Xfce Desktop Environment
xfce.org
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.

After years of using Gnome 3/4 with a modified setup on Debian, I returned to Xfce, and am quite impressed by the state of Xfce 4.18.

My background: Using Linux since 1998 or so (yes, I am old) as my main OS, I used a lot of different window mangers and DEs.

Gnome 3 actually never really matched my personal workflows, but I always discovered many paper cuts using other desktop environments and thanks to dconf at least I could automatically configure Gnome 3 in a way which made it usable for me.

For life reasons I needed a cheap, small sub notebook (or netbook, as it was called when I was younger), and settled on the HP Stream 11 with an N4120. No way to run Gnome on this machine and work fluently, so I recalled that Xfce was at the sweet spot between being full featured, fast and light on memory. (+stable and Gtk+ based, KDE hasn’t been an option for me since 3.5 and I check it regularly.)

I got more than I bargained for, Xfce felt so quick, responsive, good and simply sane that I run it now on every Linux desktop/laptop I own. (But my entertainment system, which I only use for Netflix.)

What I really like about Xfce 4.18:

  • Speed and responsiveness, even on my beefy machine I feel the difference
  • Sane size of titlebars etc.
  • Customizable panels out of the box and xfce4-panel-profiles for 1 click setups
  • Thunars split view. I get tired by the Gnome developers, who removed this feature from Nautilus, explain that two Nautilus windows side by side are equivalent to a split view. It is not
  • Ansible support for xfconf out of the box to automate the deployment of my configuration
  • Light on RAM: Around 400 MB vs a little above 1 G for Gnome
  • Everything I need for my DE is included, no search for plugins which might or might not fix my problems
  • Useful and fast default applications (Thunar, Mousepad, Parole…)
  • After tweaking the hotkeys/shortcuts a little bit a perfect keyboard driven experience

So far the only ‘downsides’ I have with Xfce 4.18 is the lack of Wayland support (AFAIK coming with 4.20), the Terminal does not resize the text area if you add new tabs (easily fixed by configuring it to always show the tab bar in the terminalrc) and the type-ahead launchers (whisker-menu, xfce4-appfinder) are ‘weaker’ than the type-ahead launchers in Gnome/KDE.

Big shout out to the Xfce developers for this excellent desktop environment!

tl;dr: If you haven’t used Xfce for some time, give Xfce 4.18 or later a try, you might like it.

  • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
    4·
    1 year ago

    XFCE has two different launchers: alt + F2 for executing anything on your $PATH and alt + F3 for starting installed programs (I think these need an *.desktop entry). The latter is neat, because it learns what you open the most. Also, you can entirely hide the category tab by resizing it. This way you can use your arrow keys to change the selection more easily.

    *fliesaway*

    • wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thank you very much for the hint. F2 and F3 start both xfce4-appfinder, will have to figure out if the non-collapsed (=F3) version behaves different for me.

    • wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks a lot @mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org!

      I don’t understand why the xfce4-appfinder behaves so differently when started with the --collapsed option, but basically the F3 version works exactly how I need it/expect it and the F2 version does not.

      • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
        2·
        1 year ago

        Very nice to hear!

        The F2 version enables one to directly call scripts by e.g. issuing sh myscriptfrompath.sh. Or start a program within a terminal: st -e top. The F3 version wouldn’t accept these.

        My usage is 95% of the time F3 - and I am a sw engineer. So very specific reasons.

        I am really glad you liked it and prompted your question. I was playing for hours until I simply dragged away the categories 😅😃!! Now it is preserved :)