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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

I just rediscovered XFCE myself after the brutal letdown that was KDE "plasma" 4.x.

I still load on the full KDE groupinstall so I can run KDE apps, but I use XFCE as the desktop. I had fogotten just how "snappy" a desktop could be.

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Absolutely. I've been on Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE) for several years, but I tried out stock Ubuntu on my netbook a few months ago — just to see the Unity desktop firsthand. This is a cheapo Dell netbook from 2009, 1024x600 resolution. Unity was so slow as to be completely unusable, and it took up precious screen real estate with a launcher bar I could not remove. It basically turned that netbook into a brick.

Now that I'm back to XFCE, with the panel set to auto-hide, I can hack with that laptop again, no problem.

I don't think you ought to need the latest and greatest machine just to run a responsive OS. XFCE is simple, fast, and gives you what you need with no unwelcome surprises.

I run 12.04 on a similar netbook but I don't feel Unity particularly slow. Of course, the Atom processor in it isn't designed to be fast, but it's usable.

And the launcher can be turned off.

You might have a different definition of "completely unusable" from mine, but have you ever compared XFCE and Unity on the same machine? I'm accustomed to a snappy DE. I don't expect to wait 30 seconds+ for the most basic desktop to show up on boot, and when I drag windows I expect them to move instantly with no visible lag. Unity didn't meet those expectations on my Mini 10v. XFCE does easily.

Yes. I'm running xfce right now, but I really don't see much of a difference apart from the lack of glitz. Memory seems to be a little bit lower, but not that much.

Another option for the memory constrained is Unity2D (and hiding the launcher for the pixel-constrained). It uses screen real estate a little bit more efficiently than xfce and looks nicer.

Weird, I might have to try it again sometime. I definitely remember thinking Unity's performance was horrible, but some of that may be confirmation bias (I expected going in that XFCE would be lighter than other options). And I was unaware the launcher could be hidden.

I'll second that. The first release with Unity (11.04?) was dradful. The second fixed some major issues, and now it's perfectly usable (unless you're particularly set in your ways). I run 12.04 on an older Eee, and it's not noticeably faster or slower than when I was running Xubuntu before.

There was a bug in Unity that caused it to consume an inordinate amount of cpu resources. They squashed it a while back.

You can also try LXDE/Lubuntu. It's a very nice and usable alternative to XFCE.

I rediscovered it as well, after updating Ubuntu and trying out Unity and Gnome shell.

Xfce does exactly (IMO) what a desktop should do: make me forget what desktop I'm using. It's got all the standard features I expect, and works how I'd expect a desktop to work. Very happy with Xubuntu right now.

Edit: One minor complaint: the default Xubuntu install left me with window borders that were too small to grab onto (for resizing). Had to change some theme or other.

Protip: Alt + Middle-button drag anywhere on a window should allow you to resize from the nearest corner/side. On a similar note, Alt + Left-drag anywhere on a window will allow you to move it without having to click on the titlebar.

I believe it's Alt + right button with XFCE/XFWM. Alt + middle button is GNOME (or Compiz, perhaps?).

Either way though, once you get hooked on moving/resizing windows this way it'll be hard to go back!

Mix that with the highlight buffer and middle-click to paste, and I can't stand working on any desktop that doesn't support that kind of workflow...

Granted I have a pretty high end developer laptop (i7 + 8gb ram + SSD), but ubuntu+gnome3 is very snappy and usable for me.

I basically just run chrome and emacs.

For me it was Unity. XFCE is exactly what I wanted.

I'm another netbook user on a slow connection, and I've never cared for GNOME (since Breezy Badger), for various reasons, so when I found out about Xfce I was quite pleased with it.

I like that some distros provide different "spins" as Fedora does, although switching DE is a simple task, why download stuff you don't want?

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