The XFce 4.0 Lightweight Desktop Environment [LWN.net]

Version 4.0 of XFce, a lightweight desktop environment, has been announced.

XFce creator Olivier Fourdan sums up the goals of the project:

XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for various *NIX systems. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources.

[XFce] The full XFce 4.0 press release indicates that this version has substantial changes from version 3.

XFce 4 is a complete rewrite of the previous version. It's based on the popular GTK+ 2.x toolkit and it has a radically different architecture from XFce 3. It embodies extreme modularity and re-usability and all of XFce 4's core components have been written from scratch in order to fit into this new architecture. Another priority of XFce 4 is adherence to standards, specifically those defined by freedesktop.org, which aims to standardize the Unix/Linux desktop.

Furthermore, the press release sums up these new capabilities:

XFce 4 consists of a number of components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment. They are packaged separately and users can pick and choose from the available packages to create the best personal working environment. XFce 4 includes a number of new themes, international keyboard support, easy-to-use preference panels for all common desktop actions, native interoperability with both Gnome and KDE and their applications, an improved file manager (Xffm) with Samba browsing and mount/umount capabilities, an easily re-locatable main panel (vertical or horizontal, with variable size, auto-hide feature and with easy-to-setup detachable menus and application launchers), enhanced drag-n-drop support, anti-alias fonts.

It will be interesting to see if XFce 4 can gain a substantial following in the landscape of available Linux desktop environments. A lighter system may be able to carve out a decent sized niche on systems that don't require all of the capabilities of KDE and Gnome.

(Log in to post comments)

The XFce 4.0 Lightweight Desktop Environment

Posted Oct 2, 2003 12:17 UTC (Thu) by jlnance (guest, #4081) [Link]

I like the lightweight emphisis, I may try this out. Currently my desktop "environment" consists of the fvwm-1.24 window manager. I switched to fvwm in the early 90's because it had a focus on being lightweight (and thats why I stayed with fvwm-1 instead of moving to fvwm-2 when that came out). I have tried Gnome and KDE and they are certainly beautiful desktops, but I always switched back to fvwm because they just felt so heavy. (And I know this is a dumb reason, but Gnome runs so many processes it makes my ps output difficult to read. Dont know if KDE does this).

Anyway, all this is to say that I appreciate the emphisis on being lightweight. Thanks for doing the work. I am looking forward to checking this out.

Jim

Lightweight in speed, not installation size

Posted Oct 2, 2003 16:28 UTC (Thu) by heinlein (guest, #1029) [Link]

I've been using Xfce for a couple years now. I don't use many of the built-in utilities except for the customizable popup menus, so I haven't taken much notice of the under-the-hood changes between 3 and 4.

The one big change is that a full-blown Xfce 4 installation requires 24 packages on an RPM-based system. Removing the -devel packages reduces that number only slightly, to 20.

Still, it's a nice environment:

Very speedy
Nice set of icons
Nice set of window-manager themes
Fairly customizable using its GUI tools
No huge ORB/object manager lurking in the background

There are still some rough edges -- a couple troublesome themes in particular -- but it's my desktop at home and at work, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Compare xfce4 install size with GNOME core install size

Posted Oct 9, 2003 9:35 UTC (Thu) by kmike (guest, #5260) [Link]

In fact, complete xfce4 download took only 15Megs for me.

20 RPMs may look scary, but most of them are under 100k in size. The biggest package is xfce4-icons (2.5M), the next is xfddesktop (1.7M, includes some huge background images). All other RPMs are less than 1Meg.

Can't say I don't miss some GNOME applets, but all functionality I use daily is here.

Compare xfce4 install size with GNOME core install size

Posted Oct 15, 2003 6:56 UTC (Wed) by kmike (guest, #5260) [Link]

Correction: just checked, entire XFCE4 download is actually less than 9 megs.
Seems like I included gtk2 related RPMs in original download estimate.

The XFce 4.0 Lightweight Desktop Environment

Posted Oct 3, 2003 0:42 UTC (Fri) by bryn (guest, #1482) [Link]

It's a bit unfair, and rude, to imply stupidity on anyone with the talent to create such a system.

If you've used XFce 4 perhaps you've had different experiences to other people. I run it on a 475Mhz AMD K6-II laptop, which is cetrainly a low-end machine by today's standards. I've found GNOME and KDE to be cripplingly slow on this machine, whereas XFce runs very happily. It also presents a very good compromise between the speediness of a minimal X setup and the desirable features of a more heavy-duty graphical environment. It certainly does a great job of filling a niche.

Low-end machines

Posted Oct 9, 2003 5:21 UTC (Thu) by botsie (guest, #1485) [Link]

> I just love to see "lightweight", "fast" and "GTK+ 2.x" together. Did these
> guys even bother to try their stuff on low-end machines before claiming
> such stupidities?

I did my part of the development on a K6-II 550 with 128MB of RAM. We have had good reports from people on P166 with 64MB. I'll admit however that I haven't heard from any 486 or 386 users.

I'll readily admit that GTK2 is a lot heavier than GTK1. But it has advantages that are difficult to ignore.

-- b

The XFce 4.0 Lightweight Desktop Environment

Posted Oct 9, 2003 16:44 UTC (Thu) by arunta (guest, #11291) [Link]

>>I just love to see "lightweight", "fast" and "GTK+ 2.x" together. Did
>>these guys even bother to try their stuff on low-end machines before
>>claiming such stupidities?

Unfair.

I have been using XFCE-4 since its development phases in my Pentium-II test system with 128MB memory. Obviously KDE and GNOME are useless in such a system.

I am pretty happy with the performance of XFCE-3 as well as XFCE-4.