Xfce Getting a New Version Soon 193
jones_supa writes It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize. It has been about two and half years since the last stable release. There is now a concerted effort underway to ship a new release of this lightweight GTK+2 desktop environment out around the end of February or early March. "As we have discussed the status and progress of core components with many of you individually, we feel confident that the state of Xfce is good enough to polish some final edges and push more translations until then," wrote Simon Steinbeiß on the xfce4-dev mailing list. The official list of showstopper bugs does not look too bad either. However, looking at the long time between releases certainly makes one think if the project could have use for some extra resources.
I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:1, Flamebait)
I don't want to come off as too negative, but let's be realistic/objective as a tech community. Does this release really matter? I doubt! In my last 7 years supporting schools and small businesses, I have seen several KDE and GNOME desktops. I have come across zero XFCE installations!
I guess slashdotters can tell me where XFCE is making a difference. Does such a place exist?
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Informative)
Best reason to use XFCE? It's not KDE or Gnome.
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"I use lightweight WMs such as XFCE or Openbox. Not a fan of the bloat..."
XFCE isn't that much lightweight compared to MATE (i.e., Gnome 2), only compared to Gnome3/Unity/KDE.
https://flexion.org/posts/2014... [flexion.org]
Where did XFCE get this lightweight reputation? It surely doesn't look very polished (based on looking over other people's shoulders only).
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"I use lightweight WMs such as XFCE or Openbox. Not a fan of the bloat..."
Where did XFCE get this lightweight reputation? It surely doesn't look very polished (based on looking over other people's shoulders only).
This. Openbox is a good example of a light WM, but XFCE is more like a desktop environment, with all the Windowsy cruft like the start menu, and all the panels that take up screen space and visual attention.
Personally, I use Fluxbox with plenty of virtual screens, because I want to focus on doing one thing at a time. I don't want constant reminders of what other programs are running or might possibly be running somewhere in the background -- I trust the computer to handle them for me.
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Where did XFCE get this lightweight reputation? It surely doesn't look very polished (based on looking over other people's shoulders only).
A long history of not adding new crap that is turned on by default, or trying to change people's paradigms. The install isn't particularly smaller, but there is generally less running.
As far as MATE, I was a user for 3 weeks, until I realized the maintainers were dominated by people who disagreed with specific Gtk3 decisions, but they didn't reject the desire to "innovate." They actually were emphasizing that, with an attitude sortof like, "we don't want to be backwards or not push new features, we just did
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I don't mind bloat itself. The real problem with the bloated software is the feature thrash and paradigm thrash that usually causes the bloat. Things that are bloated because they have lots of optional features run full speed, they just take longer to install. Features I don't use don't cause much damage. Even as a developer... parts of some bloated software I don't use, I won't need to change either.
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You will hear of such users now, I think. Gnome has become much too large to be reliable or even stable anymore I have clients preferring to use CygWin's X windows, and ssh access to X applications, rather than use current Linux releases and deal with the excessive bloat of Gnome.
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it's nice to see the americans in the crowd demonstrating their unrivaled capacity for insightful and witty commentary. thank you for your valuable contribution to the discussion.
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Perhaps these schools used old distros which still shipped Gnome 2. After the Gnome 3 debacle pretty much everyone except perhaps a couple of Red Hat employees switched to Xfce. It's now more or less the standard Linux desktop, so yes it will matter.
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*Raises hand*
I've been supporting university and small business systems for twenty years now. For some small businesses who want to get stuff done but do not feel the need for all of the latest desktop whiz-bangetry I field Xubuntu LTS (14.04 nowadays). It just works, and they don't have to refresh their hardware every three years.
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why would the Xubuntu team not provide support for XFCE? Using XFCE is the whole point of their distro. Maybe you are confusing the main Ubuntu distro with Xubuntu?
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Does Linux ebven matter? In the lasy 10 years at all the companies I worked I saw several versions of Windows and zero Linux installations.
You are probably not looking in the right place. Yes, linux still matters but not where you are looking. If you are looking linux desktops, good luck to you. My current shop is the only shop I've seen that chose linux desktops over windows.
Where you are going to find most linux installs are on the back end. In my shop we have over a 150 linux boxes churning away doing work. In another shop down the hall they have more than that. The last 3 jobs all had major linux backends doing the work.
