Submitted by 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.
Thunar is worth its weight in gold. Having loved xfce/rox combination for a long time. Its nice to see xffm finally being fazed out, and replaced by a decent file manager.
I do belive in the xfce having complemetry programs is a step in the right direction…as long as they contine to keep time between releases short.
I agree, I knew this was going to be a great file manager as soon as I saw the initial mockups. I wonder how easily Thunar could replace the file manager component of Nautilus on GNOME. The tree/list view in Nautilus 2.14 is great, but Thunar is even better.
lol … you know the weight of Thunar is ~ 0 so this statement is not exactly accurate. Nonetheless thunar is the a long awaited adition to xfce4. Installing gnome for nautilus just defeats the point of xfce4 being fast and light weight.
Quickly checked Thunar screenshots, looks very similar to Nautilus, if it’s faster and using less memory it might be worth switching to Thunar in GNOME too.
Hmm and that Xarchive, why reinventing wheel again? Isn’t file-roller enough? Or is it too much binded to GNOME?
Edited 2006-07-10 21:34
Changelog said that there are 2 new themes and main theme has been changed a little, I’m curiuos about them.
* Rework default theme, add new themes (Moheli, Daloa).
Edited 2006-07-10 18:33
Screenshots of Daloa and Moheli:
http://www.foo-projects.org/~benny/tmp/xfwm4-theme-daloa.png
http://www.foo-projects.org/~benny/tmp/xfwm4-theme-moheli.png
Looks good. On daloa, I think the curve radius on the corners should be increased (i.e. more round, less square). Moheli looks a lot like the previous default, but I haven’t used XFCE in a few months, so I could be mistaken.
Hopefully Xubuntu will update this as soon as it hits stable. XFCE is an awesome DE!
I have never used XFCE, but from what I have heard of it, it is faster and uses less memory than GNOME. And that Thunar, and Xarchiver too, look like very promising apps. I think Thunar might even be more useful to me than Nautilus, and Xarchiver also seems like it is worthy to install instead of the default file-roller..I guess I gotta try it now =)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just don’t see why people think it’s as good as nautilus, it lacks it’s features and is a clone and no you don’t have to click twice in the left side pane.
To me XFCE has become more like gnome rather than it’s own DE and gnome 2.14 actually takes about the same time to load and similar memory use. This was not the case a while back.
Edited 2006-07-10 20:16
From beta1
PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
15 0 83172 10m 9068 S 0.0 1.4 0:00.89 xfdesktop
15 0 10308 4152 3580 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.07 xfce4-session
15 0 79064 8260 6328 S 0.0 1.1 0:01.14 xfce4-panel
15 0 81460 10m 8576 S 0.0 1.4 0:01.19 xfce4-menu-plug
15 0 88732 8084 5692 S 0.0 1.0 0:00.36 xfce-mcs-manage
You can quote numbers all you like, but XFCE is not as light as it used to be. One thing that explains it being lighter is gnome-vfs which comes with a lot of functionality and Thunar lacks this, Xarchiver is just a clone of file-rollers.
Take gnome-vfs and gconf out of the loop and nautilus would be no different to Thunar, after all thats all it is really.
I wouldn’t call Thunar a Nautilus clone. Thunar has been in development for quite some time, and the ui was hacked out ages ago.
I remember how, when Gnome 2.12 came out and Nautilus had those path buttons, there were reviews mentioning how the new&improved Nautilus had taken a page from the Thunar ui.
And, at least on all of my machines, Thunar is much faster.
I will have to try it out sometime, i will try and install it alongside gnome on my ubuntu setup.
Edited 2006-07-10 20:17
After wasting a day compiling beta1, I open my browser, go to OSNews and this is the first post that in the page, damn!
Browser: Links (2.1pre18; Linux 2.4.31 i686; 100×37)
…Xfce 4.4 has a dedicated shortcut manager, with unlimited number of shortcuts.
Bug 749 is not against adding more than 10 shortcuts, it’s agaist doing a quick and dirty hack in the WM.
(BTW, the bug #749 is more than a year old…)
Xfce 4.4 has a dedicated shortcut manager, with unlimited number of shortcuts.
I’ll stay corrected. Thank you. I’m not sure if you are the same person which reacted very sensitive about #749 back in 2005. The name and the temperament at least do match 🙂
BTW, the bug #749 is more than a year old…
Indeed. I haven’t bothered ever since. Fluxbox and Gnome do all I wan’t.
The installer now includes an option to compile in compositor features. So you can get all your transparent window effects, drop shadows. It works really well on Nvidia boards. I noticed that windows drag more smoothly without leaving image artifacts if you move them quickly. To enable the compositor features pull up the settings manager, select window manager tweaks, compositor tab.
Screenshot of the new compositor effects:
http://markbokil.org/images/xfce4-beta2.png
Thunar works well as a nautilus replacement. It doesn’t have as many features as Nautilus but it uses less memory and draws directories faster.
I tried XFCE several times before but I always reverted back to Gnome. It’s all nice, it’s fast but there’s something that bother me… I don’t know. Maybe it’s too simplistic for me 😉
No seriously maybe it’s its lack of integration in most distributions. I cannot blame them for that btw.
XFCE4 is nice and lightweight. It seems sparce when you first run it since it’s default install has less eye-candy bloat than Gnome or KDE. XFCE can confuse new users that are not used to combining different features of desktop environments. For example I rarely use the XFCE4 taskbar but instead use Gnome’s and a desklet as an application launcher. You get the most out of it if you mix and match, but this takes some technical skill with linux. The performance is great but you have to be willing to tinker around with it to get it just right. If you have an older system and find yourself annoyed by sluggishness of Gnome’s UI than it could be a good match for you.
Edited 2006-07-11 03:25
I tried XFCE several times before but I always reverted back to Gnome.
Same here. I got tired of little things such as the small but extremely annoying fact that the panels don’t make use of Fitt’s law (utilize the desktop corners). The forced separation between the task bar and main panel is also annoying. I know there are plugins to fix that but it’s still annoying.
Ahh then you should be ready to give the new beta a go then. There is no forced seperation between the task bar and main panel. Its one of the changes.
Having had a scan at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts‘_law I’m not sure what you mean. Are you implaying that the last pixel in the corner should act as a button, or that the button should stretch to the corner on a panel. The latter is true. Although I can’t see how the former cannot be implimented with a simple hack.
Edited 2006-07-11 09:24
Having had a scan at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts‘_law I’m not sure what you mean. Are you implaying that the last pixel in the corner should act as a button, or that the button should stretch to the corner on a panel. The latter is true. Although I can’t see how the former cannot be implimented with a simple hack.
Last time I tried, it didn’t matter if you placed a button at the corner of the screen. Even if you moved the mouse to the corner pixel and clicked, nothing happened because there was a border on the buttons or panel or something that made it not work. Maybe they’ve fixed that too, if so I’m definitely going to try it again.