Xfce 4.12 Released After Nearly Three Years Of Work

[ermo]

@Steve DL:

Congrats on shipping 4.12 -- I bet you'll be making a lot of people happy and comfortable once they begin using it.

Can you share any details about the plans for Thunar going forward?

I'm just an audience of one, but one of the things that actively drove me to Cinnamon (and later Gnome 3.14 w/gnome-tweak-tool and the "open terminal here" extension) from Xfce 4.10 was that Thunar just didn't offer a consistent "Open in Terminal" feature. I even filed a bug (link) with pretty pictures and all.

Other than that, I have to say that Xfce 4.10 offered yours truly a very welcome shelter from the DE upheaval in Linux land. Much appreciated mate.

[stqn]

? Some good news (intel pstate support, thunar improvements), some bad news (stuff using Gtk3, no more volume/mixer), a lot a things that I don?t care about, and none of the fixes I would have liked to see (but I haven?t bothered with bug reports). Hopefully my system will still be usable after the next Arch update.

[Steve DL]

So, in your opinion X11 is not broken?
Some very bright people went on record to disagree with that.
Not only carries X11 lots of bloat, it's insecure beyond repair. Yet Xfce sticks with X11.

Nobody said that. Xfce will migrate when Wayland is ready enough. That means, when people will have vaguely agreed on how to implement a fucking fullscreen protocol and clipboard instead of all doing it their own way, when feature parity does not require X11 libraries, when GNOME has realised they do need to discuss graphic stack permissions for their sandbox, when KDE, GNOME and Unity agree on how permissions need to be advertised and handled between clients so people don't end up writing Mir-only or Wayland-only apps, etc.

We've still a long way to go, and there's no hurry.

LXQt has the same target audience as Xfce

Completely so fucking wrong. LXDE's marketing strategy is "we're lighter than everyone else". Our marketing strategy is "we're sufficiently light, simple, dependable and flexible for your needs". We do not have the same users. Xfce users talk about how they antagonise KDE or GNOME. Newcomers ask us how to run their KDE or GNOME apps. Not LXDE.

and unlike Xfce they have an actual Wayland migration strategy. AFAIK almost everything is already in place: The desktop?s migration to Qt5 is done and Openbox is on the verge of being thrown out and replaced by a slimmed-down KWin5 variant.

That's a "we don't have the manpower to do everything so let's let KDE do it" strategy. We'll do almost exactly the same, s/KDE/GNOME/. Most work on Wayland is in GTK+. The only difficulties for us are re-building xfwm and building whatever methods and protocols we need to get panels (since Shell allegedly does not actually have a separate panel). That really must be the end of the world, wow. We're never gonna get past that. Wow. As far as the real piece of work is concerned (managing client permissions), no work has been done by anyone ever, and the only people who're uninterested in X-DE work on that topic are (or rather is) GNOME Shell, because they know better than anyone else and will pull some rabbit out of their magic hat in due time.

Now since you think you know the topic so well, do enlighten us and do explain me why GNOME Shell or KWin have solved all the problems that justified a migration away from X11, just so we can see if you even understand the topic.

[AJSB]

+1, completely agree with that.

+1

I got tired long ago of "exciting" KDE, GNOME,Unity, etc. and all other....well, to me, in a single word, GARBAGE.
IMHO of course, YMMV.

XFCE is the BEST LINUX DE, again, IMHO, YMMV.

[SystemCrasher]

Xfce ftw

Nothing is exciting about those tiny features, especially not for three years of development.

That's what I like about XFCE. Still some sane and usable DE in this crazy world.

- There was KDE4. And Kool DE turned onto some awful overgrown monster which attempts to solve all kinds of problems, half of which do not really exist in first place. They created universal databases for PIM/email/etc. And there are only one IM and one e-mail program on whole planet using this "universal" mega-service. Yet there're huge MySQL daemon and so on. So it seems user should be hardcore DBA, etc?! Not to mention plasmoids are slow and completely weird. Say, if I would use notebook's touchpad, I'm doomed to connect some wrong access points before being able to select one I really want, thanks to awful design of networking plasmoid. It worked so nice in KDE3 and some early KDE4, but for some reasons it was too good to stay as is. So they added "exciting" plasmoids. I'm so excited when I struggle to connect that wireless AP, yikes!

- Then there was gnome3. Gnome2's most annoying problem was lack of settings. Yet, gnome3 has been debilitated even further. Sure, they target dullards and mental defectives. But I'm not in mood to use interfaces for retards where they do not dare to place more than 2 buttons in same window and killed almost all tunables so I can't even get my notebook shut down in way I would like. Then gnome UI also seems to be crippled in wish to make it suitable for tablets. While I'm okay with tablet devices on their own, I'm not okay about turning my 30" screen into tablet, sorry. And it's not like if there were any gnome based tablets. What a waste of development resources.