Better q
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Thankfully, linux doesn't matter. I could switch to any BSD and keep running XFCE, keep running the entire same development toolchain, I could even copy all my application settings directly over to the new system just by mounting my old home directory.
Praise be to Freedom, praise be to *nix, praise be to Portability!
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
I see XFCE every time I boot up my computer. They seem to be the only Linux desktop willing to maintain a working relationship with sanity.
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have seen several KDE and GNOME desktops. I have come across zero XFCE installations!
I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too. There are lots of people that use it but I will admit it is not as popular as the big two.
Another thing that linux has lost over the years is the truly breathtaking desktops we used to have. I remember when if you wanted a gui for your linux box you had to roll your own. You had a frame work to work with but every ones desktop was truly there own creation at the end of the day.
Enlightenment. There was a truly breath taking windows manager. Window maker, and good old xfvm2. I know they are still alive but only on life support.
Best reason to use XFCE? It's not gnome or kde.
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I use XFCE and have for several years. I believe the Supreme Penguin uses it too.
In a video from 6 months ago where Supreme Penguin shows his treadmill desk setup [youtube.com], a GNOME3 desktop can be seen. It's true that he did use XFCE at some point though.
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I have been using XFCE for several years.It comes with Studio Ubuntu, which also uses a kernel optimized for audio editing and CG rendering. My passion is CG, and if using XFCE helps to shave a half hour off a 10 hour rendering task, then you bet I'm going to use it.
Another benefit I have noticed is that I spend a lot less time messing about in the GUI time sinks. I look for an OS to provide a fast and economical way to get to the applications where I do my work. Code that supports fifty different ways to
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Sadly said penguin has enough social clout that when he yells about something, the devs of his distro of choice (That so happens to be Fedora) jump to it.
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Interesting)
My company has standardized on XFCE. When Debian switched to GNOME 3, my users revolted so I switched them to XFCE.
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I guess slashdotters can tell me where XFCE is making a difference.
I used XFCE for years and it worked great for me. Then it got more bloated and I had to switch to LXDE/Openbox. I don't want the desktop/window manager doing stupid shit when I just want to get work done. Popup notifications, desktop "effects", and the like I can do without. Also, my memory belongs to me, not the desktop environment.</rant>
I'm hopeful the LXDE/Openbox developers don't follow in the same footsteps as the XFCE crew as I fear my next option is bare X server.
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I honestly hope the following is helpful...
It sounds like you just need a decent window manger, rather than a whole desktop environment.
You can configure it as one would have done with startx (editing ~/.xinitrc), and instead just edit ~/.xsession. For example, have it include:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANGUAGE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
xterm &
exec xfwm4
You may have to tweak your desktop manager (gdm/xdm/kdm/lightdm/etc) to use an xses
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If he just wants a good windows managers I would suggest going old school, really old school.
FVWM Home Page [fvwm.org]
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I use xfce on my main home system. It compiles quickly, runs fast, is easy to use, has lots of configurability, and with a little tweaking and some themes can even look pretty nice. It is also very low maintenence. This can even have thumbnail previews of folders and plenty of other convenient features if you load some of its plugins. A great combination of usability, aesthetics, and frugality.
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
XFCE is seeing a resurgence now the gnome screwed the pooch and insists on depending on systemd.
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Supposedly the consolekit support code is still there, but needs a maintainer.
Not helping tough that the person that put in the logind code is the same guy that maintains systemd as a whole, and used to maintain consolekit. And who very loudly declared consolekit dead and buried on the mailing list (to the point that if Canonical wanted to continue maintaining consolekit, they needed to find a new name and set up a new repo), and then finally shut down the same mailing list under the pretext of spam.
Yep, Po
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:5, Informative)
I realize Lennert is your new god and all, but really! I know someone hacked a way to postpone the dependency, but by then a lot of people had already switched. Even more are switching now that it's been made clear that the intent is to be dependent on systemd
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here [gnome.org]
Note how he starts by claiming it isn't a dependency and never will be, then backpeddles until he's basically saying it will be.
But your honor, it wasn't a mugging, he didn't HAVE to give me his money. Yes, it is possible that I said something about burning down hios house, goiuging his eyes out, torturing his family to death and then setting him on fire, but he could have chosen that over giving me his money!
