Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 19th Apr 2009 13:16 UTC
The Xfce team has released the first bugfix release in the 4.6.x tree of the Gtk+ desktop environment, Xfce 4.6.1. "The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. Thanks to all the people who have been using xfce 4.6 and took the time and effort to submit bugreports for stuff that wasn't quite working the way it is supposed to. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks."
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Member since:2005-07-06
The difference in resource usage between XFCE and Gnome is far from "significant",
I haven't bothered to check actual difference in CPU cycles or bytes of memeory used or anything like that so I won't comment on if they're "significant". However XFCE is significantly faster than GNOME on my old laptop in many ways that do count. On things like time from login in prompt to desktop or time to launch the file browser it easily beats GNOME (and easily gets beaten by fluxbox).
XFCE 'feels' faster and more responsive than GNOME all around on older hardware. So perhaps it doesn't actually use significantly less resources, but it certainly more feels more lightweight on older hardware, and that is really all I care about.
Member since:2006-07-16
"For those who don't know, it is built with the same GTK toolkit as Gnome, and while they have a lot in common, XFCE is significantly more lightweight.
Its lightweightness is more of a myth. The difference in resource usage between XFCE and Gnome is far from "significant", doesn't really make the change worthwhile, especially when looking from an ergonomic standpoint.
LXDE+Pcmanfm is light, IceWM is light etc, XFCE.. not quite. Sorry. "
I agree. I installed the new XFCE 4.6 on my Debian box and used it for about a week or so. It took some getting used to but I found it serviceable. The menu system is especially more intuitive than Gnome's and I liked the cleaner control panel. Fully tricked out with murrine themes, Compiz-Fusion, etc. and it didn't seem any faster than Gnome. The more the XFCE developers bolt on in their apparent need to compete with the big boys Gnome and KDE, the more they lose their so called performance advantage.
RE[3]: Progress is good.
by DoctorD on Mon 20th Apr 2009 20:29
in reply to "RE[2]: Progress is good."
Member since:2009-03-08
The desktop environment itself is what qualifies as snappy and responsive, not the effect the DE has on the applications you run. Just thought I'd make that distinction. 
However, it may or may not indirectly affect running applications based on the CPU and RAM overhead it requires. This gain is more pronounced on systems which have a limited amount of resources to begin with (like the PS3). The more limited the system resources, the more pronounced the effect, yet it's a nice advantage to consider even if you never max out your system resources. Why should something use 128 mb when it can be done effectively with 64 mb?
Of course, this same logic can also apply to running applications, so it's not a bad idea to use apps which utilize GTK and are lightweight, too. An example is the Midori web browser, which uses GTK and webkit, rather then XUL and Gecko.
Edited 2009-04-20 20:42 UTC
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2007-11-06
Its lightweightness is more of a myth. The difference in resource usage between XFCE and Gnome is far from "significant", doesn't really make the change worthwhile, especially when looking from an ergonomic standpoint.
LXDE+Pcmanfm is light, IceWM is light etc, XFCE.. not quite. Sorry.