4 ms·

XFCE 4.20 Released

125 points by almaty 2y ago

giancarlostoro 2y ago
This is very impressive. tl;dr they are adding Wayland support while maintaining X support by abstracting both into an interface so they never lose support to either.
- kleiba 2y ago
  Wayland still intrigues me - it was first released 16 years ago but still support like in XFCE is "experimental". I really don't know much about Wayland but its initial goals and the excitement if caused (at first) seemed always very noble.
  - exe34 2y ago
    what I love about X is how stable it became after it was abandoned.
    - porridgeraisin 2y ago
      Exactly:)
  - guipsp 2y ago
    XFCE is the one running late here. Gnome, kde, and even all the wlroots based compositors have been pretty solid
    - blueflow 2y ago
      some value of "solid" that ignores machines with vmgfx or nvidia modules.
      - mariusor 2y ago
        An argument where this is a problem with the protocol instead of uncompliant vendors is disingenuous.
        blueflow 2y ago
        The protocol might be good, but my hardware is not supported by wlroots. Whether this is the fault of upstream or the hardware vendor does not matter. I cannot run wlroots, ever. Period.
        mariusor 2y ago
        It does matter, because one post before you felt entitled to put the blame on the protocol. Nuance is pretty important when you take into account the difference in amount of resources available to the two groups.
        blueflow 2y ago
        Don't know which post you are referring to. We must be reading different threads.
        mariusor 2y ago
        Maybe I'm misunderstanding you when you argue against desktop environments and wlroots compositors having "solid" wayland implementations due to not working under nvidia cards. If that's the case I might argue that you could present your point in a less terse manner.
    - goosedragons 2y ago
      If you ignore things like randomly running into screen sharing problems or issues configuring XYZ thing because Gnome or whoever can't be arsed to expose it in their Wayland implementation. I keep trying Wayland and then swapping back to X11. Less issues and I never notice the things Wayland "solves", just what it breaks.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        Yeah, I have the same experiences with Wayland. In fact, whenever I see it being mentioned and that it may be the default, I tend to just try to avoid the program in which it is default because I've always had issues with it. X11 works. These days are long gone where you have to modify X11 config as well, just run "nvidia-xconfig" or whatever. I do not remember the last time I had to mess around with X11. Wayland less so, as many essential features were not working. X11 has more than one clipboards as well, and I have no clue if Wayland has them, too, and we are talking about something very basic.
      - hakfoo 2y ago
        Indeed. I kept hearing "Wayland solves problems with two monitors at different refresh rates" But when I set up mismatching monitors, X11 didn't skip a beat (1440p native/120Hz, 1440p (being fed to a 4k native monitor)/60Hz Conversely, the worst issue I had with dual monitors was with Wayland: Wayfire thought it was a brilliant idea to not support "window spanning two monitors" as default policy. It feels to me like Wayland, GNOME and Systemd all come from the same sort of developer brain infection making them build vast, all-inclusive structures that are explicitly hostile to anyone who doesn't have the exact same underlying assumptions and needs.
        winrid 2y ago
        both your monitors are being fed 60hz with x11 then right? It uses the lowest supported value of all screens
        hakfoo 2y ago
        Well, the monitor itself says it's being fed 120Hz in its status popup, I don't think X11 is smart enough to lie in that way.
  - arcbyte 2y ago
    There's definitely a lesson to be learned from Wayland's rollout. Technically it's a vastly superior approach to system graphics. The major roadblock to its adoption has been that it didn't deal with all the "extras" that X provided to desktop distributions as well. Things like copy/paste, screen sharinf, and others don't have a single standard way of accomplishing through Wayland because those aren't things related to Waylands core goals. As a result, it's been a no man's land of distributions waiting to see if someone else will build a standard for those things they like, or building a very opinionated standard that no one else likes. Future projects wanting to overturn crusty old incumbents by supercharging the worst part of that incumbents' process should at least provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement, even though it's not the focus.
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      > provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement The whole point of freedesktop.org was to provide such a side project in the first place. The fact that it doesn't seem to be doing this with any effectiveness at present is the real issue.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      FTFY: s/extras/essential features/ the decision to roll window management and keyboard management and screen management into one thing called "compositor" looks very cavalier to me. It resulted in a need to duplicate so many things that are modular and pluggable under X. (Repeating myself, I wish somebody created a Wayland compositor that explicitly delegates most tasks to plugins, providing a stable interface, so that you could use your own WM, your own keyboard switcher, etc. Thankfully, screenshooting is using a similar approach already, but in a limited way. The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already.)
      - lproven 2y ago
