Xfce 4.16pre2 Is Another Step Forward For This Open-Source Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce 4.16pre2 Is Another Step Forward For This Open-Source Desktop

Xfce 4.16 had been aiming to release in October~November as part of their new timed release approach but that has now slipped into the December~January time-frame but today saw the availability of the second pre-release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-4.16-pre2-Released

[enihcam]

xfce would be a perfect lightweight desktop suite if its video player could replace gstreamer dependency with a lightweight mpv. a lightweight pdf reader is also needed

[Brane215]

Without flawless Wayland support, that means nothing.
Also, XFCE has lost all of its edge over Enlightenment.
It's supposed to be lightweight, yet it needs so much of other infrastructure, gtk amongst other things.

Enlightenment is much better in that regard. But, its Wayland support is sh*t, unfortunately.
So, that leaves Sway for me.
After some learning curve, it looks like I'm gonna stay with Sway, even if/when other players master Wayland...

[bash2bash]

Every 6 months or so, I give Xfce a try... and it always fails in many aspects. Its stable and lightweight, but it truly looks and feels like a frankenstine of UI elements, unrefined and not what I'd call "production ready".

I can't help but compare with MATE and Cinnamon, two very stable, very reliable and quite refined desktop environments.

But, if I was given the choice between gnome3 and Xfce, then I'd pick Xfce, because gnome3's horrible Apple/Android interface is unusable.

I hope Xfce invests some dev time to make its UI better.

[birdie]

Without flawless Wayland support, that means nothing.
Also, XFCE has lost all of its edge over Enlightenment.
It's supposed to be lightweight, yet it needs so much of other infrastructure, gtk amongst other things.

Enlightenment is much better in that regard. But, its Wayland support is sh*t, unfortunately.
So, that leaves Sway for me.
After some learning curve, it looks like I'm gonna stay with Sway, even if/when other players master Wayland...

Yeah, exactly, the level of fanaticism on Phoronix has reached its peak: if something doesn't support Wayland it's just crap plain and simple. No one cares that Wayland is a hell to code for, and requires 10 times more effort and amount of code than X11. "You suck, guys! You don't support my favourite toy graphical protocol!"

Every 6 months or so, I give Xfce a try... and it always fails in many aspects. Its stable and lightweight, but it truly looks and feels like a frankenstine of UI elements, unrefined and not what I'd call "production ready".

I can't help but compare with MATE and Cinnamon, two very stable, very reliable and quite refined desktop environments.

But, if I was given the choice between gnome3 and Xfce, then I'd pick Xfce, because gnome3's horrible Apple/Android interface is unusable.

I hope Xfce invests some dev time to make its UI better.

I don't know man. Been running it as my only DE for the past seven years. I've got nothing to really complain about.

[birdie]

Just a datapoint: Wayland has 7% (80 users out of 1105 users) market share according to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

I guess it's too optimistic. It would be great if Michael ran a similar poll:

What graphical protocol are you using in your Linux distro?

• X.org/X11
• Wayland
• What comes by default with my distro
• No idea
• I don't use Linux

Unfortunately Michael has never run any polls.

[Volta]

Just a datapoint: Wayland has 7% (80 users out of 1105 users) market share according to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

It may be true for now, but X is legacy piece of software, so it will change sooner than later. I heard Ubuntu is going to switch to Wayland quite soon. Just noticed the link you have provided shows Arch based distributions to be most widely used. This means it tells nothing about reality.

[yokem55]

Why would it change? What exactly is significantly better in Wayland than in Xorg?

The bare metal xorg server simply isn't getting any new development. There's no one volunteering to work on it, and no one paying to develop it further. And it has some glaring functionality holes (multimotor vrr, mixed refresh rates and dpi, hdr) and performance problems (accelerated video decode in the browser) that can only really be fixed with largely different architecture. So, while xorg still has tons of users, the developers have all moved on to something that can solve those problems.

[Vistaus]

It may be true for now, but X is legacy piece of software, so it will change sooner than later. I heard Ubuntu is going to switch to Wayland quite soon. Just noticed the link you have provided shows Arch based distributions to be most widely used. This means it tells nothing about reality.

And other well-known distros too. Fedora has already switched, Deepin already has an experimental Wayland session which you can try out, the next major Red Hat version will also use Wayland by default, etc.

[Vistaus]

Why would it change? What exactly is significantly better in Wayland than in Xorg?

There are a few things better, but it's not so much that it's better, it's just that it's where development happens. Love it or hate it, but Xorg development has almost reached a point of non-development at this point. It's on life-support and waiting for the last person in charge to pull the plug.