And then XFCE... its like breath of air in this crazy world. No tablets idiocy. No dullard-oriented interfaces. No builtin fidgets-midgets-plasmoids-or-how-they-call-this-useless-slow-and-bugged-crap, no super-duper database engines worth of hiring couple DBAs. Just some small and neat DE. Proven classic. Efficient and even "better than Gnome 3" in terms of customizability while being far more lightweight than Gnome. That's what I want to see in my DE. Go to hell with all these "exciting" features like builtin enterprise-grade databases and inefficient tablet UIs on my desktop.

[Awesomeness]

You do realize you are trolling an Xfce developer?

The only guy trolling is the Xfce d̶e̶v̶e̶l̶o̶p̶e̶r̶ hospice worker telling the friends and family of a terminally ill patient that he?ll be fine?

if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

So, in your opinion X11 is not broken?
Some very bright people went on record to disagree with that.
Not only carries X11 lots of bloat, it's insecure beyond repair. Yet Xfce sticks with X11.

LXQt has the same target audience as Xfce and unlike Xfce they have an actual Wayland migration strategy. AFAIK almost everything is already in place: The desktop?s migration to Qt5 is done and Openbox is on the verge of being thrown out and replaced by a slimmed-down KWin5 variant.

And you, the all-around Phoronix troll, surely understand the dynamics of a team you know nothing about better than its members.

So tell me: What?s Xfce?s Wayland migration strategy? When will there be a full port?
Or even better: Instead of telling just me, why don't you blog about it and add some content to http://xfce.org/about/news ?

[cocklover]

It's more about the learnability here. We pay attention to when people tell us they're confused by a UI, and rethink it. We still have work to do (and some big UI evaluation tasks coming, which I may try to sneak into 4.14 but most likely will need to wait for a feature-release), but Xfce *is* easy to learn to use. It doesn't get in the way of your apps.

Yes is easy. But most of desktop are. I just saying that Ubuntu LTS and debian stable use a especific desktop version (xfce,lxde,unity,kde,etc) so you won't note desktop changes meanwhile you don't update the distro. Even if you update the distro at least on Unity and KDE there isn't anything new or confusing(at least from 4.4 to kde 4.14, and ubuntu 12.04 to 14.10). More important for the "stability" ("for let me do my work") is related to other packages, core and cli packages, mostly unmaintained, horphans, outdated, untested on every distro, but you can use PPA from project maintainers to get a bit of stability.

[Steve DL]

If I wanted an "exciting" desktop experience I would not be using Xfce. I would be frustrated with the "exciting" experimentation of GNOME 3, KDE, Unity, etc. Some of us have work to do, we don't have time for excitement.

Thank you to the entire Xfce "team"! (Loosely speaking: there are quite a few peripheral contributors from upstream and downstream) Thank you for making software that just works, works well, is reliable, familiar, minimal, and yet has an excellent reach of features.

*cracks opens a bottle of champagne -- a few of 4.12's features will be immediately useful to us*

I run a medium-large organization based on Xubuntu (over LTSP) and am, personally, very grateful for your work. Our users never complain -- and that silence is pure gold. We don't have time or money to train them, and with Xfce we don't have to. They understand the basic paradigms of the "computers" (in our setup, they are X terminals) and are able to do their everyday work. That, to me, is worth infinitely more than "excitement."

(Thank you, also, to those who work on "exciting" cutting-edge experimental desktops. Eventually, I do believe your work will result in something better than the current clunky taskbar+start-menu+windows paradigm. It hasn't so far, but there is much promise among your diverse approaches. I watch your advances closely and am cheering from the sidelines. Thank you!)

Thanks for sharing this! Actually, I'd like for testimonies like yours to be visible on our website/PR materials for prospective users who are hesitating between Xfce and something. Can I contact you in private?

[Steve DL]

But if you use ubuntu LTS or debian stable you will get a "stable" experience anyways with any DE. If you install Arch the DE is updated too but not so much as the other packages. In my opinion there isn't a stable experience on Linux distros and the desktop while is important most of the time is irrelevent to the stable experience at least on workstations, while you can go for Debian Stable Or Ubuntu LTS, the Repos freezed included broken and unmauntained packages of important packages not related with DE. I must use a PPA for Netbeans, PPA for Mono, PPA for Gambas, PPA for Glib, and so on.

It's more about the learnability here. We pay attention to when people tell us they're confused by a UI, and rethink it. We still have work to do (and some big UI evaluation tasks coming, which I may try to sneak into 4.14 but most likely will need to wait for a feature-release), but Xfce *is* easy to learn to use. It doesn't get in the way of your apps.

[Steve DL]

Don't be funny. It's more likely this is the last Xfce release ever.

And you, the all-around Phoronix troll, surely understand the dynamics of a team you know nothing about better than its members.