
Xfce 4.14 - severine
https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000
======
alxlaz
I stopped using GTK applications a while ago, so I don't use XFCE anymore, but
I still love it, just... from a distance. It's an increasingly uncommon breed
of software, which gets better with every release. No pointless shuffling of
user interface features in the name of UX "innovation", no rationalizing bugs
so that they look like deliberate design choices, just steady improvement. All
this by an independent team with basically zero funding.

IMHO, XFCE is one of the few relatively well-known projects that still
embodies the spirit of free software as we once knew it. Kudos to the quiet
and tenacious people behind it, who still manage to come up with one quality
release after another, so many years down the road.

If you want to support (at least some of) their work, Sean Davis has a Patreon
account:
[https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre](https://www.patreon.com/bluesabre) . Sean
is one of XFCE's core developers and the Xubuntu tech lead. I don't know if
there's a more official XFCE donation sink (this one is the only one I know
of), but hey, it would be a great start!

~~~
terminalhealth
> I stopped using GTK applications a while ago

So you're only using something like ‎i3, ‎XMonad or ‎dwm?

~~~
alxlaz
Ah, no, I'm using lxqt at the moment. It's not perfect but it's okay, and I
trust its developers' common sense. Every once in a while I fire up Plasma 5,
too, but I'm not convinced. In the last year or so it seems to have gone down
the mobile-inspired UI rabbit hole and it's getting increasingly awkward to
use.

Other than that, I use the same kind of applications you'd expect any desktop
user to use, from file managers to text editors and from office suites to web
browsers. Only most of them are Qt-based :). The only GTK applications I still
use are Firefox (GTK-ish) and Emacs, which can still be compiled against GTK2
which is a good enough compromise for me.

It's nothing personal, I don't want to get into a big rant about how Linux
used to be about choice and about how Gnome is a Red Hat conspiracy, or
whatever flag is being waved in 4chan & friends. I just don't like GTK3's UX
choices. Oversized widgets, awkward scrollbars and hamburger menus aren't
pleasant to use on a 30" monitor. A few years ago I tried to get around that
with a custom theme, but theming is... kind of frowned upon in GTK land, so it
didn't end well.

But, you know, their code -- their choice. I don't like the choices but I
think it's a big step forward from the '90s and a big test of maturity for the
open source community. Making (what I believe to be) our own mistakes is way
better than cargo culting Microsoft and Apple, which is what we've done up
until 5-6 years ago.

Edit: also, why are you folks downvoting the parent comment? It's a productive
question, even if it looks uninformed (i.e. I'm guessing the downvotes are
because it's conflating "GTK applications" with "desktop applications", which
looks silly but have you had a look at Ubuntu lately?). If you think that's a
stupid question, fine, but are you really that sure you've never asked a
stupid question in your life?

~~~
_0ffh
Hi, I'm still on lxde, and I wonder how lxqt compares at this point in time.
But if you try to search the net you only ever get comparisons to xfce, mate,
or whatever.

Would you be so kind to give me your take on lxde vs lxqt?

~~~
alxlaz
I haven't used lxde so I can't tell you much about it. What I can tell you is
that it has a "start" menu, a taskbar, a desktop switcher, icons on the
desktop and Openbox :). It doesn't do anything that you haven't seen before,
but pretty much everything it does, it does reliably.

It's... I dunno, it's like FVWM95, only from this century. I used Openbox + a
bunch of tools cobbled together before. It doesn't do anything my old setup
didn't do, but it sure is more comfortable. No scripts, no custom setups...
all that was fun twenty years ago but I'm not a teenage l33t h4x0r anymore, I
got work to do nowadays...

I'm not sure why people conflate it with Lubuntu, you can use it on any
distribution, and the fact that it's very easy to package means there are few
packaging-related problems with it. It's also pretty easy to compile from
source if you need that, for whatever reason.

~~~
aninteger
> it's like FVWM95, only from this century.

I wonder how you'd feel about Trinity Desktop Environment? I feel like Trinity
and Lxqt are in the same space when it comes to system requirements.