Constructively, it is becoming a hard dependency such that any sane person who doesn't want s
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My first Linux install was SLS downloaded over a 9600 bps modem from a dial-up BBS. In all that time, I have never seen as many lies, damned lies and half-truths surrounding a project as I have seen around systemd and pretty much the rest of freedesktop.
That's what bothers me. If they want to be dependent on systemd, it's their cliff to jump off of but I do wish they would be honest about it.
Given that Gnome wasn't at all dependent on systemd before, I see no reason why a reasonable development process coul
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Actually, it would be great for such installations.. It's stable, relatively lean, and mimics common desktop conventions.
Re:I don't think this [release] matters at all... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the value of XFCE!!! They're not pushing a new paradigm onto unsuspecting users. Will a new version release "really matter?" No, never. Thank goodness for that! Users of something like XFCE don't want a new paradigm, they want shit that worked already to keep working, and they want the new shit to integrate with the old shit so people using the old shit can keep using it in exactly the same way that they used it before.
You came across zero XFCE as an end-user supporting end-user "desktops," that is normal. XFCE is heavily used, but by more technical people who want to make their own technical choices, and have their software respect those choices.
As a software developer, of course I encounter other XFCE users all the time. No, we don't care what you think of our choices. No, we're not asking you to run XFCE. If you don't already care about XFCE, or have a theory as to why you should care... please, don't care. It doesn't help us in any way.
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Don't fuck up (Score:5, Insightful)
All you have to do is not suck. Just don't completely fuck this up like gnome and ubuntu did and you'll be fine.
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Not sure which release was worse, Gnome 3 or KDE 4. In both cases, the UI devs went insane and for some reason, all of the other devs followed their lead.
RE the bolded part, it's a well known syndrome known as the second system effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
"The second-system effect (also known as second-system syndrome) is the tendency of small, elegant, and successful systems to have elephantine, feature-laden monstrosities as their successors due to inflated expectations.
The phrase was first used by Fred Brooks in his classic The Mythical Man-Month. It described the jump from a set of simple operating systems on the IBM 700/7000 series to OS/36
Re:Don't fuck up (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! I've seen way too many "2 steps back" releases lately. Better to take your time than to screw everything up like Ubuntu did a few years ago. Features for the sake of features is worse than useless. Lets have stability and usability before all else.
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Best i can tell, they neither have the manpower nor the personalities to go full Gnome...
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If you have kept an eye on XFCE during the slowly unrolling (and still ongoing) Gnome 3 fiasco, you know that they very much represent the "it just works", "don't break things just because" etc faction.
I remember using XFCE as far back as 2004. It doesn't look all that much different today (and can be made to look identical - heck, they even keep the old themes around still), and all I can think of that changed since then are incremental improvements, nothing earth-shattering and ground-breaking.
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Well one of their devs forked the consolekit code into consolekit2, and it putting in support for the logind dbus interfaces so that they don't have to maintain multiple code paths for the same features (power button, lid closure, etc) while staying OS agnostic.
keep it simple (Score:5, Informative)
XFCE and Cinnamon Merger? (Score:2)
They both seem to be on the same side.
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Dunno, Cinnamon is a continuation of the Gnome2 code. Xfce uses GTK but is otherwise unrelated to Gnome.
Cinnamon & GNOME shell (Score:2)
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Cinnamon is recreating Gnome2 on top of Gtk3. Xfce was never really a Gnome clone - you could make it look kinda sorta similar, but it always had being a "lightweight DE" as a goal, which isn't something that was ever said of Gnome.
Always revert to XFCE (Score:3)
at least on Linux MInt. I've been using Mint for about 8 years now and I always end up going back with XFCE when Gnone, Mate, Cinnamon end up having weird usability issues and glitches.
For me, XFCE4 does not work on CentOS 7 (Score:2)
I have read the same complaint from others.
On the other hand, some CentOS users say XFCE4 works fine them on CentOS 7.
Everything worked for me on CentOS 6.5.
xfce is very usable (Score:3)
I have it on all my computers that run Linux and need a GUI. It could be making a bit more work of drag-and-drop in its own elements (panels etc) though.
