XFCE Adds Icons, Switches to Thunar in v4.4

b100dian points out yesterday's release of XFCE 4.4, writing "If you have already followed the release candidates, you know that XFCE is really evolving. Besides adding desktop icons, introducing Thunar (in lieu of xffm) and MousePad, applications that are as simple as they are effective, and Terminal, which has built-in support for desktop composition (supported by the window manager out-of-the-box), it also introduced (finally!) a shortcut for the pop-up menu (you can see in the tour that Ctrl-Esc is bound to this menu). Congratulations for the lightest and slickest window manager ever:)" I've been using Thunar a lot lately (mostly under Gnome) because the renaming feature is powerful but reasonably intuitive -- very handy for cleaning up digicam photo names.

Lightest?

[keesh]

It's hardly the lightest... My entire windowmanager fits in less space than one of those pretty icons they use. Sure, it's not as bloated as KDE or Gnome, but that doesn't make it light any more than a Hummer is fuel efficient because it uses less petrol than a 747.

XFCE - whazzat??

[rueger]

Let me be the first to ask that posters include a couple of words when posting about relatively obscure software.

Like "If you have already followed the release candidates, you know that XFCE, COMMA THE BLAH BLAH SOFTWARE PACKAGE COMMA is really evolving."

I have no clue what it is, or Thunar for that matter, and doubt that most others do.

Backported .debs for Edgy?

[petabyte]

So I guess this would be a place to ask. I spent a bit of time this morning searching for .debs for edgy. I guess I could do the compile route but I'd like to be able to drop the gnome cruft and go back to XFCE now that 4.4 is done.

Anyone know of any backported .debs for Edgy?

Re:Lightest?

[stavrosg]

Indeed - the term 'Window Manager' is used wrongly here.
You cannot argue though that as a desktop enviroment, Xfce *has* the smallest disk and memory footprint.

And all this without leaving too much features, or configurability out

Re:Thunar... lacks SMB/NFS/Network support

[stavrosg]

That's the only (IMHO) problem with Thunar. It would be easy to integrate it with SMBCLIENT (like xffm does, by the way) but apparently they are too lazy to do that.

Nope, this feature was intentionally held back for a proper and transparent implementation instead of some hackish solution that would happen to work for some.

The idea is that the file manager does not have to be able to access anything else apart from a standard filesystem.
Need access to a remote share? OK, mount it somewhere, and presto! Everything can access it, without any special care taken.

Thunar (or some plugin) will get there, eventually.