Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 10th Jul 2006 17:21 UTC, submitted by bmeurer
Xfce The Xfce development team is pleased to announce that Xfce 4.4 beta2 is now available for download. Besides Mousepad and Thunar, this release also includes the new Xfce archive manager Xarchiver. Other than that a larger number of bugs wered fixed, and several core components wered improved. See the changelog for details.
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RE: Not used XFCE, but...
by velko on Mon 10th Jul 2006 19:30 UTC
velko
Member since:
2006-06-19

Indeed XFCE is very light and usable GTK based (beautiful!) DE. I used it for a while but couldn't get too comfortable with it because I like to use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. With XFCE you can define 10 custom shortcuts and the game is over. I was mildly surprised that the XFCE developers know about the problem but consider it minor http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=749 and refuse to fix it. One of the developers even got very upset commenting on this bug: As for reverting to whatever other window manager, I really don't care about what you use, feel free to run whatever you want, including windows if you wish.

As for thunar - this is a wonderfull app! It's more consistent than nautilus - for example I selected the "one click" option for opening files and I really have to click only once in the left (directory) pane. With nautilus I click once to open a file in the right pane and twice in the directory pane. Yes - the small thingies make the day. The only thing I noticed so far wich thunar does not do in contrast to nautilus is device mounting.

To summarise: try thunar at any rate and if you're not a keyboard junkie go try XFCE too. Both are nice pieces of software.

Reply Score: 2

RE[2]: Not used XFCE, but...
by bmeurer on Mon 10th Jul 2006 19:38 in reply to "RE: Not used XFCE, but..."
bmeurer Member since:
2006-04-17

With the shortcuts manager in Xfce 4.4 you can have any number of keyboard shortcuts. Bug 749 is about adding more shortcuts to the window manager, which was found to be a bad idea, and therefore the shortcuts manager was decoupled from xfwm4.

Reply Parent Score: 3

RE[2]: Not used XFCE, but...
by WereCatf on Mon 10th Jul 2006 19:44 in reply to "RE: Not used XFCE, but..."
WereCatf Member since:
2006-02-15

Well, one can always use something like xbindkeys to add as many keyboard shortcuts as one wants. I'm just wondering now what does XFCE 4.4 plan to change in contrast to 4.2? I didn't find any release plans or such.

Reply Parent Score: 1

RE[2]: Not used XFCE, but...
by situation on Mon 10th Jul 2006 20:30 in reply to "RE: Not used XFCE, but..."
situation Member since:
2006-01-10

I had a similar experience when I brought up the "max 10 shortcuts" issue on their official forums. Quite a few developers seem rather touchy about the subject.
It seems that xfce is moving away from it's lightweight roots in an attempt to grab some of the Gnome mindshare and be more for "the regular user". I guess they assume lightweight types can just use fluxbox or another minimal wm. It's a shame really since xfce provided a great mid ground. I guess one could always use older releases to keep the speed.

Reply Parent Score: 1