GTK+ 3 is an abomination. (Score:5, Informative)
I'll let some pictures show why GTK+3 is an abomination.
This is a GTK+ 2 UI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png [wikimedia.org]
This is the GTK+ 3 UI of a later version of the same application: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png [wikimedia.org]
The GTK+ 2 UI is a good one. It follows widely-used conventions, with toolbars containing frequently-used functionality (with relevant icons and descriptive text), and menus containing additional functionality that may not be used as often. This results in an application that's easy to use.
The GTK+ 3 UI is an awful one. There's no consistency. It's difficult to tell what's a button that results in an immediate action, and that is merely a menu. The icons don't describe the corresponding action. The application is nearly impossible to use.
Going from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 was a total regression for gedit. Its UI was trashed, rendering it unusable. I sure hope that the Xfce developers don't make the same mistake.
Re:GTK+ 3 is an abomination. (Score:5, Insightful)
That design change from Gedit has nothing to do with GTK 3, except that it relies on things added in GTK 3. Take a look at Gedit 3.0 to 3.10 and you'll find pretty much a GTK 3 version of Gedit 2.
Re:GTK+ 3 is an abomination. (Score:5, Informative)
Just to reinforce that point, here is a screen-shot of gedit 3.10.4 on my ubuntu 14.10 system.
http://s1.postimg.org/g7pfxixun/Screenshot_from_2015_02_08_11_09_15.png [postimg.org]
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This illustrate one of GTK3's "features" : the little underlines under the F of "File", the E of "Edit", the V of "View" are permanently disabled, making the alt+letter shortcuts undiscoverable to new users.
Re:GTK+ 3 is an abomination. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's all in the name of "UX".
launchers and panels (Score:2)
User defined launchers (apps, locations, folders) and user configurable docking panels were standard until Gnome 3. Even the "Classic" Gnome that came with Ubuntu 12.04 allowed launchers with a bit of scripting. But the newest Gnome requires detailed .desktop file fiddling to set up launchers.
Xfce permits user defined launchers with a right-click on the desktop. And docking panels for those launchers are easily configurable.
Unity and Gnome take away the simple usability features that make a desktop eff
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They have pretty much bought into the idea that users are idiots. The idea being pushed by Apple/MS/Google constantly.
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Progress!
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Why? Why in the ever living fuck did they rape their applications this way?
Embrace, extend (patch), become maintainer, replace all the code so you can reap the glory!
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Well, true, but it is different leaders. That is the difference. The new leaders threw out most of the work of the old leaders. They don't have time to fix their bugs, they're too busy embracing and extending shit with a new paradigm.
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I'll let some pictures show why GTK+3 is an abomination.
This is a GTK+ 2 UI: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png [wikimedia.org]
This is the GTK+ 3 UI of a later version of the same application: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Gedit_3.11.92.png [wikimedia.org]
The GTK+ 2 UI is a good one. It follows widely-used conventions, with toolbars containing frequently-used functionality (with relevant icons and descriptive text), and menus containing additional functionality that may not be used as often. This results in an application that's easy to use.
The GTK+ 3 UI is an awful one. There's no consistency. It's difficult to tell what's a button that results in an immediate action, and that is merely a menu. The icons don't describe the corresponding action. The application is nearly impossible to use.
Going from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 was a total regression for gedit. Its UI was trashed, rendering it unusable. I sure hope that the Xfce developers don't make the same mistake.
Your pictures are right, but there is one more thing about GTK+ 3 applications. If you try running them in environments other than GNOME, they misbehave. As in they become fullscreen applications (as opposed to maximized applications) and there is no way of resizing them or moving them. In some DEs, like Lumina, where I tried runnng them, the app completely covers the top bar, making it impossible to do anything else. There ain't much difference b/w GNOME shell and GNOME 3 - both of which I've tried ou
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MATE have been migrating their forks of the GNOME 2 apps from GTK2 to 3 without removing features.
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Because the people behind gtk3 are actively hostile to everyone but the GNOME project. Not only breaking functionality that non-GNOME projects need, but seeking out GTK applications and pressuring them to remove functionality just because GNOME Shell no longer uses it.
Details and further criticisms are all over the web; a couple starting points are here [wordpress.com] or here [phoronix.com] .
