Xfce 4.12 Planned For Release In A Few Weeks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce 4.12 Planned For Release In A Few Weeks

It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize!..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-4.12-Finally-Weeks-Away

[enihcam]

Phoronix: Xfce 4.12 Planned For Release In A Few Weeks

It looks like the release of Xfce 4.12 is finally about to materialize!..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...lly-Weeks-Away

One of the reasons people still consider using xfce is because it builds upon gtk2. If it had to switch, Qt5 would be better than Gtk3. Also, there are many Qt5-based app already.

[peppercats]

One of the reasons people still consider using xfce is because it builds upon gtk2. If it had to switch, Qt5 would be better than Gtk3. Also, there are many Qt5-based app already.

LXQT is still very much alpha software and KDE is bloated.
Cinnamon is the only modern DE that actually feels polished - shame it hogs memory though.

[zanny]

One of the reasons people still consider using xfce is because it builds upon gtk2. If it had to switch, Qt5 would be better than Gtk3. Also, there are many Qt5-based app already.

This is why they really just need to get behind lxqt. The desktop is almost ready, but having the XFCE camp helping would be huge. Rather than duplicating effort and redoing everything for either gtk3 or qt5.

I mean if you go GTK3, what else are you going to do than something like Zorin where you just reskin Gnome Shell? A fork of everything like Cinnamon?

That actually makes me wonder how the Mint team are doing with all their forks of everything from Gnome. Are they still getting features and releases?

[halo9en]

A new version, good. Xfce is the only desktop environment that hasn't failed me.

[peppercats]

That actually makes me wonder how the Mint team are doing with all their forks of everything from Gnome. Are they still getting features and releases?

Cinnamon is the primary DE of Mint AFAIK but it's used a lot outside of mint(it has by far the best hidpi support on linux.) It's still very active.
Mate isn't even a mint project, and I think the next mate version is switching to GTK3 which is almost done.

Other than that, they really didn't fork as much as everyone makes it out to be, you just have things like nemo which are well maintained and IMO better than the original. I don't think mdm is still active.

I'm glad cinnamon was forked, it feels /nothing/ like GNOME anymore and more like an updated XFCE.

[emblemparade]

Thanks for the neutral reporting, Michael. I felt you were oddly negative about Xfce in the past.

Moving to GTK+3 is a good thing all around. Many apps have moved forward, so the core Xfce apps shouldn't linger too much. GTK+3 offers various programmatic goodies as well as a few new nice widgets, and of course additional and important support the backends of the coming future (Wayland and Mir).

I consider myself a "hardcore" GTK+ programmer, and I can tell you that from a dev perspective the shift from 2 to 3 is not that big. GTK+ is, despite the publicity, a very conservative project that maintains very good compatibility with old code. At its core, it is C code with a C ABI, even if you write in Vala or Genie. (There were big changes in usability between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, but the GTK+ API stayed fairly consistent -- in terms of dev API: the many theme changes for designers, I'm sure, were a nightmare, and still are). GTK+ never, thankfully, jumped the insane C++ bandwagon. GTK+ hasn't done as well as Qt in terms of crossplatform widget support, but from a binary perspective it's much more portable.

At this point, it's really only theming that would give users any indication that they are using GTK+3 vs. GTK+2 apps. As long as you use a theme that supports both APIs, your experience of both will be transparent. Xubuntu did a great job with its theme selection: I really can't tell which versions of GTK+ apps are using. Qt, too, supports a GTK+ compatible theme: it's slightly quirky in terms of toolbars and design plans, but otherwise Qt apps look and behave perfectly fine in Xubuntu.

Consolidation with the latest GTK+ API is just good practice. I doubt that anything significantly will change in Xfce in terms of features with 4.12. Actually, I hope not: Xfce is the best DE for me, and I can't think of any "innovations" that would make it better. Just bugfixes once in a while, a few better Settings utilities, and I'll be overjoyed.

Well, I'm slightly concerned about how Xfwm is ready for Wayland. Will it be possible to use plain Weston for Xfce? If not, what should we do? My thought is that in the next two years Wayland and Mir will become viable, and I want my favorite desktop to be ready for it. The shift to GTK+3 is important if only just because of this.

[kenjitamura]

LXQT is still very much alpha software and KDE is bloated.
Cinnamon is the only modern DE that actually feels polished - shame it hogs memory though.

I'm using LXQT right now, have no problems to report. Rather than alpha I'd call it a very stable beta that's almost ready for release. The LXQT 0.9 release is supposed to be out very soon and after 1.0 I think it'll be considered stable enough to ship with Lubuntu as default.

Being perfectly honest though the light-weight DE I most like is MATE. I just recently installed Linux Mint Mate edition on my folks all-in-one because Windows 8.1 was running really slow for them and they don't use any apps that would restrict them to sticking with windows. It really is a nice looking simple interface that feels really smooth on that low power AMD E-350. After Mate is ported to GTK3 I'd like to take it for a spin again and put it on my own desktop.

[Akka]

This is why they really just need to get behind lxqt. The desktop is almost ready, but having the XFCE camp helping would be huge. Rather than duplicating effort and redoing everything for either gtk3 or qt5.

I mean if you go GTK3, what else are you going to do than something like Zorin where you just reskin Gnome Shell? A fork of everything like Cinnamon?

That actually makes me wonder how the Mint team are doing with all their forks of everything from Gnome. Are they still getting features and releases?

Ehh what?
Its nothing special with gtk3. Its perfectly possible to write a standalone DE on it. Your post is the usual FUD.

[molekiller]

LXQT is still very much alpha software and KDE is bloated.
Cinnamon is the only modern DE that actually feels polished - shame it hogs memory though.

Kde 4.14 is miles more polished than Cinnamon... KDE can be as bloated as you want it to be, a minimal install does not take that many resources at all.