Here is an article that reviews the new features found in Xfce 4.4. Provides in details new features found in Thunar, new applets like Orage, and new abliities like built in compositing and ability to add desktop icons. Screenshots galore as well.
Overview of XFCE 4.4
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
what’s a good example of a major additional feature that gnome has which xfce doesn’t? i think i may be switching from gnome to xfce soon.
I know that it is not perfect but gnome has VFS. Another thing that I would like to see is a launcher/searcher applet like deskbar in XFCE, or maybe just a popup launcher like Quicksilver in OS X. I use deskbar mainly to launch apps in Gnome.
In Xfce4.4 there is xfapplet, which allows adding gnome panel applets to the xfce panel. Thanks to it you can easily add the deskbar-applet.
Haven’t used Quicksilver, but fyi xfce has a built in app launcher called ‘xfrun4’. It’s a popup, remembers your old entries, etc.
When feisty fawn comes out I’m switching to Xubuntu on the laptop. I’ve been using XFCE off an on since the last 3.99.9 alphas, I fell in love with it.
I’d be using it as my main desktop if I didn’t have to use windows for my Adobe apps.
I used to think X was slow till I tried some alternate DE’s and realized the slowness of my UI on older hardware was not really the fault of X at all.
I have always been intrigued by the smaller footprint DE’s like Fluxbox etc., but lack of icons, and Gnome/KDE like task management has always prevented me from using them for anything but my anemic little test PC.
I recently gave XFCE a spin, and although it took me a bit to consolidate the panels to the bottom like this ( http://www.xfce.org/images/about/screenshots/4.4-3.png)
I have to say that it does exactly what I have always wanted: A sane UI like KDE and Gnome but with a fraction of the size and system resources.
I think it’s too bad they didn’t select XFCE for the OLPC program.
For once using low end hardware does not mean I have to use ancient Win98se or pull my hair out in frustration trying to accomplish something in Fluxbox.
Good job XFCE!
“I have to say that it does exactly what I have always wanted: A sane UI like KDE and Gnome but with a fraction of the size and system resources. […] For once using low end hardware does not mean I have to use ancient Win98se or pull my hair out in frustration trying to accomplish something in Fluxbox.”
I can confirm this. XFCE 4.4 is really nice, even on slower x86 machines. With “slow” I mean those with less than 1 GHz; test machine here: 333 MHz, 256 MB RAM, FreeBSD 6.2. The system is still usable (with applications like OpenOffice, Opera, Sylpheed and MPlayer), allthough I prefer XFCE 3 on these systems. But this example shows that implementations regarding efficiency are still around, this makes me happy because I think you can’t relativate lack of programming knowledge with increased computer power. 🙂
To say it again: Well done, XFCE team!
//I can confirm this. XFCE 4.4 is really nice, even on slower x86 machines. With “slow” I mean those with less than 1 GHz; test machine here: 333 MHz, 256 MB RAM, FreeBSD 6.2. The system is still usable (with applications like OpenOffice, Opera, Sylpheed and MPlayer), allthough I prefer XFCE 3 on these systems. But this example shows that implementations regarding efficiency are still around, this makes me happy because I think you can’t relativate lack of programming knowledge with increased computer power. 🙂 //
If you are interested in the combination of ease-of-use (via Xfce 4.4) and reasonable speed on older hardware, I would tentatively suggest this distribution might be worth a try:
http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=03988#0
http://www.sam-linux.org/
http://sam.hipsurfer.com/news.php?readmore=7
It isn’t quite ready for release yet, but it does come as a liveCD (which you can optionally install to hard disk) and it promises to be all of the things you might be looking for.
so did he just not notice that you could drag and drop icons from thunar (and at least rox, probably any gtk) or the app finder?
so did he just not notice that you could drag and drop icons from thunar (and at least rox, probably any gtk) or the app finder?
If I recall correctly, ROX Filer cannot interact with the desktop at all unless you start it with the pinboard option turned on in which case, it “draws” a new root window and then you can drag and drop icons on it. If you set the pinboard to use the same wallpaper as your “real” root window then it sort of looks like having icons on the desktop.
It is a nice solution to use with icewm and have a fast and full featured file manager (seriously, the gap on functionality between Konqueror and ROX is not that much) and also icons on the desktop. But I like to use it with Windowmaker without the pinboard.
Don´t know if this is true when used together with the new XFCE release, though.
wow, really good work!
congratulations to the XFCE team, really good release! This is a big step forward
XCFE rocks!
It has a great future in the *inux desktop…
I think about swithing to XFCE on my Ubuntu laptop but 2 things are cruicial for me:
thumb/cd drive automounting, possibly with a desktop/FM icon and support for GNOME/KDE/Freedesktop menus.
Anybody knows how to enable it on ubuntu with xfce?
Edited 2007-01-24 21:06
The author just talks about features in Thunar I would demand from any serious file manager.
For example he says nothing about one of it’s most important (IMHO) feature, the support of removeable media.
Supports removable media.
Is SMB support in thunar still missing? That would be pretty disappointing (to me) because it’s the one feature that keeps me in Nautilus..
other thing I can think of is the breadcrumb bar and tree list view in Nautilus, but it crashes so regularly that I can dispense with those.
Use fusesmb and you can use whatever file manager you like with it.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/fusesmb/
thanks looks interesting! (sorry to reply so late)