It's been nearly 18 months since the last major Xfce release - Xfce 4.4, to be exact. Xfce 4.6 was supposed to go final this month, but the Xfce team didn't meet the deadline. Instead, they released the first alpha release of Xfce 4.6, and Phoronix summarises the most important changes, including a number of screenshots.
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Member since:2008-06-24
Looks aren't what they're really aiming for. XFCE's goal is to make something as useful as the leading X managers, but keep resource useage to a minimum. It's known that GNOME and KDE3 are resource hogs and fluxbox is somewhat 'too' lightweight for some people's tastes. XFCE lies somewhat in the middle of these projects.
However, KDE4's goal now is to become a lot lighterweight, thus bringing on some big competition for XFCE. It will be very interesting to see how XFCE comes along with another X manager with similar goals.
Member since:2005-08-11
Member since:2006-05-28
That statement doesn't hold true as far as KDE3 is concerned. My laptop takes exactly 24 seconds to boot to a KDM prompt, and then takes a further 4 seconds to get to a working desktop.
All the KDE applications that I use are quick to load, very responsive, and feature rich. I have 512MB of RAM, and my KDE environment rarely uses the swap space; unless I am scanning images using a high DPI setting.
I have used XFCE4 on this laptop and it wasn't any different to KDE3 in terms of performance, responsiveness, etc. This made me go back to KDE3 because I get more features and the same performance.
Member since:2007-03-26
That's quite a generalised statment.
I know people who are happy with Aero in Vista (they find it responsive enough for their needs as well as they like the looks).
I also know people (myself included) who find Aero anything but useful.
Personally I'm happy with KDE4 + compiz; everything runs at a good speed for me and (as vain as it might sound) it looks pretty. However 7 years ago I shunned both KDE and GNOME for fluxbox (due to it's minimalistic approach).
My point is this: KDE and GNOME maybe larger packages, but that's not specifically bloat. Sometimes the very features that make a project larger is the very features that attracts the user to said project.
Plus, compared to Aero - KDE / GNOME don't feel all that slow, so there can't be that high of a fat to meat ratio in KDE / GNOME.
Member since:2006-03-12
Desktop analogy...they all look the very similar. I actually used to set it in a very windows2000 kind of why. Its a layout I've only just moved from. It is GTK+y, but where XFCE really shines is Terminal and Thunder(The file manager) both of which I prefer more than any Linux or Windows equivalent. I moved off XFCE only because the desktop itself was weak, you couldn't select mult6iple things on the Desktop which really really annoyed me.
Member since:2007-07-01
Member since:2006-03-20
Member since:2006-03-20
Member since:2006-10-08
Member since:2006-01-10
More like it looks like Gnome 2.8. In fact when I saw it, I thought "Hey, it's Gnome before they added the "Places" menu. Had to go far back enough to see what version it was. The first Ubuntu release came with Gnome 2.8
http://osdir.com/screenshots/index.php?directory=gnome2.8
Edited 2008-09-16 05:04 UTC
Member since:
2006-08-15
Nice features, but it looks very similar to GNOME.
http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=xfce46_alpha&image=xfce_46alph...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gnome-2.20-screenshot.png
I will give it a try but I will stay with KDE4 myself.