Xfce 4.14 Sees Its Long-Awaited Pre-Release

[boxie]

You have never used the xfce desktop, you can make panels freely and add what ever to them.

I have actually, in anger for more than a year, (1.12 release even too) - but that was many years ago now. I have since moved on. I found Unity limiting, XFCE primitive (not sure if there has been a paper cuts project for it, but it really does need it), gnome2 was alright, gnome3 is (still) jarring, cinnamon was good but plasma seems to be the flavour of the moment for me.

but hey, you gotta give em all a whirl and use them in anger to form a proper opinion.

[mrazster]

Speaking of trolls, take a look of your all messages, no sense at all. An example: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...95#post1094195

Stop..please, just stop !
I absolutely love xfce it has been my "goto" desktop since I first installed it when xubuntu had its first release.
I have since used xfce on almost all distros I've tried...to almost all my friends who want come over to linux I introduce them to xfce first.
Most of them are still there and loving and other have moved on and liked other DEs.
But I never act the way you do with your trolling and frankly, a very embarrassing way. You're making a fool out of your self and us who actually love xfce and want others to see it for the wonderful DE it is. You're not helping to "spread the word" you're making people hate instead.

SO PLEASE JUST STOP !!!

[xfcemint]

You're talking about time from login to DE though right? I haven't timed for over a year but, back then it seems that was around 5 second mark, I know there's been improvements in this area since, but probably right that it doesn't hit 2 seconds.
Is that an important metric for you when choosing a DE? Do you boot so frequently that a few extra seconds is a dealbreaker?

It is not a dealbreaker, but it is nice. I type my login and *poof* the Xfce desktop is up. Such a nice feeling. Especially on a laptop.

The actual time heavily depends on the storage device. On an SSD drive, KDE can almost make it in 2 seconds, but on a HDD it is a 20 second disaster. eMMC or USB stick is somewhere in between.

You're probably right? I don't run XFCE so I can't comment, I know that with KDE it's around the 450MB mark. There's also lighter-weight DEs than XFCE if this is a major priority for you, but for the same reasons a user might prefer KDE, I'd wager you'd not want to give up whatever benefits you enjoy from XFCE to use a DE that requires less memory?

The thing is that Xfce is guaranteed to work on low power / low memory hardware. Then I don't have to learn and setup two different desktops. Whatever device I use, I know that Xfce will work. I just copy my setings over and it is done. So convenient.

Hard to find a device with less than 1 GB RAM today. And even if you do, what's the point of running a desktop on such a device?

For a typical user, the difference between the two is minimal when actual usage of apps is taken into account.

I don't know about that. If you show me a Raspberry Pi running KDE, I'll believe it.

ODROID-N2 runs on ~5W, can be powered by a powerbank over USB, costs 2-3x(depending on model) of the RPi though. Can run KDE.

ODROID-N2 has 4 GB RAM. That is sufficient to run a Windows 10 desktop.

Also, the GPU on
ODROID-N2 is Mali-G52. Possibly the Panfrost GPU driver is in use, and that's why it can run KDE.

Sure it can, it works in VMs where it doesn't have proper GPU access and as such the compositor disables certain eyecandy.

I don't know. Xfce runs the same with or without a GPU.
It's possible that KDE can use MESA for software-only rendering, but that would be slow and annoying as hell.

You have a bias to Xfce and that's cool, no need to try come up with reasons to defend your choice.

Well, I like Xfce. Maybe it just suits my needs. I know KDE has more features than Xfce, but I never needed those extras. The features of Xfce are quite sufficient for my needs.

I somewhat dislike the window decorations for Xfce you get with Linux Mint. So I just edited them in a text editor. In a half an hour, I got what I wanted. It was so easy.

I don't like Gnome Shell, Gnome 3 or whatever it is called.

[tildearrow]

Genuine answer:
KDE cannot start in 2 seconds.

Is there any way we can "preload" KDE at boot time to make this statement false? I've tried cat'ting all KDE-required libs and assets to /dev/null to have them in the read cache but takes like 50 seconds to do so (but after that KDE boots in just 10 seconds). Then I've tried sorting the cat list by physical position in the disk, but it only brought a minor improvement.
Then I tried packing the asset/lib set to a tar, which is extracted to the root filesystem at boot (takes only 3-4 seconds), hoping that any overwritten files also go into the read cache, but sadly this is not the case. May somebody explain this?

KDE cannot use as little memory as Xfce.

Meaningful only in very old/low-end computers. Most of this memory usage can be attributed to Akonadi.

KDE cannot be used on a Raspbery Pi, or any other low-powered computer.

OK, I agree..................

KDE cannot work without a GPU accelerator.

Really? KWin has XRender and no-compositor modes which allow it to work without a graphics card.

[Buntolo]

Finally, now I hope they can start working for Wayland support. Xfce is the best dektop all around, apart from its look and the fact that it's slowly updated.

Yes, it's not nice-looking and they're VERY slow to update it, but after 2 years (and counting) of GNOME 3 on my home PC I don't care anymore about eyecandies and updates, if you've a bad experience.

I measure quality of software/hardware with a simple rule: ppm, profanities per minute, the higher the count, the worse is whatever I'm using.

[frank007]

In my opinion, Xfce didn't have to be ported to the Gtk3 libs; instead, the Xfce folks had to fork the Gtk2 libs.

[V10lator]

Just wait it to break because of constantly updating qt packages. No go when using a rolling release distribution.

I'm using LXQT on a rolling release distro since years and the only time it broke was when a brownout happened in the middle of an update. This interrupted update left different QT parts with different version numbers on disc so every QT app crashed. This has nothing to do with LXQT through, KDE (apps) crashed in the exact same way.

So LXQT breaking for you cause of other QT probs must be a bug of your distro. Maybe this is why you're the only one using it?

[frank007]

A DE is heavy or lite? It depends on the cpu usage at idle for me. 1 Gb of used ram and low cpu activity at idle is much better than 400 Mb of used ram and high cpu activity at idle in my opinion. So, what cpu activity Kde or Xfce or others have at idle?

[Aisyk]

I'm using XFCE for years, after testing Gnome, KDE, Pantheon.
Just one thing, XFCE developement is slow (too ?) but secure, and some features needs really to be implemented (like colord, vblank).

For me KDE is a good eyecandy DE, suitable for users who wants to. XFCE is fast, flexible, essential.

[veeableful]

I have never used XFCE on high DPI screen (which I assume it doesn’t do right now) so does anyone know if this release will make it usable on high DPI screen? Thanks!