~~~
alxlaz
They're a world of difference apart! TDE uses its own fork of Qt 3. Qt 3 is
huge, and while Timothy Pearson, who maintains it, is an extraordinarily
capable programmer, I doubt he and his team can maintain it _and_ TDE that
well. LXQT, on the other hand, can be compiled against the latest Qt 5
libraries. Besides, TDE isn't "just" the desktop, there's a whole application
suite in there, too. I doubt that you'll get proper, 2019-level support for
TLS, for example, in those applications. Bugfixes are occasionally committed
but whether or not they're enough is anyone's guess.

Plus, you get all the usual problems, like inconsistent theming (Qt 3 engines,
unsurprisingly, don't work with Qt 5; Plastik, CDE, Motif and Windows are in
both Qt 3 and Qt 5 but you need to manually add color palettes etc.)

Frankly, even though TDE pushes all the right nostalgia buttons and even
though I instantly feel better about anything with Pearson's name on it, I
don't think I want it on my systems :). I tried it and it's fun but a bit
difficult to use in 2019.

They're in the same space in terms of requirements but a very different space
in terms of bugfixes, compatibility and perhaps security.

------
meddlepal
I've been using XFCE for years now and it's just absolutely my favorite no
thrills DE.

~~~
zepearl
I used to use Enlightenment e16.

Then some months ago e16 was superseded by e17 (with the various versions 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22) => e17 is very nice but I never ever managed to run a bug-
free version of it (they could rename the software to "Bug").

Desperate for an alternative, I tested other window managers and XFCE was the
only one that provided some features that were similar to e16 and that I
wanted to keep using => using since then XFCE on all my PCs and notebooks with
no problems (and I'm since today a patron of Sean Davis, yo).

Really looking forward to the vsync of XFCE 4.14 :)

"Alternatives" is one of the main reasons of why I love Linux - everybody can
choose in a huge number of areas the type of software that fits him/her best.

------
lousken
I used to really like XFCE and it was my daily driver on my laptop for 6years
because it was no compromises on performance type of GUI. Also worked amazing
in VMs if you needed to test something and WSL on windows didn't exist.

But then they started working on GTK v3 and things started to fall apart (my
experience is only from xubuntu but i think it doesn't matter). Thunar got
really buggy, often crashed in random locations and it was painful to use.
This one at least got fixed.

Then mousepad. It used to be really fast editor but after i switched from old
xubuntu to 18.04 it feels extremly sluggish when opening lager document with
syntax highlight. E.g. download html of youtube and open it in mousepad, it's
unusuable.

And then the clipboard issues and large image (screenshot) killed it for me
and I had to switch to KDE. It takes ~0.5-1s more to load apps like dolphin
compared to thunar but at least once you load them they just work. I still
hope I'll be able to come back, the zero animation GUI is appealing to me.

~~~
andreldm
Thunar was crashing long before the gtk3 port, hopefully it's much more stable
now. The clipboard failing on large chunks of data has been fixed too.

~~~
lousken
> The clipboard failing on large chunks of data has been fixed too.

That's awesome, I'll try again with new xubuntu, hopefully there won't be such
nasty bug, or do you recommend another distro?

~~~
andreldm
Besides Xubuntu, Manjaro (or plain Arch) and openSUSE Tumbleweed support Xfce
very well.

------
znpy
Love Xfce, it's the only sane-minded desktop environment.

I hope it will keep being awesome as it currently is!

~~~
_0ffh
Hi, I also like xfce, and I've used it for a few years in the late noughties.
But then I tried lxde, and I've stuck with that ever since. While I agree
things like KDE and Gnome3 are atrocities, what makes you think so of lxde?

~~~
byuu
Not the original poster, but the trouble I had with lxde was that it never
felt consistent. It felt more like openbox where you made a desktop out of
dozens of indepedent projects that each did things their own way.