GTK is generally seen as a dead end these days. Many if not most of the folks who develop GTK apps that aren't part of the core GNOME project are s
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xfce devs refuse to recognize things like this as a problem. Fuck those idiots and fuck xfce.
So you don't like the default for borders? Easily fixed in xfce using Settings Manager - Window Manager. Just pick one of the other pre-built styles, such as Daloa, or Kokodi, or Moheli.
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Are any of those more than one pixel thick? Because if they aren't, it doesn't address the problem. And why should I have to fuck with styles when all I want is a thicker border?
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On my system the "Xfce" theme has 5-pixel borders.
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Because border width is part of the window theme?
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I use XFCE and my window borders are 5 pixels wide... not sure what you are doing.
Re:One pixel wide window borders (Score:4, Informative)
Why should I have to alt+rclick, dig into the window manager settings, find a theme, etc, etc etc. when XFCE could do what every other decent UI does - PROVIDE A GRABBABLE WINDOW BORDER OUT OF THE BOX.
While I agree with the sentiment, I think you're confusing XFCE and XUbuntu. The distribution, XUbuntu, chose the default theme. For 12.04, that's Greybird, which has 1px wide borders. I've honestly been quite annoyed with that, and I had tried other themes in the past (much much older installs), and just learned to deal with it. HOWEVER, I just tried the theme's again, and "Default-4.6", which I assume is the default XFCE theme, has 5px wide borders... those seem just right to me.
So, complain to XUbuntu. XFCE provides a default theme that fits your default needs. In addition, it's REALLY easy to change your theme. If they had set it to the 5px wide one, I'm sure someone else would be complaining because the border is taking up all their precious screen space and why should they have to go into a menu to ... blah blah blah. The fact is, there is an easy to use settings manager, and it's a couple click to change it. THey're not burying settings like so many other apps these days (gnome, firefox, chrome, etc).
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It might be worth trying to install a command-line Ubuntu and to apt-get install the Xfce desktop (check the recommends and suggest in 'apt-cache show xfce4'). I happen to not really like the Xfce desktop in Xubuntu and even in Mint Xfce 17.x but I remember than installing Xfce over command-line debian squeeze gave a rather nice clean state.
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I don't see why the active areas of the drag handles couldn't be a few pixels bigger than the visible areas. that way you could avoid wasting precious screen space, but still have easy to resize widows.
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Re:One pixel wide window borders
how easy is it to hit something 1 pixel thin on your monitor?
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Right click titlebar, select resize, move mouse.
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Why would anyone set window borders to 1 px wide? This sounds like a PIBKAC thing. (Oh dear. Did I just date myself?)
Re:One pixel wide window borders (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish qvwm continued.
Re:One pixel wide window borders (Score:5, Interesting)
Xfce is for people that want a professional looking desktop that doesn't get in the way of getting real work done. A desktop that does it job and doesn't get in the way or consume to many resources that could best be dedicated to real work.
If you don't like the way XFCE you can change it. My desktop at one point did look like windows 95 then I changed it. Now it looks like a modern version of CDE. The other day I was playing with some settings and icons and I could make XFCE look like a modern mac desktop.
So yeah, its like anything else. You only get into it what you put out of it.
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You'll have to explain "desktop that doesn't get in the way of getting real work done.",
Here you go. 4 gb laptop, 1.7 dualcore processor. Then stick the current version of KDE on it. There you go. Getting in the way of getting real work done.
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I've got a 12 year old 1GB memory, 2Ghz laptop running opensuse Tumbleweed 13.2, its slower than my desktop but it doesn't stop me working, the only thing i can;t do is watch Flash videos, i think my graphics ATI setup is too out of date to be supported.
When was the last time you tried something like KDE on your machine? I find each new release gets faster and more efficient, it seems faster now than it
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or consume to many resources
Why, why is this still and issue? Are you using a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM? Otherwise I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015. Every OS works fine with decent hardware, and if you use computers for a living I can't believe you're not able to buy 8GB of RAM.
Spoken like someone who has never used a computer for anything that could not be done in a week's time with paper and pencil.
Computer graphics and animation. Audio editing (the high quality stuff, not mashing together lossy mp3s). Statistical analysis. To be brief, much of what is done today by many artists and small business owners. All of these are done measuably better on computers that do not waste resources on OS and GUI shiny distractions.
