Fedora 24 Will Ship With Linux 4.5 Kernel, Linux 4.6 To Be Offered As Update

[tessio]

Let's give this a bit of context: I loved KDE3. I now love XFCE. They're both environments that let you do what needs to be done, and don't get in the way. I like the idea behind KDE 4 and 5, but I find the execution to be subpar.

That said, XFCE development proceeds at a glacial pace. True, they don't subscribe to the "move fast and break things" school of thought, and I really like that, but migration to GTK3 for wayland support has been going for a long while, and is nowhere near finished. Stuff is mostly bug free, but when you find a bug/annoying "feature", you will have to live with it for a few years.

Constant releases (not to be confused with constant development) and software quality are only weakly correlated. Constant releases could mean constant bug fixes, or constant introduction of half-baked "new features" that are buggy and unfinished.

Mate is the best of both worlds. Constantly developed, and very stable. I really think Mate and XFCE should merge.

[Duve]

What I have read from Xfce developers, they have no plans port to wayland because it is a big job. There is no reason, Xfce is light and fast with X in low end devices like 800Mhz P III , I have tested. Gnome and Kde needs wayland more. It easier to blame that X slows when gnome and kde architecture is resource hungry. And X is not dissapearing any soon, there are thousands of apps that needs to be ported, xorg writes.

Do not fixit, if it is not broken.Xfce is not broken, gnome and kde are.

If it is a matter of resources, I get it but time isn't on their side.... The truth is that X11 has been needing a replacement for a while for a multitude of reasons, and now that Wayland has stabilized there are no more excuses about porting to it. Mate has begun the task of rebuilding in GTK+ 3 because of Wayland, so has Cinnamon, Gnome and KDE are much father along in there ports (Gnome is nearly finished at the time of writing), Enlightenment is complete and runs rather fast over it.

While X11 isn't disappearing (and XWayland will always remain as a compatibility layer for applications), it will very likely be forced into maintenance mode. Once Gnome and KDE have finished there ports, there will likely be a shift in focus on from X11 to Wayland-core and Wayland-protocols... I really don't see feature development on X11 in five years time (maybe longer) once that shift has taken place. I don't think that it would be wise of Xfce to simply allow itself to be over looked. Xfce is a rather good Desktop, it would be a disservice to it's users to delay the transition any more than it's developers have already done.

While Gnome and KDE both have their issues... I would be hard press to call them broken. They have been planing this transition for a while and have put in the hard work to get it done, so what is Xfce's plan? Because to do nothing isn't an option.

[Ericg]

hmm with what do you compare it, its 1mio times better then the 10 million ppas you have to fiddle into your config in ubuntu. I think RPMFusion is one of the best unofficial package system of any distribution.

Could you argue why it is bad, when it could not work better in any way on my machines?

It's not that it's BAD-- It's just a little bit of a mess right now. Supporting new Fedora releases is still lagging behind by anywhere from a month to three months-- despite the fact that they have the entire release cycle to be working on it. Last I heard their big infrastructure switchover still wasn't complete and that was causing them no amount of grief, which further delays things.

[Vyrlokar]

What I have read from Xfce developers, they have no plans port to wayland because it is a big job. There is no reason, Xfce is light and fast with X in low end devices like 800Mhz P III , I have tested. Gnome and Kde needs wayland more. It easier to blame that X slows when gnome and kde architecture is resource hungry. And X is not dissapearing any soon, there are thousands of apps that needs to be ported, xorg writes.

Do not fixit, if it is not broken.Xfce is not broken, gnome and kde are.

Indeed, Xfce is wonderful. It does all the right things I need. However, once the transition to Wayland happens, I'll fear I'll need to change DE, and change the DE of all the computer I administer at work. None of them care about rethinking the desktop metaphor. Xfce is wonderful for both high end and low end devices.

As for wayland, I though it actually would work even better on old devices, since it would have less overhead than X...