Xfce 4.12 Planned For Release In A Few Weeks

[sgtGarcia]

That's how the users want it. There's no need to change something that works fine.

This is precisely the point of view that got us into the whole Unity/Gnome3/Metro mess. When it comes to modern DEs, stagnation is about the best thing that can happen to them. Xfce guys are smart enough to admit that DE layouts reached perfection about 10 years ago and all the convergence crap is nothing but going downhill in desktop usability and productivity.

Well You both are right & wrong at the same time.
I like XFCE or more likely standard desktop layout ( You know menu button, windows list, etc ), but there is a room for improvement in other areas.

Unity/Gnome3 - I really don't like it but for a lot of people it is:

That's how the users want it. There's no need to change something that works fine.

So You know: Stagnation NO, Stability YES

Maybe my stable PPA of LXQt is of interest for you? ppa:joern-schoenyan/lxqt

I will build latest packages for Vivid tomorrow including some metapackages. Not sure if I manage to create live isos, I have some problems with Ubiquity :-/

Definitely will look into. Thanks.

Well, lack of resources can lead to some stagnation but we should learn how to be productive without a fat money bag. Economical (financial in fact) crisis will show its real dimensions to us in the near future... XFce need not any big changes because of its fully functional state.

Well I think this is the biggest problem with a lot of free & open source programs/apps - lack of manpower, or to be more precise to many different apps doing the same with little to no differences :/

[timtas]

Glad to see

Fully agree that xfce is working so well that it doesn't need too many improvementd, but it still felt a bit strange to see nothing happening at all.
Thunar could well get some useful improvements, like mounting network shares directly from the fm. Switching to Gigolo for this works well, but still.

[waxhead]

I am totaly fine with it.

Xfce4 is nearly perfect, all we need is bugfixes. Not some fancy eyecandy that gets in your ....wait for it... eye!

[Steve DL]

Hi, Xfce developer here.

Yes, Xfce works well. It's pretty amazingly functional for most Linux users. Right now we have a pretty cool process for improving our core desktop experience -- we don't subject our users to silly experiments and we're slowly but steadily integrating usability research into Xfce's development. We have people who know how to manage releases (no joking), our Web presence, our servers, we finally have enough bug triagers. We have a core dev who started working on libinput support, and a bunch of C developers fixing bugs throughout and helping implementing the mad ideas of the design team.

But let's not kid ourselves, yes we need more people. Our current devs will be very busy working on the next big packages to come up (Libinput, Wayland, porting to a maintained toolkit) and the things we want to do (reworking session support, screen locking, our settings UIs, our global keyboard shortcut backend and a bunch of other things that will surely come up).

Lots of things we could improve on:
- connectivity with other devices
- proper accessibility support (we do need an expert for that)
- touch support (in a long, loooong time from now)
- updating our audio stack (mostly, merging existing patches and fixing a few UI glitches)
- security (sandboxing, 2-factor authentication, code testing process, vulnerability handling process)
- more panel plugins (e.g. recently used apps, pushbullet?, <insert what you're excited about here>)
- more panel plugin maintainers for the existing ones
- a continuous integration framework
- moar usability experts
- even moooaaar usability experts -- seriously, come and talk to me!

So, if you appreciate Xfce and want to show your appreciation, if you know how to write C and want more experience of working in a dev team (highschool/undergrad students wink wink), come and talk to us on #xfce-dev at Freenode IRC! We don't need money, we don't even need (much) praise. We need a bit of your time and coding skills to help us set the bar even higher for our competitors!

[duby229]

Hi, Xfce developer here.

Yes, Xfce works well. It's pretty amazingly functional for most Linux users. Right now we have a pretty cool process for improving our core desktop experience -- we don't subject our users to silly experiments and we're slowly but steadily integrating usability research into Xfce's development. We have people who know how to manage releases (no joking), our Web presence, our servers, we finally have enough bug triagers. We have a core dev who started working on libinput support, and a bunch of C developers fixing bugs throughout and helping implementing the mad ideas of the design team.

But let's not kid ourselves, yes we need more people. Our current devs will be very busy working on the next big packages to come up (Libinput, Wayland, porting to a maintained toolkit) and the things we want to do (reworking session support, screen locking, our settings UIs, our global keyboard shortcut backend and a bunch of other things that will surely come up).

Lots of things we could improve on:
- connectivity with other devices
- proper accessibility support (we do need an expert for that)
- touch support (in a long, loooong time from now)
- updating our audio stack (mostly, merging existing patches and fixing a few UI glitches)
- security (sandboxing, 2-factor authentication, code testing process, vulnerability handling process)
- more panel plugins (e.g. recently used apps, pushbullet?, <insert what you're excited about here>)
- more panel plugin maintainers for the existing ones
- a continuous integration framework
- moar usability experts
- even moooaaar usability experts -- seriously, come and talk to me!

So, if you appreciate Xfce and want to show your appreciation, if you know how to write C and want more experience of working in a dev team (highschool/undergrad students wink wink), come and talk to us on #xfce-dev at Freenode IRC! We don't need money, we don't even need (much) praise. We need a bit of your time and coding skills to help us set the bar even higher for our competitors!

If you read my earlier post, I'm concerned about GTK3 breaking themes again. Will the GTK3 release of xfce be versioned a new major release number?

The next time the GTK3 devs decide it's funny to watch their userbase squirm, I would rather stick to GTK2. With proper versioning it won't be a problem for those of us wanting to stick with GTK2 for a while longer. If you guys version it wrong though, it's going to make package management a pain in the ass.

Transitioning to GTK3 warrants a major version change.

[Steve DL]

If you read my earlier post, I'm concerned about GTK3 breaking themes again. Will the GTK3 release of xfce be versioned a new major release number?

