I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after trying yet another distro that went tits up), I was going to stop playing around WITH linux and start playing around ON linux for computers that I needed to get actual work done on. If one wants a classic Linux feel that is fairly stable, XFCE and a Debian base is pretty good for that.
I am a little concerned about the whole Wayland situation, since the XFCE team seems to be taking a fairly anti-Wayland stance at the moment. It has forced me to manually move from Wayland back to X11 on new installs (to get a relaible experience, which is not reliably straightforward and seemingly may become more problematic as time progresses.
They have a visual language that's not changed for decades and just works.
I prefer tiling window managers with no decorating, but whenever I have an app that doesn't play nice with xmonad I open an xfce x server and do my work there.
> I stopped writing posts like this for years, out of fear of how people from specific desktop environments would respond.
I personally also quite liked Cinnamon with Linux Mint, which was similarly pleasant out of the box, but I’m also sorry that the author had to deal with people I guess getting kinda heated over their preferences?
His points about how they do not feel the need to change does seem correct, and it is amazing. As a windows user you should be able to figure it out pretty easily!
Unlike Gnome, Xfce is pretty un-opinionated; I can do away with everything that annoys me in Gnome, macOS, and Windows, while keeping the good bits, and having many more good bits none of these offer.
This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.
Also I enjoyed how easily I could modify it:
- xfwm4: zoom only to multiples of integer, nearest neighbor only
- xfwm4: stop moving zoomed area after the cursor when Scroll Lock is on
- xfce4-screenshooter: supply custom actions with parameters %x %y %w %h of a selected rectangle, allowing me, for example, to select a rectangle and then launch a screen recording script.
Never found the use for multiple desktops, though.
The only part that irritates me is having to interact with the GTK file chooser (file open dialog). Someday I might be annoyed enough to replace it.
Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
There's also people trying to keep the SGI experience alive, but this one is a clone: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
As for as early xfce check out https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/xfce-default.jpg (I'm actually on that site from 25 years ago: https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/twm-cjmckenzie.gif)
Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.
I have some old chromebooks (flashed with chromebox firmware) that uses xfce too, which works great!
So kde & xfce is the only two desktops I use these days & have patience for.
Thanks !
TBH I typically run things fullscreen, so the only part of xfce I normally "see" is a thin task bar at the bottom with open windows and clock and such. Well, except for when I use Thunar, which is a nice enough file manager.
go for NORD theme
https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic
and I love this icon set (white)
https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1277095
for more NORD integration have a look here:
https://www.nordtheme.com/ports
have fun
I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard.
XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.
You're probably not the target audience then. It's not a DE that prioritizes prettiness.
If you want something that looks like the 90's desktop metaphor, it's exactly that and it's really good at that.
I just looked at the homepage to see if it was anything different than I see on my machine, and if anything it looks nicer there. It's certainly nothing fancy, but I feel like there's hardly enough there to really count as "ugly". It all fades into the background quickly when you're doing actual work on it. But YMMV I guess.
(edit - there are a ton of themes out there: https://www.xfce-look.org
Though personally I would avoid using their app)
I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
After ~10 years of using XFCE, I recently for the first time encountered flickering, after an NVidia driver update. I disabled compositing and it went away. Still happy, but clearly something broke there. Pretty sure someone's trying to fix it, somewhere.
Who is actually getting this impression? What thing that they "need" is in doubt?
> I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to,"
You assume incorrectly. Every OS and DE finds some way to be obnoxious, even when you've learned the tricks and keyboard shortcuts. XFCE just seems to have the least of them. It's predictable. I think a new user will be able to navigate it immediately. I don't know about KDE, but I sure couldn't say the same about Gnome 3.
It's still a very nice desktop and you can combine it with Compiz if you want to have some fun.
What on earth?
No, the config has dialogues and intuitive controls. There is a settings-editor you can go into if you need to, with a bit more of a regedit kinda feel, but I haven't looked in there in years.
> Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in? Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs.
And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card.
Anyway, I LOVE XFCE. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in my DE, I just need it to launch applications, bind some hotkeys, and otherwise stay out of my way.
I see a top comment here speaking about an inefficient architecture.. that may be the case under the hood, but if you use it for a while, the "click lag" is very noticeable when you move off it.
Maybe it's not a good thing! /s. When I started a new role, I had to use a mac for a week until IT did a Linux swap out, and I found it so frustrating. Mostly the inability to set shortcuts that were muscle memory, but also the lag.
I have noticed lag more on a brand new iPhone (the pro one) then on my face... Which is something
I first used it on an eeepc because something light was the order of the day. But then Gnome 3 happened and I made the switch on my full-strength machines too.
It works and it works well. It's theme-able. It's not opinionated about how I should use it so I can put bars wherever I want, launchers, menus, systrays wherever I like, and I can do it all with a few clicks and dragging and dropping stuff.
Generally a great DE and one that won't screw you over on update, which is something I've come to value.
Post-2010ish Gnome and kde are like some sort of sick joke. The fact that there are people who actually contribute their precious free time to these, feels to me profoundly sad.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
(Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive FPS where a single extra frame of latency lowers your chance of being productive.)
It would be embarrassing for gnome to be more performant there than XFCE.
Also with x11 if you go through the steps to get Variable Refresh Rate going and you are dual monitor, it will max the refresh of both to the slowest monitor. :(
Wayland doesn't have that issue.
If I were into hardcore gaming, and used the same machine for daily work, I would likely just end the X session, and switched to a minimalist Wayland session with a menu of games for the entire desktop.
Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
This enforces a path where window contents often round-trip through the X server before composition. Quantitatively, this typically adds at least one frame of input lag compared to the zero-copy direct scanout path available to monolithic wayland compositors. You likely won't notice this while editing text. However, the architecture doesn't perform well when you attach an external monitor. Since X11 shares a single virtual coordinate space, it cannot synchronize VBLANK across two outputs with different refresh rates or clock domains.
ps: and please don't call your 2018 machine vintage, it makes my secondary thinkpads feel prehistoric :D
I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.
To my eye most Linux de’s are much lighter or responsive than windows or Mac
But that's not where we are, a lot of people still haven't moved and XFCE only has premliminary support for wayland at this time.
But it doesn't matter, xfce on X is still great.
If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.
Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.
Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.
At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.
But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.
ROTFL. Moksha, the lightweight desktop for Bodhi Linux, has very low RAM requirements, with a default install using under 100MB of RAM
That's hilarious. Remind me, which colour represent “maximize” again? And why are half of the apps I constantly use stuck in a group together such that I have to use a different key to switch between them? And where is the handle to resize a window, anyway?
You only think osx is better designed because you're used to and therefore blind to the various papercuts that osx inflicts upon its users.
- macOS (Quartz): No, you'll need a third-party app.
- Windows (dwm): No, you'll need PowerToys.
- xfwm4: Yes, you can do it out-of-the-box.
This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.
Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.
Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application.
> You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?
Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguishable from other windows knockoffs
We "PC" users have a dedicated key for that on our keyboard, it is called "home". We even have the opposite, a dedicated key called "end".
> use readline bindings in a textfield
I don’t even know what this means.
readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line.
bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically.
macOS adopted some (but not all) of the common keybinds from that era into their UI. I.e., in a GUI text entry field in macOS, you can hit ^A to move the cursor to the start of the text entry.
(I don't know that this particular UI-ism would make or break an OS for me, personally, though.)
Given how UI is implemented, this would be up to the toolkit. In GTK3, this was called "key themes"; there was, I think, an "Emacs" theme that would do what they desire. I do not know if GTK4 still has this, however (and I suspect it was removed).
(I think more users are going to expect ^A to be select-all, and home/end and ^← for word navigation, etc. These are the defaults. Thus key themes were probably little used.)
