Xfce 4.16 Released With Numerous Improvements To This Lightweight GTK3 Desktop

[Paradigm Shifter]

Looks pretty good.

I find it vaguely amusing that now about the only file manager that can't pause file coping is the one I use... Nemo... and it's a feature I'd like.

[ed31337]

I've been using Xfce 4.16pre1 on my Raspberry Pi 4 for a while now. I really love the panel. Very snappy and not heavy on memory usage, plus very functional, configurable and great looking. It's the best!

The rest of xfce, however is just okay...

The window manager, while not bad, does have minor limitations. Moving a window around seems to freeze screen updates of all the other windows until you finish moving your window. Alt-Tab switching between applications highlights each window as you tab through, but unfortunately does not bring the occluded window contents forward nor paints it like Windows or mutter does. Not a huge deal, but ugly. The window borders are too thick, wasting screen real estate in my opinion. You can fix that by editing theme files, but none of the provided themes provide satisfactorily thin window borders by default.

The desktop manager (xfdesktop) is okay, but it does use up a bit of memory that I'd rather not spend. I don't really like having a pile of icons inaccessibly hiding down below all my windows anyway. I can more easily just use the panel to start apps. I disabled xfdesktop on my computer and am much happier about the memory savings. I don't miss its functionality at all.

The file manager (thunar) is close to being good enough, but it's slightly inferior to Nemo, so I disabled it. This also let me disable the thumbnails service, which I really don't like taking up memory.

[kpedersen]

Guest Wayland is a protocol. No more. No less.

That is very true. Part of Wayland's sole goal is to provide a nice backend protocol for an Xserver. So really Xfce doesn't really need to do anything for Wayland users to be able to use it.

[Hans Bull]

Those gnome3-like screenshots confirm that it was a good choice to switch from xfce to KDE two years ago.

[Mez']

Seems nice and all. I don't use it but I'm glad it exists to offer an alternative. Someday, I might have the need for it.

That being said, I don't understand the use of that cyan/turquoise theme color. I know tastes and colors, blah blah, it's subjective yet as for pink it's the furthest from one-size-fits-all you can find, and to me it feels a bit cheap and childish. KDE also used it for a long time with the same feeling. Enough to keep me away from it.
Or maybe as it is a feminine color, they are trying to target women a bit more with that color. Then I'm all for it if it's an attempt at luring some women into the geek side.

It's probably easy to change as well, and hopefully distros would ship it with more pro/classy looking theme colors.

Sorry for that rant. Aside from that, they seem to do a very good job given the smaller size of the project compared to the usual juggernauts (Gnome and KDE mostly). 15 years ago, they were the 3rd DE in terms of use, nowadays with Mate, Cinnamon or Budgie, it's harder to say. But they seem to have dismantled LXDE, who lost a lot of popularity ever since.

[Mez']

They should just use Mutter. In fact all GTK-based projects should swiftly switch over to Mutter. Collaborate with the Gnome people to make it happen. The single largest threat for the success of Wayland is fragmentation and half-assed compositor implementations, which we must avoid by any means necessary.

I traced the dependencies for Mutter on Arch via its native package manager. It's got two gnome-prefixed deps: gnome-desktop and gnome-settings-daemon. The first package seems to be merely a meta package for some generic stuff not actually strictly Gnome-specific, but the gnome-settings-daemon package seems problematic. While it's got minimal Gnome bindings, too, it loads quite a bunch of random crap such as a library for accessing weather information...

Maybe these dependencies can be gotten rid of via compilation options, I don't know, but does not seem like a major task for refactoring stuff to make Mutter a generic, desktop-agnostic service.

No, they shouldn't. In fact, none of them should. The mindset behind Mutter is the same as behind Gnome. They don't accept design ideas, they accept contributions only if it fits their narrow views. That's nowhere near the idea of collaboration.

In fact, I read Budgie will also likely move away from Mutter. And that's a fantastic thing. Then they won't be stuck by the limited mindset.
I would probably use another compositor on Gnome if we could pick them with our DE.

[szymon_g]

Does it work with tracker (pref. V3)? I do kinda fancy it's features

[Sin2x]

These gnome-esque aesthetic developments make me consider switching to LXQt or IceWM. It was a good ride but everything comes to an end.

[billyswong]

P.S. I think it's wrong to talk about "compositors" when talking about implementing the core functionality for a desktop environment on Wayland. Compositors don't do drag 'n' drop, they don't do clipboards, they fucking don't do screen recording. Maybe window managers do that. The problem is that people *think* compositors should do that, because they suck at software design and cannot come up with a viable solution where a compositor only does compositing and not sound management and clipboards.

People with mindset like this aren't much better at their jobs than the folks who had a god damn web browser built into an OS kernel some 20 years back.

Back then the NT4.0 days, Microsoft explicitly moved GDI, their UI drawing interface *from* user space *to* kernel space. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/pre...(v=technet.10) It is under the name of "performance". While it makes no sense in year 2020 to put stuff like GTK or Qt into kernel, at that time I am sure it makes a lot of sense to them to put HTML engine into kernel too, as HTML is in some sense just another UI drawing interface.

[jo-erlend]

But i thought Wayland was complete? According to herzian law? You know *complete*, production ready, X drop in replacement.

Wait, weren't those all the things X was doing for me? So what does wayland DO then?

Wayland is a protocol, not a display server. If you want a replacement for Xorg, then you may try Mir.