Xfdesktop 4.13.1 Released, Another Step Towards Xfce 4.14

[waxhead]

Ahem, with a 6600, 3GB of RAM and SSDs you could use any DE and it would not get in the way either.

For "old hardware" people usually talk about obsolete pre-Core stuff, less than 2GB of RAM and oldish Sata hard drives.

True, but I use XFCE on a lot older hardware than that and I can have a consistent experience across my machines

[grok]

Mate is good on low hardware too, only mate-system-monitor is tremendously CPU hungry, I'm talking 10% to 20% CPU use or more depending on what tab you look at - last I remember, xfce4-taskmanager was very CPU hungry too. I wonder why the "task managers" are so bad. Perhaps Windows has better hooks, since the Windows NT 4.0/2000/XP/7 task manager had no issue.

There's some "fake" slowness if you run Mate on Linux Mint : the Mint menu takes long to open, because it initializes/caches stuff. But that's only the first time you open it (whether immediately after boot, or a day after you booted, doesn't matter)

Both Mate and XFCE were not great with dual monitors (different issues) but with recent Mate (1.16 or 1.18) or XFCE 4.14 this might be better (I'm on single for now). Things can be a bit silly when you want the primary monitor on the right, that kind of stuff. Awareness of mis-matched height is among the silly things. Both desktops are moving a bit slow but are very much alive and small things get fixed or improved regularly, that's encouraging.

[grok]

Only of interest to those who have substituted religious zealotry with distribution and DE zealotry, I wonder who that could be ?

Are you saying that perhaps because you use a panel on the top? Panel on top is evil, everyone knows it goes on the bottom. Dual panel (top and bottom) is acceptable, since the task switcher goes on the bottom.
Top panel and bottom dock is for weak minds with Apple envy.

[timtas]

People use Xfce because it is freely configurable, works, boots and shutdowns fast. No cpu or ssd is enough fast for win10, gnome3 and kde. That is called wintel conspiracy, force people to buy new hardware to run new software.

I heard from credible sources that this evil conspiracy actually dates back at least to the old Egyptians. In any case it was neither Intel's or Microsoft's invention, as this rule already applied to IBM mainframe HW / SW in the early nineties. And it also always and still applies to the Apple world. Blame capitalism.

[gilboa]

While my daily drivers is usually KDE, I've used XFCE extensively on low-end machines and VMs.
However, in the last couple of month I switched these machines to mate (from XFCE), as it seem to behave better in VMs and has somewhat better configuration options. (E.g. panel configuration, applets, desktop icons, etc).
I truly hope XFCE development will pick up and close the gaps.

- Gilboa