The WashingtonPost has an interesting article on the matter, but registration required.
WashingtonPost: XFce Looks Good Without Overhead
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
That’s an interesting read for a non-tech publisher. Sure it’s a high level article, but pretty far off the beaten path for them.
Anyway, I’ve been using afterstep on my laptop for a bit now and have been thinking of switching to xfce. it seems to be more active, and i haven’t liked a few features of afterstep.
But I haven’t used gnome or kde for a while. I just hit a snapping point where I decided a non-windows box shouldn’t be sitting there thinking to load a desktop.
Then I ran into sight on multi-head monitoring for games. There is a quake3 Linux setup with 2 monitors running on a Amd k6-2 450mhz. Go to the web page below and scroll down past the Windows UT setup and you’ll see it:
http://www.planetquake.com/mhg/
When I see stuff like that and remember how fast I’ve had linux desktops running on < 1ghz machines, it reminds me why I don’t try the latest overweight desktops.
Anyway, my 2 cents…
-bogey
The article sounds interesting, but I don’t feel like registering for SPAM just to read it.
http://www.bugmenot.com
or better yet, get the bugmenot extension for firefox and automatically fill it in.
maybe you should paraphrase it fo us that care not to register
XFCE is faster, and lighter than KDE or Gnome.
XFFM is pretty darn fast.
The installer is good, but you are probably better off using a package.
I’ve used it on Gentoo and Debian. I went back to KDE. XFce pre version 4 was snappy, but 4 is slow. Slower than KDE at least. But it surely does look good 🙂 The part of being lightweight… I don’t know where it comes from, it must be because people think traditionally – as, like I said, XFCE used to be lightweight before GTK2 and eyecandy was implemented. Must be the doom of any “lightweight” DE – the addition of modern looks.
Oh it isn’t fast?
Look, GTK2 is slower, but Xfce still beats the pants off of KDE on my box here. And certainly it uses less memory and has a signifigantly faster startup time. So I’m started doing my work faster, and I can run more apps without thrashing.
Xfce is pretty smart about being well designed and small.
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,119699,00.asp
and no registration required.
I wish there was a XFCE like desktop running over QT. Then it’d be really fast.
XFce looks nice, it’s very functional and easy to use, it’s very fast, and uses minimal memory. I like using it on older hardware. On the machines I’ve used XFce (as well as KDE and Gnome) on, it used on average 50 megs less of memory than KDE and Gnome.
With people complaining about the bloat of KDE and Gnome, and with other “lightweight” window managers looking very spartan, XFce is a great alternative.
Another nice thing about XFce is that it’s window manager/user interface make Gnome and KDE apps fit right in and look the same. By comparison, if you run KDE apps in Gnome or Gnome apps in KDE, they’ll out of place with fonts being different, etc. Not XFce. With XFce, it all looks unified (except for the different icon sets of GTK+ and QT).
I hope more and more Distros feature XFce, particularily 4.2. XFce has a great future.
I like xfce but I have two complaints:
The widgets on the windows. There are just too many, looks cluttered.
The taskbar, which nice on large screen, really squeezes my viewable area on smaller screens. I wish I could turn it off and have the old cde style pining back from earlier versions.
Xfce on QT… hmm wonder if that would be better?
whatever was that program’s name, xfce’s file manager was the reason i dumped it.
on other things, respect to the authors.
here: http://bugmenot.com/view.php?url=www.washingtonpost.com
You can use rox ( http://rox.sf.net ) instead of xfwm and then turn of the taskbar. Rox minimizes windows to the desktop. Also, I feel that the Rox filer is a better one than xffm.
Using Rox as your window manager does mess up other things, like your right-click menu, though.
you do know you can remove both the task bar and anything you don’t want on the windows.
Ah once again, the false assumption that QT is faster than GTK2. I think it’s been said about 16,000 times now; if you can see a difference on a machine faster than 500MHz it’s because you read it was different.
QT is pretty fast, but once you throw in kdelibs everything gets rediculous. Heh, I took Mandrake off my laptop simply because kedit, kwrite, and kate all wanted to use noticable cpu while I typed (uncomplex latex text). I found this rediculous: It could have been specific to that release of Mandrake, I rarely run kde so I don’t know if this is a pattern. Last thing you want in your laptop is background processes to speed things up later, because what you really want is to keep your laptop cool.
Umm, since when does Mandrake stand as a metric whether Qt is fast or whether KDE is fast? But whatever is useful to hammer out random text, eh?
Ive been using xfce4 for about 4-5 months now and ive been pretty happey with it. I must say that there own file manager really sucks, I just use rox. The main thing I really like about it is that its really light. Most of the time I never use the menu on the bar. The apps and folders I goto all the time are in the pannel up front. I started out in KDE it was way to bloated to me being a ex windows user. Gnome was a little better but didnt really fully use it. Xfce4 was just right. That and you can use your mouse whell on the desktop in xfce4, unlike Gnome.
i don’t trust anyone that has a iconless desktop, it’s kde and winxp for me.
ever since the new xfce xfce loads slower and isnt as fast as my gnome lite desktop
XFCE was designed as a clone of CDE, the default desktop on Solaris.
It’s relatively lightweight, and does a good job of not getting in the way of doing work. Since the conversion to GTK2, it’s also less ugly than CDE (Motif), or old XFCE (GTK1).
These days, however, I’m doing the WindowMaker thing again, along with GWorkspace for file manager duties, and Terminal.app as the xterm replacement. So far, so good.
KDE is horrid, and I can’t stand to use it. Gnome is much more usable, but it’s still pretty bloated. I’m also kind of disliking the look of Gnome these days. The cartoonish SVG icons, and horridly antialiased fonts (or worse, stolen MS fonts) become distracting.
Oh, and why doesn’t any other DE than KDE have ftp:/, smb:/ and fish:/ equivalents in their file manager/file dialogues. It’s essential when working online. ( in XFCE their Samba implementation didn’t work outside the office network.. )
believe it or not, that comment is the first thing i have read that gives me a reason to give xfce a shot. thanks 😉
i was looking at the gnomefiles site and saw this screenshot?
https://player.helixcommunity.org/2004/common/creative/screenshots/g…
looks great what ever the DE is .
-best
-greg
That looks like Enlightenment 16 to me but it is just a guess. It is certainally not xfce.