Xfce, by comparison, feels like each program is part of a package. That is not
to say it's perfect: I still have to pull in Mate applications for things like
a task manager, archive manager, and calculator. I also had to write my own
replacements for things like a text editor that doesn't open every new
document in a new window. But I get a whole lot of mileage out of Xfce's file
browser, desktop, panel, terminal, settings panel, etc.

I'm a bit nervous about the Xfce move to GTK3, and I hope I won't end up with
any client-side decorated windows, or the GTK3-style file picker.

~~~
kitsunesoba
I haven’t used LXDE/LxQt in several years but this has been my experience as
well. XFCE feels like an intentional, designed singular “piece” where LxQt
feels stitched together.

------
gnulinux
My issue with using "lightweight" DEs in linux is they're so badly polished.
VSync is way off. There are minor glitches all around the place. I used to use
AwesomeWM which was by far the best DE experience I had in my life. Currently
I use OSX and even though OSX looks more aesthetic I can never achieve the
simplicity and efficiency of AwesomeWM. Even then, when I occasionally go back
to lightweight DEs and say watch a movie, I immediately realize the VSync
issue. Gnome and KDE does NOT have these minor issue but they're also not
nearly as efficient as awesome, XMonad, ratpoison, xfce, lxde etc.

~~~
hedora
The release notes for this version of XFCE mention improved vsync support.
(Though the amd opensource drivers have an option that just “fixes” vsync
across the board for me, and I only use lightweight WMs that don’t do anything
special to support vsync).

~~~
ac29
For what its worth, XFCE 4.14 still has tearing for me on a Skylake Intel
iGPU.

~~~
lousken

      cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf <<'_EOF'
      Section "Device"
      Identifier "Intel Graphics"
      Driver "intel"
      Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
      Option "TearFree" "true"
      EndSection
      _EOF
    

this is what I had to do when I was using xubuntu to fix that

~~~
gnulinux
Since these things don't come installed by default in big distros, I can't
help but think they need to introduce some big trade-offs. I don't know if
doing this without understanding this trade-off is a good idea. (not saying
it's not, but I don't know)

~~~
lousken
There are but the thing is - vsync is a trade-off in itself. That's why
there're variable refreshrate monitors with freesync and gsync, so obviously
the better solution is to use them. But intel needs to support those first.
Until then... you just need to deal with either of those trade-offs[0].

[0]
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics#Tearing](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics#Tearing)

------
jdsully
I’m very excited about high DPI support. I switched to xfce on all my Linux
boxes because I like the simplicity but the lack of proper high dpi was a
nuisance.

------
unhammer
> [session manager] can now run commands not only "autostart style" at login
> time, but also when your computer suspends, logs out etc.

> larger thumbnails as well as support for a "folder.jpg" file altering the
> folder's icon

> "Do Not Disturb" mode

> HiDPI support

------
Insanity
I switched to xfce about a year ago (from gnome) and have not looked back yet.
It is great and I quite like the "oldschool" feel. Really recommend trying it
out!

~~~
kgwxd
I've been using Xubuntu for about 10 years now. Over the weekend, I tried to
switch my main desktop to Ubuntu. The animations instantly drove me back. I
didn't even bother looking if I could turn them off because I knew, even if
there is an option, I'd be fighting with them after every update for the rest
of my life.

------
ctack
In hindsight my desktop experience peaked about 10 years ago when I started
out as a dev using XFCE. The move away and subsequent desktops; Gnome, Mac,
Windows have not touched that golden age of window management.

