Xfce 4.16 Should Be Out Next Year But Without GTK4 Or Wayland

[ssokolow]

X11 only has a "concept of what it's drawing" (which by the way is better or worse, depending on the situation) if the app uses Xlib, XtIntrinsics etc. Virtually all modern apps are based on GTK or Qt with client based rendering. Locally they use the GPU and when ran remotely, they essentially just push a video stream across the network, just like VNC. In other words switching to RDP and Wayland will make zero difference in that regard.

Exactly. All the jumping from company-named domain to company-named domain has made a mess of its PageRank score, if it's even still up, but I remember the blog post when a Qt 4 update switched to reinventing the widget tree client-side and just presenting pre-composed window contents to X11 as one giant pixmap filling the top-level window.

It was a "We've given you more than enough time. Now we're going to fix it" response to a laundry list of problems.

Some of them were rooted in X11 not synchronizing with the application for what a newly resized window should look like, so you'd see flickers of messed-up rendering as the toolkit raced with X to get the layout revised before the next scan-out. Hence "every frame is perfect" being one of the design statements for Wayland.

Others were related to the X11 event system not supporting transforms. Reinventing everything below the level of top-level window is what allows Qt to implement things like clicking on transformed buttons.

(And that support for transforms was one of the big things that GTK+ users lamented Qt being ahead of them on at the time.)

[bkor]

IIt is similar in design to Microsoft RDP and in this day and age of cloud computing it is the future of all GUI systems.
[..]
Can't remember what that technology is called. I think it is X11 and you can access it using the modern GUI viewer app called Xwayland.

RDP works pretty well. X11 for me was slow even using it on a local 100Mbit/s network. IMO X11 is nothing like RDP, that's at least very usable across slow links.

[muncrief]

Well, it took 6 years just to get my fantastically beautiful custom GTK2 , and then GTK3, theme to work perfectly, so I'm not looking forward to doing it all over again for GTK4 anyway.

In any case GTK4 and Wayland are works in progress and I don't see the need for the frustration of either beta products right now.

So as far as I'm concerned XFCE still rules!

[jo-erlend]

RDP works pretty well. X11 for me was slow even using it on a local 100Mbit/s network. IMO X11 is nothing like RDP, that's at least very usable across slow links.

Yes, native X11 is unusable over WAN, but that's what NX is for. X2go, for instance, can provide a very fast desktop experience over very high-latency, low-bandwidth links.

[ermo]

I'm pretty pleased with Xfce-4.14 so far. Would definitely recommend it.

I use it with the (IMHO excellent) Plano-theme and have replaced the default Xfce application menu with the lovely xfce4-whisker-menu-plugin.

[debiangamer]

Xfce 4.14 is aivailable in Debian now.

https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=sid&keywords=xfce4

[jacob]

I wonder what debianxfce *cough* I mean debiangamer thinks about this

debianxfce doesn't think.

[debiangamer]

Originally posted by retardxfce View Post

I wonder what debianxfce *cough* I mean debiangamer thinks about this

debianxfce doesn't think.

Michael, when you ban these two and other that do not respect good behavior? You banned me because of criticizing IBM software and let users like these two continue insulting other users.

[ermo]

Michael, when you ban these two and other that do not respect good behavior? You banned me because of criticizing IBM software and let users like these two continue insulting other users.

In fairness, it is my impression that he banned you for continually being a nuisance in the eyes of a not insignificant amount of members? Perhaps the members of this forum haven't forgotten your posting history despite your recent good behaviour?

[Vistaus]

Wait, wut? Next year already? Diehard Xfce fans won't like that as they swear that a release every 5 years or so is better than a shiny new one every year...