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.

Looks very good

[Coryoth]

I have to say, XFCE is looking very impressive. Thunar is, IMHO, a significant improvement over the earlier file manager. The desktop in general is also looking more robust and featureful - XFCE is starting to look like good competition for GNOME and KDE, and in the space of resource light desktops it looks like a clear winner. Better yet, due to freedesktop.org standards it interacts with GNOME and KDE just fine. For a while I had been hoping E17 would provide the impressive option for light desktops but, with interminable delays and XFCE now looking like a perfectly good alternative to GNOME or KDE regardless of whether you are interested in a light desktop or not, it looks as if XFCE is the clear winner.

Do lightweight window managers matter anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the past one of the things that I loved about linux was that you could choose a lightweight window manager, and run just fine on older hardware. Now-a-days that doesn't seem to work anymore, because it isn't the WM that are heavy weight (sawfish, metacity and KWM really aren't that bad), or even the desktop apps (how big is the doc), it is the libraries. And if you use a single Gnome or KDE application, you end up having to load those anyway. GTK is especially bad now, especially if you aren't using an accelerated (aka proprietary) video driver. I just cannot make linux useful on lower-end machines anymore, without restricting myself to older distros.

That was actually part of the reason that I started using OS X. If I am going to have to buy a hefty machine, I might as well get a Mac. And if I am going to have to use proprietary drivers, and codecs of iffy legality just to do the work I need, I might as well use an OS that has that nicely integrated.