Xfce 4.14 released | Hacker News Reader

Xfce 4.14 released

simon.shimmerproject.org

191 pointssigna1127 comments

XFCE is like the Goldilocks DE for me. Not too New Age (Gnome 3) not too much (KDE) and not too little (tiling WM). It’s not the prettiest thing but if something bothers me I know I can tweak it and be happy.

Thanks team for keeping some of us sane!!

xfce components are not entangled like the gnome-systemd-complex or kde applications depending on more of kde. So they're often useful if you want to sprinkle a few DE bits into an otherwise minimal WM.

You've perfectly articulated what I love about my current window manager (LXDE). Going to give XFCE another spin based on your comment.

I've used both Xfce and more recently tried LXDE. The latter was fine but more minimal and a bit lighter on resources. Now with the upcoming LXQt it might be a good time to switch back to Xfce to avoid the transitional pains.

It looks good as well, with a good theme. The default one just isn't very visually appealing.

XFCE is by far my favorite desktop manager. Minimalist, snappy, clean (but not ugly), and customizable.

I like it so much I run GalliumOS on all my Chromebooks and Xubuntu on all my Desktop PCs/VMs.

Honestly I think it is the best desktop manager on the linux space, but moving/resizing windows is still very painful compared to windows.

I binded the windows key and arrows to move windows, but it is still nowhere near as powerful as window movement on windows 7, 8, or 10.

> but moving/resizing windows is still very painful

Press alt and drag inside a window. Left mouse for moving, right for resizing.

I think GP was talking about limited snapping functionality not resize itself.

Those functions were expanded in Windows 10 lately too.

I haven't checked xfwm4 4.14 yet though. If these functions have been enhanced, excellent! If not, it's worth a request.

Love Xfce. I've never been able to get into a decent workflow with Gnome or KDE. Much lighter on resources it seems, too.

Congrats to the devs!

I'm using bspwm on my personal machine and Xfce on my work machine. There's some bug with bspwm and my work's EliteBook docking station that I haven't figured out how to solve yet - something to do with how the internal screen and VGA output are layout...

It's surprisingly complete and stable compared to how light it is. The EliteBook w/ an Intel 520 can't run Gnome without major slowdowns. It has some visually rougher edges compared to Gnome or KDE but it's perfectly doable to make it very presentable, and doesn't take as much resources as both of them - although KDE is not remotely as heavy as Gnome.

I really don't understand how Gnome became this monster of a thing it is today.

Well Miguel de Icaza started working for Microsoft, and Gnome immediately went into the toilet. Totally unrelated I'm sure, but that did happen.

I use it in VMs quite a bit, exactly because it is light on resources.

I don't use xfce any more, but back when I had a hard drive die I ended up installing xubuntu partitioned across 4 USB flash drives(8-16GB each) so I could keep running my laptop. It was one of my first forays into Linux and it blew me away I could do such a thing and have a fairly fully featured desktop environment run smoothly in that situation.

I have been using Xfce for 5 years and it never disappoints me. Light, minimal, and very customizable. I hope it does not undergo radical change at the cost of performance just for the sake of redesign that many other desktop environments have gone through.

I still have 15 year old hardware lying around in my home and they come to a stall while running some of the desktop environments that have modernized themselves. But Xfce continues to run fine on them. It would be great if Xfce remains the way it is for another 15 years so that my old hardware continues to work for me.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890

But now, the "tour" is available: https://www.xfce.org/about/tour :)

How is XFCE these days compared to MATE?

(Although I use MATE with i3wm and panels disabled. I moved to MATE sometime after GNOME 3 was released and I missed GNOME 2)

my opinion might be a little dated, because I am currently using deepin, and before that I used xfce for about a year coming from MATE, so I believe the last time I used MATE was 18 months ago.

At that time XFCE seemed to me like a bare bones MATE but in a good way. A little less polish here and there, but overall the system seemed to work better, that means less crashes and less fixing.

One thing I missed in XFCE is the way you can set panels in MATE. It has a lot more placement control and if I remember correctly, it had more plugins and they worked better. But apart from that, XFCE felt more solid and performant than MATE.

Crashes?

Last time I had a crash was.... Over a decade ago?

Not that I've used either of those desktops in years, but any crashes from a desktop seems like a major red flag.

the ecosystem of a desktop comprises the desktop itself and the bundle of software. I can't recall exactly what went wrong, it might even be I messed up something manually, but using MATE that time I remember things not being as stable as when I moved to XFCE, for instance the display configuration app, albeit uglier in XFCE, for me was much more stable.

But again I might have messed up configuration the first time around

fellow mate + i3 user, switched from xfce because i was able to get hidpi working better in mate. might give xfce another try to check the new release out.

XFCE4 is the bomb! I need to start reading the source to see how I can make my own taskbar plugins...

https://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins

At work, I have to use a Windows laptop running stock Ubuntu 16.04 inside Virtualbox. This VM used to behave in weird ways - network got disconnected periodically (only a restart could bring it back), the whole thing would freeze all of a sudden etc. Finally, I got fed up and switched to Xfce. Absolutely no problems now. Thanks to the Xfce developers for a truly amazing piece of software!

XFCE for when I want the traditional gui DE (such as on my touch laptop 2-in-1), and Awesome the rest (most) of the time. XFCE is great and continues to improve, highly recommended.

I'm using Xfce with Xmonad. Enjoying how simple yet flexible (configuration options) Xfce is.

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