~~~
Vinnl
Can't you just use Xfce again? You could still be riding that peak...

~~~
ctack
You're absolutely right. Have a company MBP for the time being but after this
I will absolutely be looking at Xfce again.

------
pjmlp
It is my current WM, uses C, but at least isn't as slow as GNOME with
JavaScript everywhere.

Thanks to Canonical's decision, I ended up migrating to XFCE, I was actually
quite happy with Unity before.

------
kazinator
> _Most components also received GObject Introspection support._

In case anyone doesn't know what this is. GI is a system for accompanying
system components (i.e. shared libraries) with XML meta-data (in separate
files) that describes their API's: types, functions, arguments, and argument
semantics (in/out pointers: who owns/allocates/frees, and whatnot).

Here is the significance: if the GI info for a component is correct, and if
you can parse it in your language, from that info you can generate accurate
FFI bindings, without manual work.

The accurate, detailed semantic information cannot be gleaned even if you
parse the C headers. Without something like GObject Introspection, you're
looking at a lot of manual work.

------
severine
I'd also like to mention the excellent community forum, with some of the most
helpful mods and fellow users in the FOSS landscape.

~~~
severine
Link: [https://forum.xfce.org/](https://forum.xfce.org/)

------
stcredzero
Xfce is my daily driver for cloud development. I use Xubuntu running in
VirtualBox on a Windows gaming laptop. (I know, I know, Oracle and all that!)
Running in seamless mode works quite well. Since I code in Golang, I don't
need the fastest machine around for fast compiles. Also, since I run ubuntu
VMs on AWS, I have nearly zero mismatches between my development environment
and deployment. I can even run my full IDE/debugger (I use Goland) in a
deployed environment for debugging.

Which brings me to a segue: This seems like a good place to ask what's the
lightest weight developer-cromulent environment possible that would support a
GUI? When I bring up an IntelliJ IDE on a VM, I see that I'm using just short
of 6.5 GB of disk. Most of that seems to be the OS, which at the moment is
Xubuntu. What's lighter weight, but not outdated and annoying? (When I
incorporate Docker, 6.5GB is going to be a bit heavyweight.)

Back in the Smalltalk days, the Visual Smalltalk image with some libraries
loaded could basically do the same thing as VNC, but with no OS dependencies
and with a much smaller footprint. People were already debugging server
deployments with a full IDE back in the early 2000's.

~~~
severine
It advertises itself as midweight, so of course you can find lighter
distros/DEs out there, but the snappiest desktop Linux I've used recently is
MX Linux, with comes with a very polished Xfce... Try it, it has a lot of pro-
user features!

Link: [https://mxlinux.org/current-release-
features/](https://mxlinux.org/current-release-features/)

------
squarefoot
Great news! XFCE still is my favorite desktop environment on normal PCs for
being the right balance between features and snappiness, although I tend to
use rox-filer rather than Thunar for operations on most used directories for
it being faster than Thunar (although Thunar did improve a lot). To do so I
keep those 4 or 5 icons on the panel each of which calls rox-filer and one of
the paths as the argument (example: "rox-filer Documents" as command with
"~/Documents" as working directory). This makes it much faster especially with
crowded dirs.

------
koyote
By far one of the best windows managers out there!

Looking forward to using the new version once it hits Xubuntu.

------
puzzlingcaptcha
I've been testing it since 4.13-pre1 and it's a solid (if slightly overdue)
release.

------
lol_jono
this is the one project where point releases actually mean something

------
Nursie
Nice! Congrats to the team and I look forward to trying it out later on.

XFCE has been my DE of choice since the Gnome 3 thing, and I love how it still
gives me the (relatively modest) options to arrange things as I like, without
attempting to re-educate me on how I should use my computer.

I first tried XFCE when I was looking for somethign lightweight to run on an
eeePc 901 (the first consumer atom machine, IIRC).

Keep up the good work :)

------
lemper
I'm quite excited with this news. If this release is nice enough, i think i
will migrate to xfce4 from kde plasma.

------
epberry
Hell yes. Fastest desktop in the land.

