
Xfce 4.14 released - signa11
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2019/08/21/xfce-4-14-released-yeah-like-a-week-ago/
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nominated1
XFCE is like the Goldilocks DE for me. Not too New Age (Gnome 3) not too much
(KDE) and not too little (tiling WM). It’s not the prettiest thing but if
something bothers me I know I can tweak it and be happy.

Thanks team for keeping some of us sane!!

~~~
stallmanite
You've perfectly articulated what I love about my current window manager
(LXDE). Going to give XFCE another spin based on your comment.

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karmakaze
I've used both Xfce and more recently tried LXDE. The latter was fine but more
minimal and a bit lighter on resources. Now with the upcoming LXQt it might be
a good time to switch back to Xfce to avoid the transitional pains.

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umvi
XFCE is by far my favorite desktop manager. Minimalist, snappy, clean (but not
ugly), and customizable.

I like it so much I run GalliumOS on all my Chromebooks and Xubuntu on all my
Desktop PCs/VMs.

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maceurt
Honestly I think it is the best desktop manager on the linux space, but
moving/resizing windows is still very painful compared to windows.

I binded the windows key and arrows to move windows, but it is still nowhere
near as powerful as window movement on windows 7, 8, or 10.

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RaleyField
> but moving/resizing windows is still very painful

Press alt and drag inside a window. Left mouse for moving, right for resizing.

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AstralStorm
I think GP was talking about limited snapping functionality not resize itself.

Those functions were expanded in Windows 10 lately too.

I haven't checked xfwm4 4.14 yet though. If these functions have been
enhanced, excellent! If not, it's worth a request.

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aptmiguk
Love Xfce. I've never been able to get into a decent workflow with Gnome or
KDE. Much lighter on resources it seems, too.

Congrats to the devs!

~~~
folkrav
I'm using bspwm on my personal machine and Xfce on my work machine. There's
some bug with bspwm and my work's EliteBook docking station that I haven't
figured out how to solve yet - something to do with how the internal screen
and VGA output are layout...

It's surprisingly complete and stable compared to how light it is. The
EliteBook w/ an Intel 520 can't run Gnome without major slowdowns. It has some
visually rougher edges compared to Gnome or KDE but it's perfectly doable to
make it very presentable, and doesn't take as much resources as both of them -
although KDE is not remotely as heavy as Gnome.

I really don't understand how Gnome became this monster of a thing it is
today.

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Data_Junkie
Well Miguel de Icaza started working for Microsoft, and Gnome immediately went
into the toilet. Totally unrelated I'm sure, but that did happen.

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grawprog
I don't use xfce any more, but back when I had a hard drive die I ended up
installing xubuntu partitioned across 4 USB flash drives(8-16GB each) so I
could keep running my laptop. It was one of my first forays into Linux and it
blew me away I could do such a thing and have a fairly fully featured desktop
environment run smoothly in that situation.

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chrisperkins
I have been using Xfce for 5 years and it never disappoints me. Light,
minimal, and very customizable. I hope it does not undergo radical change at
the cost of performance just for the sake of redesign that many other desktop
environments have gone through.

I still have 15 year old hardware lying around in my home and they come to a
stall while running some of the desktop environments that have modernized
themselves. But Xfce continues to run fine on them. It would be great if Xfce
remains the way it is for another 15 years so that my old hardware continues
to work for me.

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numlock86
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672890)

~~~
rom1v
But now, the "tour" is available:
[https://www.xfce.org/about/tour](https://www.xfce.org/about/tour) :)

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jtl999
How is XFCE these days compared to MATE?

(Although I use MATE with i3wm and panels disabled. I moved to MATE sometime
after GNOME 3 was released and I missed GNOME 2)

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gchamonlive
my opinion might be a little dated, because I am currently using deepin, and
before that I used xfce for about a year coming from MATE, so I believe the
last time I used MATE was 18 months ago.

At that time XFCE seemed to me like a bare bones MATE but in a good way. A
little less polish here and there, but overall the system seemed to work
better, that means less crashes and less fixing.

One thing I missed in XFCE is the way you can set panels in MATE. It has a lot
more placement control and if I remember correctly, it had more plugins and
they worked better. But apart from that, XFCE felt more solid and performant
than MATE.

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benj111
Crashes?

Last time I had a crash was.... Over a decade ago?

Not that I've used either of those desktops in years, but _any_ crashes from a
desktop seems like a major red flag.

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gchamonlive
the ecosystem of a desktop comprises the desktop itself and the bundle of
software. I can't recall exactly what went wrong, it might even be I messed up
something manually, but using MATE that time I remember things not being as
stable as when I moved to XFCE, for instance the display configuration app,
albeit uglier in XFCE, for me was much more stable.

But again I might have messed up configuration the first time around

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westmeal
XFCE4 is the bomb! I need to start reading the source to see how I can make my
own taskbar plugins...

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severine
[https://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins](https://wiki.xfce.org/dev/howto/panel_plugins)

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pcein
At work, I have to use a Windows laptop running stock Ubuntu 16.04 inside
Virtualbox. This VM used to behave in weird ways - network got disconnected
periodically (only a restart could bring it back), the whole thing would
freeze all of a sudden etc. Finally, I got fed up and switched to Xfce.
Absolutely no problems now. Thanks to the Xfce developers for a truly amazing
piece of software!

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arminiusreturns
XFCE for when I want the traditional gui DE (such as on my touch laptop
2-in-1), and Awesome the rest (most) of the time. XFCE is great and continues
to improve, highly recommended.

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stunt
I'm using Xfce with Xmonad. Enjoying how simple yet flexible (configuration
options) Xfce is.

