Xfce 4.6 released

[Posted February 27, 2009 by corbet]

The announcement has gone out for the Xfce 4.6 release. "Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new session manager and sound mixer as well as several huge improvements of its core components." An extensive list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Xfce 4.6 released

Posted Mar 2, 2009 6:52 UTC (Mon) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] (2 responses)

It just goes as a generation circle. Something is born as lean and agile, then it gets bloated with time and development, then something new is born again as lean and agile opposed to the bloated former one. See LXDE.

Xfce 4.6 released

Posted Mar 2, 2009 11:15 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm confused. Are you saying that LXDE is lean and agile, or that it too is beginning to burst its seams?

Xfce 4.6 released

Posted Mar 2, 2009 18:49 UTC (Mon) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

I mean, XFCE is getting bigger and heavier on resources along with its development. LXDE was born more recently and is still lighter. But only so far. Maybe once in a future developers will come to the balance between features and bloat. But not today in any way.

What is missing compared to Gnome?

Posted Mar 2, 2009 12:52 UTC (Mon) by irios (guest, #19838) [Link] (1 responses)

Xfce is promoted as some sort of Gnome Lite, and in fact it shares a lot of Gnome's infrastructure. In Xfce's own material they insist on how much leaner than Gnome they are, but I have not found anywhere a side by side comparison of what you get with each.

Please, can somebody clarify (or point to where I can find enlightenment) what are the *differences* between Gnome and Xfce, meaning, what does Gnome have that is missing in Xfce? My previous questions about this subject have always received terse answers on the lines of "Bloat" and "Bad Engineering" which is not much of an explanation.

Thanks!

What is missing compared to Gnome?

Posted Mar 2, 2009 13:40 UTC (Mon) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link]

The main difference is that XFCE is based on a plain GTK infrastructure wherever possible and runs only minimal services/daemons. Gnome, on the other hand, has a more KDE-ish design of augmenting the basic UI toolkit with many additional libraries and services, such as gconf [configuration management daemon], gstreamer, libgnomeui, gnome-vfs, libxml, bonobo, libgnomecanvas, pango, libgnome-keyring, Gnome volume manager, Gnome network manager etc. A basic Gnome app such as gnome-sound-recorder has 81 library dependencies, a basic XFCE utility like the orage calendar 48 (a comparison that doesn't include userspace demons).

Figures on this page suggest that XFCE consumes about 30-50% less RAM than Gnome.