~~~
pjmlp
I bet twm or fvwm would be even faster. :)

~~~
gattilorenz
Short sad personal story.

I once entered in a class and heard the familiar Windows 95 startup sound.
Thinking it was a VM, I went and checked: a group of students were customizing
their Linux distribution to look like Win95.

I asked them if they knew fvwm95, the window manager of my youth; they didn't,
and I suddenly realized that a) it's not supported anymore b) they were all
born after Windows 95 was released c) I'm slowly getting old.

~~~
jraph
“What is this Xorg stuff you are talking about already? Is it like Wayland? Oh
you could run windows through the network? Nice! Wait, apps had to connect to
a socket to draw stuff? So weird. Wasn't it inefficient as hell to send whole
full screen windows at 100 Hz using this? Oh you could bypass this to have…
what you call it again? “Direct rendering”? Sounds like a horrible hack.”

~~~
qplex
I get you're joking and while it seems to be trendy to put Xorg down, the
reality is that it's actually the one that works.

Wayland is still very buggy and not at all ready for mainstream use.

I really don't get that Debian took it up as the default in Buster. Xwayland
sucks also, it breaks applications that run fine under X.org and very few
applications have native support for Wayland. </rant>

~~~
jraph
Well, yes, I'm still using Xorg too :-) Middle click paste is not yet
supported in KDE with Wayland [1], and it seems that KDE and Wayland don't
like suspend / resume on my machine, and recently (after a bios update ?),
adding a screen have made the system crash.

Besides, as far as I know, it is not possible to run Wayland apps on Android
(yet, but it seems that it is a hard problem [2]).

[1]
[https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907](https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907)

[2] [http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-
and...](http://www.jlekstrand.net/jason/projects/wayland/wayland-android/)

------
llcoolv
It sounds funny, but I waited for this for years :D Great news.

EDIT: The below text is actually fake news - a rebuild of appmenu/vala against
latest xfce seems to solve this.

However, if you are using valapanel/AppMenu, maybe you'd like to wait with the
upgrade until a compatible version is released[1].

1\. [https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-
appmenu/iss...](https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-
appmenu/issues/309)

------
Andrex
Is it normal for Xfce stable releases to take 4+ years? If I was a user
waiting for HiDPI support I probably would have just given up.

~~~
ivank
I've been using Xfce on hidpi since 2015 with just font scaling (using the DPI
setting in xfce4 settings/Xorg), and it has worked fine, other than the minor
issue of unscaled icons in the Window Buttons panel.

------
mmrezaie
wow! This was unexpected for me. Changes happen so rarely with xfce and for me
it is a good thing. But I wonder with all the optimizations going with gnome
will xfce be any lighter anymore? I mean the next gnome versions, even 3.32 is
resource hungry sometimes.

~~~
xendo
It's exactly because of these optimizations that Gnome is running slower. They
have so many things to optimize that optimizing one makes two slower -- it's a
vicious cycle.

~~~
baybal2
A story how early GTK3 was loosing so much to GTK2 even with first taking full
advantage of fast Cairo rendering.

GTK2 own renderers were managing to outdo external ones for many reasons

~~~
pferde
Not to mention that GTK3 is so over-optimized that it skips some important
calculations and sometimes ends up with certain widgets positioned
incorrectly. It's a mess.

------
Slackwise
Haven't used Xfce in a few years... is there finally a native Dock/SuperBar or
a proper plugin that isn't some hack that nests alternative docks inside a
panel?

~~~
severine
No, there isn't.

I guess you're alluding to DockbarX [1] and xfce4-dockbarx-plugin [2]. Those,
and specific dock apps (there are quite a few) are the alternatives as of
today.

[1] [https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx](https://github.com/M7S/dockbarx)

[2] [https://github.com/TiZ-EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin](https://github.com/TiZ-
EX1/xfce4-dockbarx-plugin)

------
bgorman
Amazing news. Unfortunately, without HiDPI support, most Linux DEs other than
Gnome and KDE have been unusable for years.

------
kbumsik
So is it fully migrated to Gtk3 now?

