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Otte: staring into the abyssOtte: staring into the abyssPosted Jul 28, 2012 19:57 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)In reply to: Otte: staring into the abyss by drag Parent article: Otte: staring into the abyss
Xfce is not "GNOME with pieces removed." It's a completely separate code base from GNOME. You can check out the code at http://git.xfce.org/. Xfce does depend on GTK+, but that's just a graphics toolkit.
If anything, GNOME and Xfce are farther apart than they've ever been. Just compare a default install of GNOME and a default install of Xfce, and tell me how many similarities you see. Not many.
I view Xfce as the working man's desktop because it enables you to get stuff done with a minimum of yak-shaving. Rather than focusing on "the semantic desktop" (like KDE4) or chasing dreams of Linux tablets (like GNOME3), Xfce focused on delivering a usable desktop with no drama. And it has succeeded. It may not be as exciting as a catastrophic rewrite-from-scratch or as trendy as HTML5, but it's actually usable. I hope more distros consider using it as the default desktop.
Another thing Xfce gets right is not re-inventing wheels. GNOME has its own office suite (GnomeOffice), its own IDE (Anjuta), its own CD ripper (Sound Juicer), and on and on. Xfce takes the approach that if a perfectly usable program already exists for a task, it doesn't need to be re-invented.
P.S. I've done the "old-school WM" thing before too. I used xfvwm for a few years, and even used twm. None of those environments was as productive as Xfce because there was inevitably a yak to be shaved-- a configuration file that had to be edited by hand, or a bash script that had to be tweaked. Xfce is a great project and it's really worth a look, if you haven't tried it.
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XFCE Posted Jul 29, 2012 14:52 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] +1 We use Debian Squeeze at work. When we move to Wheezy, I'll be transitioning all the non-technical users from GNOME 2 to XFCE because I think that transition will be easier on them than GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.
XFCE Posted Jul 29, 2012 16:18 UTC (Sun) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
Early 2013, a lot of Wheezy users will dislike Gnome 3 and will switch to Xfce. It's because of that it's so sad to have only the 2 years old Xfce 4.8 in Wheezy instead of the one year old Xfce 4.10.
XFCE Posted Jul 29, 2012 19:09 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I'll take old XFCE 4.8 over new GNOME 3 any day. Besides, as far as the end-user experience goes, I don't think there's that much difference between XFCE 4.10 and XFCE 4.8.
XFCE Posted Jul 30, 2012 22:00 UTC (Mon) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link]
It might be easier for you to just use GNOME Classic (fallback mode)
XFCE Posted Jul 31, 2012 0:50 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
There have been mixed messages about the future of fallback mode... It might not be the best choice for stable, long term deploys.
XFCE Posted Jul 31, 2012 2:36 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Not. GNOME classic means I have to go do configuration on all the boxes, whereas switching to XFCE is simply apt-get install xfce4.
XFCE Posted Jul 31, 2012 19:09 UTC (Tue) by mbiebl (subscriber, #41876) [Link]
This doesn't make sense.
Since you are apparently using Debian, just select the "GNOME Classic" session in your display manager and you're done. No configuration required.
XFCE Posted Aug 1, 2012 17:09 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Hmm, OK. Didn't know that. However, I think XFCE has more of a future than GNOME Classic and I don't want to have to force my users to change again in a year or two's time.
Otte: staring into the abyss Posted Jul 31, 2012 11:45 UTC (Tue) by rossburton (subscriber, #7254) [Link]
"its own CD ripper (Sound Juicer)"
I wrote SJ originally because there wasn't anything else. At the time the cutting edge GNOME-friendly ripper was Grip, and after wasting a week of constant ripping because I typo'd one of the patterns I decided that enough was enough and wrote a replacement.
SJ is part of the GNOME release but it hasn't actually depended on anything GNOMEy for some time now, so the current releases will fit in fine once Xfce moves to GTK+ 3 (or use SJ 2.32, and bring in a small library from gnome-media).
I was curious to see what Xfce recommended as a CD ripper. The wiki page recommends an app that appears to be unmaintained now, and the xubuntu metapackage doesn't appear to pull in a CD ripper (maybe I missed it, or it's integrated into something else).
Otte: staring into the abyss Posted Aug 5, 2012 6:52 UTC (Sun) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]
Is that xfburn? I use it from time to time and it usually does the job.
Otte: staring into the abyss Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:17 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
Thanks for the information! I'll give Sound Juicer a try next time I have to burn a CD.
Otte: staring into the abyss Posted Aug 16, 2012 23:18 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
Er, that should read 'rip a CD.' Opposite operation :)
Otte: staring into the abyss Posted Aug 19, 2012 12:56 UTC (Sun) by philomath (guest, #84172) [Link]
That's my experience too. Xfce is the only DE workable for me.
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