decorations, the annoying part is that there doesn't appear to be a good way to opt-out. You can configure your window manager to draw the system title-bars anyway, so that you at least have consistent pin/minimize/maximize/close buttons, but then you usually end up with a double menu. But also, the process of applications moving to this style usually involves throwing away the standard File / Edit / View / ... / Help menu bar, which can be incredibly annoying if not done thoughtfully. I stopped using gedit because everything is now buried under a single hamburger menu, and interacting with it is infuriating.
- kfrzcode 7y ago
  I haven't had issues w/ i3wm and polybar on debian, but I'm somewhat of a zealot when it comes to reducing "noise" on my desktop and am happy to deal with the foibles that pursuit entails.
  - ohazi 7y ago
    I've been happy with Xfce since Gnome lost me with v3. I've also found myself relying so much on my tile-window-left/right/NW/NE/SW/SE shortcuts that using a computer without them has become aggravating. I think I'll probably hold out until Xfce becomes too unusable and then just bite the bullet and pick a tiling wm.
    - btrettel 7y ago
      I could have written this comment. I tried awesome around 2012 for a while but found that I didn't like it. My tastes and habits have changed substantially since then so I might try awesome or another tiling WM. Before I used Gnome I used IceWM and I might give that another try too, as I think it has some basic tiling features.
kstrauser 7y ago
First, that's awesome. I'm glad that Xfce provides a lightweight, sane alternative to GNOME. Second, OMG it's 2019 and we still haven't developed the technology that would allow us to take screenshots that aren't covered in cute women. That was initially kinda cool 25 years ago when we were starting to get computers capable of rendering JPEGs in a reasonable amount of time. It seems less cool now when people are still using them to brag about their comprehensive K-pop collections. To be clear, I have nothing whatsoever against cute women. I married one. But guys, a little real talk: these kinds of screenshots do nothing to make us look more professional. Can we start showcasing literally anything else, like our collections of tropical fish, or birds, or beaches, or...?
- userbinator 7y ago
  to make us look more professional What is "professional"? I'm very glad that Xfce is not a company, because the term only brings to mind bland, sterile, mindless, and boring office-drones. Fortunately plenty of open-source doesn't shy away from being more... raw human (for lack of a better term.)
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Are you sure you don’t mean it was cool when you were 25 years younger? Like the author of this blog post and indeed the developer of the Xfce feature might be for all we know.
- rjeli 7y ago
  Most kpop fans are female, why do you assume it's a guy? :)
- chapium 7y ago
  I guess I'm just not triggered by women in sweatshirts.
- danillonunes 7y ago
  This is linuxreviews.org, which I believe is just a site run by some guy, so meh, just let he do his thing. If it was an official release from XFCE, then I wouuld agree with you.
zozbot234 7y ago
The differences between LXDE (the original branch, not LXQt), Xfce, MATE are basically fading away by now. I wonder if they could all standardize on a shared code base. Heck, even GNOME3 is not that crazy if you ignore the whole Gnome-Shell bit (and yes, Cinnamon basically forks Gnome-Shell, as opposed to providing an entirely independent environment.) One could easily have an alternative "shell" portion providing an Xfce- or MATE-like experience, while still relying on the basic desktop-app suite that we get as part of that project.
- deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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aclsid 7y ago
I started playing around with Linux since Redhat 5.1, and it is amazing that after all these years, some people still don't get it when it comes to good UI/UX design. The fonts look all out of place even on window titles. I thought, well it is an open source project with people doing this on their spare time, maybe I should contribute to that project to help, but the issue is so widespread that there really needs to be a frank conversation about it so that all the teams start doing some basic polish on the presentation. I'm very glad though that the font rendering nightmare is over in Linux and funny enough, IMHO now Windows has the crazy font rendering.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  It all boils down to the fact that it just doesn't matter. Any hangups exist mostly in our heads, and everyone has different hangups so there's no winning the battle. Some people think consistency is important, I find it causes me to get confused more often, like driving around a cookie-cutter neighborhood where you're never quite sure you're pulling into the right driveway, even though you've lived there for 5 years. Corporations have salaried design teams that need to constantly prove their value, when really they could have stopped working in 1995 and we all would have been just fine.

