After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.4.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.4 features new tools such as the much awaited Thunar file manager as well as several improvements in its core components.
Benedikt Meurer had also prepared a tour for the newcomers.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Xfce was my absolute preferred DE a year ago, but Gnome overtook it for me around 2.14 or 2.16.
I agree. As implied in the tour linked in the teaser, Thunar had some revolutionary ideas back in the GNOME 2.14 days. The Xfce guys have done a commendable job in bringing their vision to fruition, but they might be a little late to the party.
The GNOME folks have turned what looked at the time to be a major slip-up with spatial Nautilus into the much more pleasant version we have today. It's, well, a lot like Thunar, except with more features. Both are great filemanagers, but Nautilus was able to steal most of Thunar's thunder.
I think it comes down to the development platform. Each environment comes with a stock GTK2 toolkit plus some extra libraries that really pull the applications into the desktop in a cohesive way. Xfce has some great strengths, including the lean and mean distinction it proudly wears, but it can't compete with the consistency and cohesiveness provided by GNOME's extensive libraries. It's a tradeoff.
( Neither can compete with KDE's development environment, but that's another post... )
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
I simply cannot wait to get this installed and try it out. Xfce was my absolute preferred DE a year ago, but Gnome overtook it for me around 2.14 or 2.16. The Xfce guys are really slick. I can't wait.
Same here! I switched to Gnome when 2.10 was released, because I liked the automounting and the nice icons for mounted volumes on the desktop, and gradually it became my favorite DE until I eventually removed xfce from my installation.
Now I'm eager to try this new release of xfce; I hope that they kept the right-click-on-desktop application menu which xfce 4.2 included.
Member since:
2006-08-29
I noticed the release of Thunar 0.8.0 on GnomeFiles, went to the authors blog to see that Xfce 4.4 would be released in the next few hours and I couldn't navigate over to OSNews quick enough.
I simply cannot wait to get this installed and try it out. Xfce was my absolute preferred DE a year ago, but Gnome overtook it for me around 2.14 or 2.16. The Xfce guys are really slick. I can't wait.