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.

  • Banned@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    1 year ago

    I never stopped using Xfce. I try Gnome and KDe every other year or so to see if I like the feel of it and just am not into it. I do keep my set up really basic though. The only issue I have is I cannot right click in Thunar to bring up context menu without it hanging/freezing my entire system for a minute or so. Now I just use a different file manager.

    • wolf@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Your right-click issue sounds very strange.

      I am running Xfce on a real potato and right click is instantaneous.

      Do you use any dynamic/on the fly menu creation?

      • Banned@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        1 year ago

        None that I know of. I don’t do much customizing or tinkering which is why I was confused when the issue started a few years ago. I did try to troubleshoot for a while by resetting or deleting various config files I could find and nothing helped so I just found an alternative file manager that does what I need.