        > The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already You'd think that, wouldn't you? The closest thing I know to a universal Wayland server that's WM and desktop independent is Mir. I blame the disappearance of the one concerted competitive rival effort to the primarily Red Hat-backed complex of Wayland+GNOME+Flatpak to a single HN thread. In my experience, HN commenters are often surprised when I say that I find this place to frequently be toxic, negative, with a strong element of groupthink. It's all on display in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 It is also why Jamie Zawinski blocks incoming URL requests from here, and redirects to a famous image. https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png
kelsey98765431 2y ago
blaze it woohoo
rouxz 2y ago
Experimental Wayland support is a dealbreaker.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  Why? It sounds pretty clear that you don't have to use it and they're unlikely to change that in the foreseeable future.
- guilhas 2y ago
  The whole Wayland experience has been experimental
timonoko 2y ago
Making your own app-icons is notoriously difficult. $ cat /usr/local/bin/noko-make-icon convert -size 24x24 -gravity center -background yellow -fill black\ label:$1 ~/.local/share/icons/$1.png file=~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop echo [Desktop Entry] > $file echo Name=$1 >> $file echo Comment=noko-made >> $file echo Exec=$1 >> $file echo Terminal=false >> $file echo Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png >> $file echo Type=Application >> $file "convert" is from Imagemagick
- nine_k 2y ago
  Would you prefer this script to be shipped for you? If so, I suppose it should support more optional parameters, e.g. for the name and comment. BTW you can DRY it up: convert ... # Unchanged. cat <<EOF >~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop [Desktop Entry] Name=$1 Comment=noko-made Exec=$1 Terminal=false Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png Type=Application EOF
- blueflow 2y ago
  The desktop entries also control which application is used to "open" a file. Writing and debugging them made me hate the xdg-open system. Also, if you specify Terminal=true, your configured preference for your terminal emulator is ignored by all desktop environments.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > Also, if you specify Terminal=true, your configured preference for your terminal emulator is ignored by all desktop environments. What do they use?
    - blueflow 2y ago
      Their own terminal emulator or they poke around the system and use the first one they find. Ideally this happens through the dbus so you can't trace it with strace -f.
nine_k 2y ago
I've been using Xfce for like last 25 years. I'm immensely thankful to these folks for creating and maintaining a DE that gets the job done, allows ample configuration, is stable, and otherwise stays out of your way. Incessant improvement without dramatic changes is a rare and valuable skill. Wayland support is huge news. Of course, it's still limited, and Wayland itself is still limited in many ways. But this appears to be the road forward, and Xfce is taking it, showing how it's future-proof. I like how it was done by factoring out things related to the Wayland support into a library, while maintaining most of the rest. This hopefully shows that the code is in a good shape, well-structured. Congratulations with the release!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dsjkvf 2y ago
...And just the other day I was thinking about maybe trying XFCE out :) Now, currently I'm using LXQt (which is probably even more bare bones and "get the job done" DE), what can XFCE give me? I mean, I certainly see a point when people switch to XFCE from Gnome or KDE. But what about if coming from the other side of the spectrum?
- ai-christianson 2y ago
  > I certainly see a point when people switch to XFCE from Gnome or KDE. But what about if coming from the other side of the spectrum? I think you basically answered it right there. It sits between. For the lxde people it would be more of a full fledged desktop, but not with the full weight of KDE or Gnome.
  - dsjkvf 2y ago
    Thanks! Yeah, I understand that it sort of sits in between. But what are those "additional" features compared to a more spartan DEs? More included apps / accessories? More access to the machine's properties (like, more GUIs for various options)? Something else?
    - graemep 2y ago
      I have not tried LXQt properly or recently but I think both those and lots of applets.
- lproven 2y ago
  > what can XFCE give me A working vertical taskbar. Which, sadly, LXDE did just fine.
  - dsjkvf 2y ago
    Funny thing is, I actually use my LXQt exclusively with a vertical taskbar (and it's been years). Don't know about any possible problems.
sum_aint_right 2y ago
Solid release, I'm not interested in Wayland at all, but it's nice to have, hopefully the CSD stuff remain something optional
evanjrowley 2y ago
I really like the XFCE implementation on Kali Linux because the desktop menu(?) includes a search bar. When I install XFCE on other distros like Ubuntu and Arch, this feature is missing out of the box. Is this a standard feature and/or is there a standard method to add it to other Linux distros?
- crtasm 2y ago
  This? https://gottcode.org/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/ https://gottcode.org/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/
  - evoke4908 2y ago
    I thought this was just default with XFCE in general
    - crtasm 2y ago
      Maybe it's included and just needs enabling https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/start https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin...
      - evanjrowley 2y ago
        Thank you! At least with Arch, it's an optional package: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xfce4-whiskermen... I don't know how to tell if this is the case for Ubuntu/Debian just from browsing the package pages in launchpad.
jcarrano 2y ago
I'm proud to have contributed my grain of sand in the form of two tiny patches for this release.

