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A first look at Xfce 4.8A first look at Xfce 4.8Posted Dec 26, 2010 9:05 UTC (Sun) by djao (subscriber, #4263)Parent article: A first look at Xfce 4.8 I'm very much interested in using lightweight desktop environments, but in my experience neither Xfce nor LXDE provide a useful terminal program. Last I checked, xfce4-terminal has a rather bad race condition wherein keystrokes sent to the terminal can and often do get lost if the system is swapping heavily. Disappointingly, LXtermial (from LXDE, the "other" lightweight desktop environment) also has the same problem. Lost keystrokes represent a showstopper bug under any circumstances (keystroke buffering is fine, keystroke lossage is not); however, particularly for desktop environments advertised as "lightweight," I would think and hope that low-memory performance would be an area of priority. Other terminal programs, such as xterm, rxvt, and even gnome-terminal, do not have this particular flaw (or at least it is nowhere near as bad), despite using the same or even greater amounts of memory. Under memory pressure, xterm and other "good" terminal programs will buffer keystrokes, and may under dire straits crash entirely, but as long as they are running, all keystrokes sent to the program will eventually arrive and arrive in the correct order. Whenever I am forced to use Xfce or LXDE, I always use one of these reliable terminal programs instead of the terminal program that comes with the desktop environment, but such a solution is neither satisfying nor ideal. In order to make this comment somewhat relevant to the article: I surmise (without proof, please correct me if I'm wrong) that this review of Xfce was carried out on a high end machine with plenty of RAM. One cannot extrapolate, based on Xfce's performance on a high end machine, that it would be suitable for a low-resource environment; simply put, it's not, unless you don't care about the terminal, but a good fraction of Linux users consider the terminal indispensible. Readers would be better served if the reviewers made an attempt to match their review platform with the intended use case of the software in question. In this case, the problem with the terminal program is only apparent when the desktop environment is run on a low-memory machine.
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A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 5, 2011 11:23 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Whenever I am forced to use Xfce or LXDE, I always use one of these reliable terminal programs instead of the terminal program that comes with the desktop environment, but such a solution is neither satisfying nor ideal.
Could you explain why that is? I've often wondered why desktop environments tend to add their own terminal application which I always ignore in favour of xterm due to its zero startup time and lower memory usage.
(I hope this doesn't sound like 'xterm is good enough for me; it should be good enough for you'.)
A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 5, 2011 11:39 UTC (Wed) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I couldn't code without konsole because it gives me tabs, infinite scrollback and decent font support. And as for why desktop environments code their own terminal emulator: desktop integration, for instance with notifications is very useful as well.
On my laptop, konsole starts up without any waiting time as well -- probably because I've always got at least one open already.
A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 5, 2011 14:05 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
Also search -- I can't live without search in my terminal program. I've been using konsole on my gnome desktop for years now. It's just a really good terminal program. I don't know why *other* desktops have written terminal apps though, everyone should just use konsole. :)
A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 6, 2011 18:33 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Thanks for the responses, both.
It looks like most of those things aren't relevant to me since I tend to do everything in screen anyway, which isn't to everyone's taste but does explain why I've not felt a need for extra terminal features.
A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 6, 2011 18:59 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
You know... I use screen as well :-) I have virtual desktops, windows, tabs and screen screens. I have to admit that I get confused now and then.
A first look at Xfce 4.8 Posted Jan 8, 2011 13:49 UTC (Sat) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> One cannot extrapolate, based on Xfce's performance on a high end machine, that it would be suitable for a low-resource environment;
Unlike Gnome, XFCE (at least in Xubuntu) doesn't seem to restart critical UI pieces when they crash, e.g. after user loads too large images in Gimp, system runs out of memory & OOM-kills random processes.
An older relative of mine lost his "Applications" panel menu because of this and it didn't come back even with reboot (maybe because of session saving?). He used only apps that had Desktop icons for few weeks until I had time to go and fix it...
So, although I like XFCE looks and functionality in general, currently I don't consider XFCE reliable on low-resource environments. Besides desktop, I've also noticed some of Xubuntu default apps have stability issue compared to their Gnome & KDE counterparts.
And in high-resource environments Xubuntu/XFCE apps are still lacking some features available on other desktops that I need on such machines (like reliable backup DVD burning) and its session handling seems to be having some issues with KDE4 apps (with which I replaced XFCE apps until switching to KDE completely because of these issues).
I want to like XFCE and I do, but to use it, it and its apps still need to mature a bit. Hopefully that happens soon after v4.8 is ready & in distros.
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