Xfce 4.2.0 Released

kelnos copies and pastes: "The Xfce Team is pleased to announce the availability of Xfce 4.2.0, the next major version of the Xfce Desktop Environment and Development Framework for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Xfce 4.2.0 can be downloaded here. Xfce 4.2.0 includes new applications like a session manager and an application finder, a new and beautiful icon theme, support for bleeding-edge features (like the X.org Composite extension), usability and performance improvements, better support for multihead desktops, new and updated translations, additional themes, and various other improvements over the previous stable releases. See this page for a complete list of changes between Xfce 4.0 and Xfce 4.2. Furthermore, Xfce 4.2 is the first desktop environment to ship with an easy-to-use and platform-independent graphical installation wizard, which takes care of compiling and installing Xfce on your system. Visit the os-cillation installers website for download links and instructions. If you want to try Xfce 4.2.0 first, without installing anything on your system, you might want to try the Xfce Live Demo 0.2, provided by os-cillation, to discover the power and efficiency of Xfce."

How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?

[IO ERROR]

Can Xfce be used without GNOME or KDE? I'm looking for a very small window mangler I can throw into a USB pen drive distro, and the xfce.org site doesn't seem to be too clear on this.

Oh, wait, I found it. It requires GTK+. Hm. Are there any good WMs which don't have any gtk+ or Qt dependencies? Remember, I said GOOD. I've used wmaker and its ilk, but something a little more modern would be nice.

Oh, and I'm also familiar with DSL [damnsmalllinux.org], but I hate Debian...

Best Alternative

[ebob]

To anyone who thinks this sounds like the best alternative to the bloated KDE and Gnome, it is. Go the their website and check out the flash demos [xfce.org]. They show how well (and how fast) it works better than any description. The window manager has about a bazillion styles from simple to extreme. If you want to compile it yourself, the graphical installers are fabulous. Translations into 40 languages! Xfce simply rocks.

Building.

[theapodan]

To be playing devil's advocate for a moment,

Is this release substantially slower/more bloated than the 4.0 release, and less so than the 4.1 release? When I went from the 4.0 release to the 4.1 release, my system couldn't take it and still remain reasonable (I have a junker running FreeBSD). So how does 4.2 run, for those who went right ahead and installed the release? I wonder if there will even be packages built for this version for the 4.x tree.

License confusion does not inspire confidence.

[jbn-o]

From the download page of the Xfld.org website [xfld.org]:

"Various parts of Xfld are covered by so many different licenses, we can't possibly keep them all straight."

They have an obligation to do exactly that--keep the licensing straight--so they aren't distributing something they don't have a license to distribute. Perhaps it is time to comb the distribution and make sure the licensing is correct.

ION

[G. Waters]

Do yourselves a favor; try ion [cs.tut.fi] for 15 minutes and you'll be hooked.

Re:Best Alternative

[Val314]

Go the their website and check out the flash demos

i dont want to bash Xfce (never tried it, so i cant say anything) but compare this [xfce.org] to that [apple.com] (not the product, just the movie itself).
why did they had to make those flash moves so damn fast that you cant really follow them.

Re:One reason why I'm still using Window Maker....

[pherthyl]

Yes. I notice this too. I have no idea what causes it exactly, but you can definitely tell that MS Windows or OSX has a better "feel" to it than the Linux desktop (I haven't tried WindowMaker). I think it has something to do with the way redraws are done. KDE has long had problems with flickering, which have been fixed to a large extent in recent releases, but some problems still remain.

The thing is, it's so hard to quantify so its impossible to file any meaningful bug reports.
My best guess right now is that Windows seems to draw things to the screen when it is fully rendered so the entire menu/window/dialog will appear at the same time. In KDE I notice that sometimes windows will appear but will be drawn a second time after they are displayed. Perhaps it displays the text first and then redraws the icons or something.

Well this comment is starting to sound like meaningless blather, but I can't describe the problem much better.

FYI I almost exclusively use Linux, so no I'm not a microsoft troll.

Great for multi-user boxes

[Bazman]

I run a lab of thin clients hanging off a rack of Dell servers. I really wasn't too keen on umpteen Gnome sessions running, or even half a dozen bloaty nautiluses. So I stripped them out, and made XFCE the only option.

Its slick, light, windowsy-enough to not scare newbies too much, and the lab has run for over a term with no problems.

I set the servers up to give the users a choice of connecting to the Linux boxes or Windows boxes, and 95% of the connections are to the Linux boxes....

Baz

Toolkit API wrappers

[Doc Ruby]

I wonder whether there's a role for something like "Gtk--": the Gtk/++ API implemented minimally. Both graphics and features are reduced to the bare usable minimum, but compiling against Gtk-- lets "Gtk" dependent apps run on totally stripped systems (like the requested pendrive). Of course a Qt-- seems just as possible, as I'm discussing only architectures, not which toolkit is better.

Such a "Toolkit--" could be a good enhancement, or spinoff, of the Gtk/Qt unification projects underway. The holy grail is a single build with style features from any toolkit selectable at runtime, without stopping the use of any program due to toolkit dependencies. "Style" includes under-the-hood features like IPC message buses and HW support. Open source is so mutably refactorable - let's leverage that main asset, and have it all!

Re:License confusion does not inspire confidence.

[MrHanky]

I can't find that anywhere on the page you link to, but maybe they've removed it. Anyway, it doesn't have to mean the licenses are unknown, just that they are too numerous to list on the web page. And since it seems to be based on Debian, they probably used Debian's packages, and you'll find the licenses and the names of copyright holders under /usr/share/doc/$packagename/copyright.

Re:How lightweight, if it requires gtk+?

[ultrabot]

Blackbox is another personal favorite - it's about as lightweight as you can get.

No, ION [cs.tut.fi] is as light as you can get (or ratpoison, but let's be realistic and err on the side of usability). Windows ary typically full screen, without borders. Everything is basically in "workspaces", b/w which you switch by alt-1, alt-2 etc. Works like a charm on that server if you still want to use a browser or GUI apps every now and then.

Re:Best Alternative

[Wolfrider]

--I've found that ' xftree ' and ' gqview ' (separate package) are a decent alternative to konqueror, at least for local files. Much resource savings since you don't have to load multiple kdeinits.

Re:Toolkit API wrappers

[ThisNukes4u]

While this may be technically feasable by removing some of the lesser-used functions of the libraries out and removing themeing functionality, in practice I would say that it is not practical because you have no idea of knowing if a certain app is going to use that one function that no other app uses but that one, and soon in order to have compatiability with all the apps you want you are basically including all functions. Some of those problems could possibly be worked around by implementing "dummy" functions in place of real funtions that have reduced functionality or none at all, but this could reduce the functionality of the program too or introduce new bugs.

Re:Toolkit API wrappers

[Doc Ruby]

I'm talking about "slimming down" every function, but keeping all the functions. So, for example, rather than a widget loading a bitmap to simulate a "real" widget (like a button or shaded dropdown), it just draws its border, and maybe an "X" across to show its area. Other GUI functions get just as simple. Some toolkits, like blackbox, do this, but they don't expose a Gtk or Qt API. So they're nice and lightweight, but useless for running the apps we need - so useless. Maybe an interesting project is not so much a version of the Gtk/Qt convergence, but wrapping blackbox in a Gtk API.