125 points by almaty 2y ago

This is very impressive. tl;dr they are adding Wayland support while maintaining X support by abstracting both into an interface so they never lose support to either.

kleiba 2y ago
Wayland still intrigues me - it was first released 16 years ago but still support like in XFCE is "experimental". I really don't know much about Wayland but its initial goals and the excitement if caused (at first) seemed always very noble.
- exe34 2y ago
  what I love about X is how stable it became after it was abandoned.
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    Exactly:)
- guipsp 2y ago
  XFCE is the one running late here. Gnome, kde, and even all the wlroots based compositors have been pretty solid
  - blueflow 2y ago
    some value of "solid" that ignores machines with vmgfx or nvidia modules.
    - mariusor 2y ago
      An argument where this is a problem with the protocol instead of uncompliant vendors is disingenuous.
      - blueflow 2y ago
        The protocol might be good, but my hardware is not supported by wlroots. Whether this is the fault of upstream or the hardware vendor does not matter. I cannot run wlroots, ever. Period.
        mariusor 2y ago
        It does matter, because one post before you felt entitled to put the blame on the protocol. Nuance is pretty important when you take into account the difference in amount of resources available to the two groups.
        blueflow 2y ago
        Don't know which post you are referring to. We must be reading different threads.
        mariusor 2y ago
        Maybe I'm misunderstanding you when you argue against desktop environments and wlroots compositors having "solid" wayland implementations due to not working under nvidia cards. If that's the case I might argue that you could present your point in a less terse manner.
  - goosedragons 2y ago
    If you ignore things like randomly running into screen sharing problems or issues configuring XYZ thing because Gnome or whoever can't be arsed to expose it in their Wayland implementation. I keep trying Wayland and then swapping back to X11. Less issues and I never notice the things Wayland "solves", just what it breaks.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Yeah, I have the same experiences with Wayland. In fact, whenever I see it being mentioned and that it may be the default, I tend to just try to avoid the program in which it is default because I've always had issues with it. X11 works. These days are long gone where you have to modify X11 config as well, just run "nvidia-xconfig" or whatever. I do not remember the last time I had to mess around with X11. Wayland less so, as many essential features were not working. X11 has more than one clipboards as well, and I have no clue if Wayland has them, too, and we are talking about something very basic.
    - hakfoo 2y ago
      Indeed. I kept hearing "Wayland solves problems with two monitors at different refresh rates" But when I set up mismatching monitors, X11 didn't skip a beat (1440p native/120Hz, 1440p (being fed to a 4k native monitor)/60Hz Conversely, the worst issue I had with dual monitors was with Wayland: Wayfire thought it was a brilliant idea to not support "window spanning two monitors" as default policy. It feels to me like Wayland, GNOME and Systemd all come from the same sort of developer brain infection making them build vast, all-inclusive structures that are explicitly hostile to anyone who doesn't have the exact same underlying assumptions and needs.
      - winrid 2y ago
        both your monitors are being fed 60hz with x11 then right? It uses the lowest supported value of all screens
        hakfoo 2y ago
        Well, the monitor itself says it's being fed 120Hz in its status popup, I don't think X11 is smart enough to lie in that way.
- arcbyte 2y ago
  There's definitely a lesson to be learned from Wayland's rollout. Technically it's a vastly superior approach to system graphics. The major roadblock to its adoption has been that it didn't deal with all the "extras" that X provided to desktop distributions as well. Things like copy/paste, screen sharinf, and others don't have a single standard way of accomplishing through Wayland because those aren't things related to Waylands core goals. As a result, it's been a no man's land of distributions waiting to see if someone else will build a standard for those things they like, or building a very opinionated standard that no one else likes. Future projects wanting to overturn crusty old incumbents by supercharging the worst part of that incumbents' process should at least provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement, even though it's not the focus.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    > provide a side project where all the extra bits that maybe people liked can grow a replacement The whole point of freedesktop.org was to provide such a side project in the first place. The fact that it doesn't seem to be doing this with any effectiveness at present is the real issue.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    FTFY: s/extras/essential features/ the decision to roll window management and keyboard management and screen management into one thing called "compositor" looks very cavalier to me. It resulted in a need to duplicate so many things that are modular and pluggable under X. (Repeating myself, I wish somebody created a Wayland compositor that explicitly delegates most tasks to plugins, providing a stable interface, so that you could use your own WM, your own keyboard switcher, etc. Thankfully, screenshooting is using a similar approach already, but in a limited way. The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already.)
    - lproven 2y ago
      > The idea is so obvious that somebody must have attempted this already You'd think that, wouldn't you? The closest thing I know to a universal Wayland server that's WM and desktop independent is Mir. I blame the disappearance of the one concerted competitive rival effort to the primarily Red Hat-backed complex of Wayland+GNOME+Flatpak to a single HN thread. In my experience, HN commenters are often surprised when I say that I find this place to frequently be toxic, negative, with a strong element of groupthink. It's all on display in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 It is also why Jamie Zawinski blocks incoming URL requests from here, and redirects to a famous image. https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2024/hn.png