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Audio editors are much better on Windows or Mac OS. Where the fuck are you getting your information from? Small business owners use Microsoft Office. Are you Linux fanboy?
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Short answer: I am not a fanbois of Linux or any particular OS or application. It is just that I have neither the time nor the money to play around in any of the closed gardens-- the two biggest being Microsoft and Apple. In the rare occasion that I need a Microsoft only product, like upgrading my Garmin GPS, I can do that through WINE or by running Win7 in a VM, under Linux, with all the safeguards against malware or corruption of the filing system that come built into Linux.
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Why do you think that would make a difference to us who are trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of our boxen? Wasted GPU cycles are still wasted, on a machine that could be tuned to offload some of the rendering work or number crunching from the cores to the GPU.
I do some CG. A "simple" three minute animation can easily take more than 30 hours to render, even with four cores AND the GPU cooking.
There is a reason why anyoine doing serious computer work today is using one of the Linux distros.
I
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... I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015. Every OS works fine with decent hardware ...
Windows 7 may start off fast, but as its registry bloats up strange things start to happen, like long delays for folders and icons to populate, more and more system jobs running at random times, and a general slow increase of sluggishness over time. Linux's two heavyweights can suffer from configuration bit rot as well, but you don't need to re-install the OS to cure it there.
In my experience with xfce4, it remains very deterministic and static in operation; i.e. everything is mostly instant all the time :
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'd rather pirate Windows 7 and get (almost) anything the way I want it. 3 minutes of tweaking (Always show file extensions, taskbar like previous versions, disable sticky keys, etc.) and it's just what I need and want. Why, why is this still and issue? Are you using a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM? Otherwise I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015
I fully understand what you are saying. At home I run Windows 7 on a fx-8150 with 16GB of RAM and SSD drives. I run windows 7 at home because I don't want to fuck with linux at home since I do all day at work. When I get home I want to turn my computer on, it work and it just work.
Yes, in 2015 there are still resource issues. At work I use a laptop with a dual core 1.7ghz processor and 4Gb of RAM. Any thing that wastes resources, like a over bloated gui, isn't welcomed in that environment.
But I do
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Perhaps the real question is whether you can justify an OS taking 2 gigabytes of ram while sitting idle at the desktop.. It's really not justified no matter how much ram the system has.
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Xfce is flexible enough that it can do Windows of all generations. Never mind that its initial configuration looks more like CDE (or used to). It could probably do OSX as well if there was a way to ensure a universal menubar.
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That's just your opinion, and I disagree.
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Compared to today's fisher price interfaces, it is.
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Xfce is for those people who think Windows 95 is the pinnacle of user interfaces. It's fine for a OS-in-a-USB-drive kind of thing but that's it. No redeeming features other than "it's better than Gnome 3"
It works. Very well. And people who like simplicity and like to feel in control of their computer/desktop like it. I use it on work/home desktops, for years, and have no problems with it.
Not sure what other "features" I would need.
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Because there are those of us who'd rather use our ram for work rather than for a heavy yet inflexible UI that doesn't do much but does it splendidly. There's no reason for a typical UI to take that much ram, that's why. Same goes for cpu and gpu.
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A thousand times this..... XFCE is great - but screen tearing and vsync problems make me rage. Now, I'm back to Windows 7 - although I did enjoy KDE - simply because it was the closest to XFCE and doesn't have tearing / vsync issues.
Now if only we could get decent power management on Radeon cards and three screens..... :)
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Can we at least get an optional, properly functioning, vsync'ed, tear-free compositor built in to XFCE sometime before the decade is out? That's probably the only reason I don't use XFCE instead of something like KDE or Cinnamon. KDE, Cinnamon, and even the abomination (Gnome 3) have all solved the screen tear problem, but not XFCE.
Yeah, I rant about that occasionally. From Bountysource I found this item planning DRI3 Present [bountysource.com] support for the compositor. The hypothesis is that it would provide proper vertical backing for application image buffers. Looking at the comments, the code has been in place in Xfwm for quite a while already. Whether it actually works remains to be seen. Was the work finished and tested properly? Is the driver support in place and functional? I certainly still hope that this implementation solves the problem.