44 points by Chaekyung 7y ago

Part of me is happy to see this, IMO CSDs do make applications look cleaner and more aesthetic. The other part though expects this to be a compatibility nightmare. Are XFCE CSDs going to work out of the box in GNOME? KDE? Are we going to fragment Linux applications a third time, adding in XFCE-specific apps to the GNOME and KDE/QT fragmentation we already have?

kelnos 7y ago

Much better article, from the source: https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/10/19/xfce-4-15-development-phase-starting/ https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/10/19/xfce-4-15-develo... Not sure why the linked article is describing all this stuff as some big "secret"; the Xfce development list has been public forever. It's also weird to call Simon's public blog "secret".

jammygit 7y ago
> Let’s start with one very important and obvious change: we will drop Gtk2 support with Xfce 4.16. This will have a concrete effect on old Panel plugins or Gtk2 applications that rely on libxfce4ui. I read a blog by dedoimedo who complains constantly at how willing Linux developers are to break things / not maintain compatibility. It makes me think of how I take for granted how so many of my old pc games will still run on windows 10. Not that the telemetry is acceptable
- zozbot234 7y ago
  I like Gtk2 but it has big problems in HiDPI scenarios, and is not Wayland native. It's quite worthwhile by now to standardize on the Gtk3 series, at least provided that reliable theming is added back in - and Gtk3 developers seem to be aware that this is widely considered to be a real issue.
- jolmg 7y ago
  I wouldn't say "Linux developers". To me, it seems that not only are the Linux kernel developers incredibly concerned with backwards compatibility, but so are many other projects. In my view, it's only in the context of DE stuff like Gtk/Gnome that backwards compatibility seems to go out the window.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t play games from the 90s. Recently discovered Imperium Galactica 2 and Space Empires 4 - from 99 and 2000 - and they both run great on Win10, 20 years later.
- ac29 7y ago
  GTK3 came out in 2011, which was also the year of the last major GTK2 release. Its not implausible that GTK4 will be out before Xfce 4.16. How long should older software like GTK2 be supported by upstream developers? Keep in mind XFCE is more or less a volunteer-run software effort.
dang 7y ago
Ok, we've changed to that from https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce4-panel_4.15.0_kicks_off_Xfces_march_towars_a_4.16_release https://linuxreviews.org/Xfce4-panel_4.15.0_kicks_off_Xfces_.... Thanks!

thiccly 7y ago

Creepy website. I bet those women didn't consent to having their pictures being used like that. This isn't /g/.

saagarjha 7y ago
Those look like pictures take from movies and popular media?
- thiccly 7y ago
  I guess now I just learned they are members of a Korean girl group. Not sure they'd approve of their pictures being used to promote "linuxreviews.org".
  - DrJokepu 7y ago
    Doesn’t matter if they approve it or not, they almost certainly signed a release form, whoever owns the copyright gets to decide what use is allowed.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    Most likely they are not the copyright holders so there's nothing to approve. Why so obsessed about random k pop pictures?
    - thiccly 7y ago
      There is something to approve. There is a copyright holder and the way these images of the women are being used is a creepy form of advertising.
      - newnewpdro 7y ago
        Would you describe it as creepy if these were a bunch of images containing popular anime characters instead of kpop band members?
  - deleted 7y ago

jammygit 7y ago

The main reason I use gnome is the keyboard shortcuts. I tried most other desktop environments and I just needed the mouse too often. Being able to see all open applications with Super is really nice too.

crispinb 7y ago
I'm relatively new to recent desktop Linux, having been on macs for past decade or so. As Gnome is my distro's default, I've stayed with it for simplicity and am having a hard time finding what so many people dislike about it. As you write, it's very keyboard-navigable. It's quick on my (fastish) laptop. It's kind of spartan & minimalistic compared to macOS & Windows 10, which seems like a good thing. I can see the appeal of i3 etc, but if all you want is a relatively mainstream DE that works & stays out of the way, Gnome seems about right to me.