~~~
hpaavola
> In this 4.14 cycle the main goal was to port all core components to Gtk3
> (over Gtk2)

[https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000](https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1565568000)

So depending on the definition of "fully", that would be yes or no :) Some
details can be found here
[https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status](https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.14/roadmap#status)

------
Grollicus
Does that mean they'll start with Wayland support now?

~~~
severine
Someone is on it:

> Xfway Aims To Provide A Wayland Compositor Inspired By Xfce's Xfwm4 [1]

> _While it doesn 't appear to be an official part of Xfce at least at this
> time, Xfway is a Wayland compositor inspired by Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager.

Xfway was pointed out on the Wayland mailing list [2] for this Xfce window
manager inspired compositor.

The code appears to have started out from the Weston code-base but adding
support for Sway's WLROOTS among other changes inspired from Xfwm4.

Those wanting to give this Wayland compositor a whirl can find it on GitHub
[3]. _

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-
Xf...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfway-Xfce-
Xfwm4-Compositor)

[2] [https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2019-Ju...](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-
devel/2019-June/040668.html)

[3] [https://github.com/adlocode/xfway](https://github.com/adlocode/xfway)

------
s_m
I like xfce as much as the next casual Linux user, but how big a deal is it
_really_? How impactful on the world is the not-even-first-rank Linux desktop?
Is its usership even in the tens of thousands?

~~~
foresto
The stats at popcon.ubuntu.com show Thunar and XFWM installations at around a
quarter of a million. Of course, that only includes Ubuntu users who opted in
to stats tracking, so the global count would be higher.

~~~
vunie
How does this number relate to the number of KDE and LXQT/LXDE installations?

------
ivanstame
I just hope compositor works better now...

~~~
severine
One would hope so, as there are several mentions of the compositor in the
changelog:
[https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14](https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.14)

------
dinghy
I was waiting for this update!

------
hedora
No mention of systemd or logind! :-)

------
karatchov
I've tried using linux desktop for daily use multiple times. Xfce was usually
my choice for its simplicity and snappiness.

But, there was this 1 simple thing that made me lose faith in the linux
desktop:

For xfce's default folder viewer: Thunar, there was no possibility to adjust a
per-folder view settings. At first I did not beleive it, but there were
multiple discussion complaining about the same issue, including a 12-years old
bug
report([https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521](https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3521)
)

For a desktop manager endorsed by major distrubitions, I find this to be mind
blowing and enraging.

It gave me the feeling that linux desktop is an un-finisehd, unpolished, hacky
piece of software

~~~
aflag
So you used a somewhat obscure window manager, found a missing feature in the
folder viewer you were using and jumped to the conclusion that Linux has a
broken desktop experience?

~~~
karatchov
I used the default window manager that comes with xfce.

I tried setting up other window managers in xfce, and come to the conclusion
it is not straightfoward, and the integration with the rest of the system is
not perfect.

Also it was a feeling of imperfection that pushed me back (I am sure you can
setup the linux desktop for your liking if you tried enough)

~~~
jraph
I would not recommend Xfce to a newcomer, though I know some people who
started using Linux with it and kept it.

I think I would recommend Cinnamon (I don't like it personally but people seem
to like it) or Unity (especially since they came back to Gnome. This desktop
looks nice and easy to use).

I like Plasma 5, I find it's the best general purpose desktop environment
across all the major OSes, but somehow non-technical people don't seem to like
it so much.

All these observations are anecdotal and should be taken with a grain of salt.
I didn't conduct a study and the number of people is low.

There is a ongoing effort in the KDE community to improve usability and
usability and they are doing a great job. I recommend reading
[https://pointieststick.com/](https://pointieststick.com/)

~~~
karatchov
I tried multiple desktop managers. Everyone had its own perks.

Coming from windows, xfce felt the most natural for me.

I also considered implementing the feature, but it was out of my skill
set(probably doable with enough effort and time).