The next time the GTK3 devs decide it's funny to watch their userbase squirm, I would rather stick to GTK2. With proper versioning it won't be a problem for those of us wanting to stick with GTK2 for a while longer. If you guys version it wrong though, it's going to make package management a pain in the ass.

Transitioning to GTK3 warrants a major version change.

I'm only speaking for myself here, and those decisions belong to the core devs, but I don't have the feeling that the Xfce team wants to rely on components that are not stable yet. Some individual apps are starting to add GTK+3 support, but I don't think any core Xfce module will be ported to GTK+3 in the immediate future. We wanted to have a GTK+3 theme, but the people who maintain our theme engine and theme decided it was still too early wrt. theme instability in GTK+3.

As for versioning... the problem is some projects we rely on will start expecting GTK+3/GNOME 3 stuff. GNOME changes the names of config files in GLib (such as mimeapps.list), changes FreeDesktop.org D-Bus interfaces (e.g. installing Nautilus on an org.freedesktop DBus interface and preventing Firefox and Dropbox users from opening their files in Thunar; changing the session management API in Glib which worked well with Xfce, and which we haven't caught up with yet), etc. So at some point third-parties will have to choose between supporting Xfce 4 and GNOME 3 (and the other competitors :-) ).

We stick to our habit of implementing cross-desktop standards and supporting a wide range of platforms by not jumping on new libraries too early, and with GNOME's more radical pace in recent years, it's become harder to find compromises and prevent GNOME apps from working poorly in Xfce. So I don't think there can be a working Xfce 4/GTK+2 alongside Xfce 5/GTK+3. Not because we don't want to but because changes in GNOME slowly break old code, and because the Xfce UX also depends on Xfce running newer apps properly, regardless of whether you or I like how these apps are written. Not blaming anyone here, and really not interested in DE flamewars, just stating that change happens and people will always forget, refuse or fail to implement retro-compatibility at some point in time.

[duby229]

I'm only speaking for myself here, and those decisions belong to the core devs, but I don't have the feeling that the Xfce team wants to rely on components that are not stable yet. Some individual apps are starting to add GTK+3 support, but I don't think any core Xfce module will be ported to GTK+3 in the immediate future. We wanted to have a GTK+3 theme, but the people who maintain our theme engine and theme decided it was still too early wrt. theme instability in GTK+3.

As for versioning... the problem is some projects we rely on will start expecting GTK+3/GNOME 3 stuff. GNOME changes the names of config files in GLib (such as mimeapps.list), changes FreeDesktop.org D-Bus interfaces (e.g. installing Nautilus on an org.freedesktop DBus interface and preventing Firefox and Dropbox users from opening their files in Thunar; changing the session management API in Glib which worked well with Xfce, and which we haven't caught up with yet), etc. So at some point third-parties will have to choose between supporting Xfce 4 and GNOME 3 (and the other competitors :-) ).

We stick to our habit of implementing cross-desktop standards and supporting a wide range of platforms by not jumping on new libraries too early, and with GNOME's more radical pace in recent years, it's become harder to find compromises and prevent GNOME apps from working poorly in Xfce. So I don't think there can be a working Xfce 4/GTK+2 alongside Xfce 5/GTK+3. Not because we don't want to but because changes in GNOME slowly break old code, and because the Xfce UX also depends on Xfce running newer apps properly, regardless of whether you or I like how these apps are written. Not blaming any one here, and really not interested in DE flamewars, just stating that change happens and people will always forget, refuse or fail to implement retro-compatibility at some point in time.

OK, thank you for your response. It's not what I wanted to hear, but at least you're honest.

Now I'm even more concerned than ever. I know it's inevitable that the GTK3 team will break something. They don't care when they break things. Moving forward with something just for the sake of moving forward with it, isn't usually a good idea. Every time a new version of GTK3 is released and themes break, or widget placements are off, or certain controls stop working, that's when people get pissed. And I really think the GTK3 dev team does it on purpose for the sole reason of trying to piss people off. Every time they break something it was planned. Every time they've broken something, they knew it before hand and did it knowingly.

I'm not happy with this move. I don't like GTK3.

[stqn]

OK, thank you for your response. It's not what I wanted to hear, but at least you're honest.

Well I think that Steve?s answer is a no-nonsense answer and he says he doesn?t want to jump on Gtk3 because it?s unstable which I completely agree with. Hopefully the Gnome devs will have fixed their broken scrollbars and stopped breaking the themes by the time Xfce moves to Gtk3, if ever.

Otherwise I suppose I?ll have to try Enlightenment or LXQT or something? :-/

[duby229]

The sad part is, I'm half convinced the GTK3 team get together on beer night just for the only reason to hash up new ways to piss people off. I can imagine the mailing list poster getting devs excited about thinking up new ways to break things that they can discuss on beer night.

[Steve DL]

The sad part is, I'm half convinced the GTK3 team get together on beer night just for the only reason to hash up new ways to piss people off. I can imagine the mailing list poster getting devs excited about thinking up new ways to break things that they can discuss on beer night.

Why would you assume the worst out of them? Most people I talk to in the GNOME ecosystem are mindful and helpful. I like the new GTK+3 widgets. I understand the drive for identity/change of GNOME and why they want to import good ideas from mobile UX into the desktop. I'm not a GNOME or Red Hat insider so I can't judge why they let their code break so often. I assume they are under big economic pressure to deliver mobile/convergent products for their clients, and if we're lucky enough to be writing Xfce for our own enjoyment, we also have no money and no wo/manpower :-) So I don't know what strategy is best for an individual project. I can tell though that I personally prefer releasing rarely, but releasing things that are finished. I guess that's why I didn't release new software in the past few years