ohazi 7y ago

If you like client-side decorations, the annoying part is that every application you use needs to be modified to draw their own windows in this new style. This takes years, and the intermediate period looks inconsistent. Even in the ideal "endgame" state where all of your apps have switched over to the new style, each app draws their decorations and organizes their menus and buttons slightly differently, so this state also feels inconsistent. If you don't like client-side decorations, the annoying part is that there doesn't appear to be a good way to opt-out. You can configure your window manager to draw the system title-bars anyway, so that you at least have consistent pin/minimize/maximize/close buttons, but then you usually end up with a double menu. But also, the process of applications moving to this style usually involves throwing away the standard File / Edit / View / ... / Help menu bar, which can be incredibly annoying if not done thoughtfully. I stopped using gedit because everything is now buried under a single hamburger menu, and interacting with it is infuriating.

kfrzcode 7y ago
I haven't had issues w/ i3wm and polybar on debian, but I'm somewhat of a zealot when it comes to reducing "noise" on my desktop and am happy to deal with the foibles that pursuit entails.
- ohazi 7y ago
  I've been happy with Xfce since Gnome lost me with v3. I've also found myself relying so much on my tile-window-left/right/NW/NE/SW/SE shortcuts that using a computer without them has become aggravating. I think I'll probably hold out until Xfce becomes too unusable and then just bite the bullet and pick a tiling wm.
  - btrettel 7y ago
    I could have written this comment. I tried awesome around 2012 for a while but found that I didn't like it. My tastes and habits have changed substantially since then so I might try awesome or another tiling WM. Before I used Gnome I used IceWM and I might give that another try too, as I think it has some basic tiling features.

kstrauser 7y ago

First, that's awesome. I'm glad that Xfce provides a lightweight, sane alternative to GNOME. Second, OMG it's 2019 and we still haven't developed the technology that would allow us to take screenshots that aren't covered in cute women. That was initially kinda cool 25 years ago when we were starting to get computers capable of rendering JPEGs in a reasonable amount of time. It seems less cool now when people are still using them to brag about their comprehensive K-pop collections. To be clear, I have nothing whatsoever against cute women. I married one. But guys, a little real talk: these kinds of screenshots do nothing to make us look more professional. Can we start showcasing literally anything else, like our collections of tropical fish, or birds, or beaches, or...?

userbinator 7y ago
to make us look more professional What is "professional"? I'm very glad that Xfce is not a company, because the term only brings to mind bland, sterile, mindless, and boring office-drones. Fortunately plenty of open-source doesn't shy away from being more... raw human (for lack of a better term.)
ubercow13 7y ago
Are you sure you don’t mean it was cool when you were 25 years younger? Like the author of this blog post and indeed the developer of the Xfce feature might be for all we know.
rjeli 7y ago
Most kpop fans are female, why do you assume it's a guy? :)
chapium 7y ago
I guess I'm just not triggered by women in sweatshirts.
danillonunes 7y ago
This is linuxreviews.org, which I believe is just a site run by some guy, so meh, just let he do his thing. If it was an official release from XFCE, then I wouuld agree with you.

zozbot234 7y ago

The differences between LXDE (the original branch, not LXQt), Xfce, MATE are basically fading away by now. I wonder if they could all standardize on a shared code base. Heck, even GNOME3 is not that crazy if you ignore the whole Gnome-Shell bit (and yes, Cinnamon basically forks Gnome-Shell, as opposed to providing an entirely independent environment.) One could easily have an alternative "shell" portion providing an Xfce- or MATE-like experience, while still relying on the basic desktop-app suite that we get as part of that project.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

aclsid 7y ago

I started playing around with Linux since Redhat 5.1, and it is amazing that after all these years, some people still don't get it when it comes to good UI/UX design. The fonts look all out of place even on window titles. I thought, well it is an open source project with people doing this on their spare time, maybe I should contribute to that project to help, but the issue is so widespread that there really needs to be a frank conversation about it so that all the teams start doing some basic polish on the presentation. I'm very glad though that the font rendering nightmare is over in Linux and funny enough, IMHO now Windows has the crazy font rendering.

kgwxd 7y ago
It all boils down to the fact that it just doesn't matter. Any hangups exist mostly in our heads, and everyone has different hangups so there's no winning the battle. Some people think consistency is important, I find it causes me to get confused more often, like driving around a cookie-cutter neighborhood where you're never quite sure you're pulling into the right driveway, even though you've lived there for 5 years. Corporations have salaried design teams that need to constantly prove their value, when really they could have stopped working in 1995 and we all would have been just fine.