kelsey98765431 2y ago

blaze it woohoo

rouxz 2y ago

Experimental Wayland support is a dealbreaker.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
Why? It sounds pretty clear that you don't have to use it and they're unlikely to change that in the foreseeable future.
guilhas 2y ago
The whole Wayland experience has been experimental

timonoko 2y ago

Making your own app-icons is notoriously difficult. $ cat /usr/local/bin/noko-make-icon convert -size 24x24 -gravity center -background yellow -fill black\ label:$1 ~/.local/share/icons/$1.png file=~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop echo [Desktop Entry] > $file echo Name=$1 >> $file echo Comment=noko-made >> $file echo Exec=$1 >> $file echo Terminal=false >> $file echo Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png >> $file echo Type=Application >> $file "convert" is from Imagemagick

nine_k 2y ago
Would you prefer this script to be shipped for you? If so, I suppose it should support more optional parameters, e.g. for the name and comment. BTW you can DRY it up: convert ... # Unchanged. cat <<EOF >~/.local/share/applications/$1-noko.desktop [Desktop Entry] Name=$1 Comment=noko-made Exec=$1 Terminal=false Icon=~/.local/share/icons/$1.png Type=Application EOF
blueflow 2y ago
The desktop entries also control which application is used to "open" a file. Writing and debugging them made me hate the xdg-open system. Also, if you specify Terminal=true, your configured preference for your terminal emulator is ignored by all desktop environments.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Also, if you specify Terminal=true, your configured preference for your terminal emulator is ignored by all desktop environments. What do they use?
  - blueflow 2y ago
    Their own terminal emulator or they poke around the system and use the first one they find. Ideally this happens through the dbus so you can't trace it with strace -f.

nine_k 2y ago

I've been using Xfce for like last 25 years. I'm immensely thankful to these folks for creating and maintaining a DE that gets the job done, allows ample configuration, is stable, and otherwise stays out of your way. Incessant improvement without dramatic changes is a rare and valuable skill. Wayland support is huge news. Of course, it's still limited, and Wayland itself is still limited in many ways. But this appears to be the road forward, and Xfce is taking it, showing how it's future-proof. I like how it was done by factoring out things related to the Wayland support into a library, while maintaining most of the rest. This hopefully shows that the code is in a good shape, well-structured. Congratulations with the release!

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dsjkvf 2y ago

...And just the other day I was thinking about maybe trying XFCE out :) Now, currently I'm using LXQt (which is probably even more bare bones and "get the job done" DE), what can XFCE give me? I mean, I certainly see a point when people switch to XFCE from Gnome or KDE. But what about if coming from the other side of the spectrum?

ai-christianson 2y ago
> I certainly see a point when people switch to XFCE from Gnome or KDE. But what about if coming from the other side of the spectrum? I think you basically answered it right there. It sits between. For the lxde people it would be more of a full fledged desktop, but not with the full weight of KDE or Gnome.
- dsjkvf 2y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, I understand that it sort of sits in between. But what are those "additional" features compared to a more spartan DEs? More included apps / accessories? More access to the machine's properties (like, more GUIs for various options)? Something else?
  - graemep 2y ago
    I have not tried LXQt properly or recently but I think both those and lots of applets.
lproven 2y ago
> what can XFCE give me A working vertical taskbar. Which, sadly, LXDE did just fine.
- dsjkvf 2y ago
  Funny thing is, I actually use my LXQt exclusively with a vertical taskbar (and it's been years). Don't know about any possible problems.

sum_aint_right 2y ago

Solid release, I'm not interested in Wayland at all, but it's nice to have, hopefully the CSD stuff remain something optional

evanjrowley 2y ago

I really like the XFCE implementation on Kali Linux because the desktop menu(?) includes a search bar. When I install XFCE on other distros like Ubuntu and Arch, this feature is missing out of the box. Is this a standard feature and/or is there a standard method to add it to other Linux distros?

crtasm 2y ago
This? https://gottcode.org/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/ https://gottcode.org/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/
- evoke4908 2y ago
  I thought this was just default with XFCE in general
  - crtasm 2y ago
    Maybe it's included and just needs enabling https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/start https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin...
    - evanjrowley 2y ago
      Thank you! At least with Arch, it's an optional package: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xfce4-whiskermen... I don't know how to tell if this is the case for Ubuntu/Debian just from browsing the package pages in launchpad.

jcarrano 2y ago

I'm proud to have contributed my grain of sand in the form of two tiny patches for this release.