I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.
I want to like KDE, but it's just too unreliable for me. My last foray was about a year or two ago, I had to stop using it because an update something in KDE's power management broke and my laptop no longer reliably suspended when the battery was low (manually triggered suspends still worked fine.) I've been repeatedly having experiences like this with KDE, each time I fall back on LXQt with kwin and everything looks a bit uglier but just simply works.
I don't know what's going on in KDE, but I assume they've got too many software architects with their heads in the clouds, designing a byzantine mess of abstraction and indirection until even they lose track of where in the code the functionality actually lives. That's all just my assumption though, all I really know is that basic features keep breaking between releases.
I had a similar experience. I only moved from xfce when my nvidia board kept killing my X session in creative ways. I'm pleasantly satisfied with kde, but I only have high praise for xfce usability.
KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), far better than the contemporaneous Windows XP or Mac OS X, while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage (despite having waited to make the transition to KDE 4 until it was claimed that all its initial bugs had been solved; when I tried it there were no bug problems, only bad design choices that could not be altered in any way).
For a few years I had kept the last KDE 3.5, but eventually I grew tired of solving compatibility problems with newer programs and I switched to XFCE.
I am still using it because I have never seen any reason to use anything else. There are a few KDE or Gnome applications that I use (for instance Okular or Kate), but I have not encountered yet any compatibility problem with them, so I have no need for one of the more bloated environment systems.
I have been using Linux on a variety of laptops and desktops, all with XFCE and without problems. XFCE does not do much, but I do not want it to do more, it allows my GUIs to be beautiful and to reach maximum speed and it has decent customization facilities, which is very important for me, as I have never encountered any desktop environment where I can be content with its default configuration.
Whenever I happen to temporarily use some Windows version for some work-related activity, I immediately feel constrained in a straitjacket by the rigidity of the desktop environment, which does not allow me to configure it in a way that would please me and would not interfere with my work.
On my main desktop, and also on my mobile workstation laptop, I have used only NVIDIA GPUs for the last 20 years and I have never encountered even the slightest problem with them, at least not with XFCE, so I am always surprised when other users mention such problems, like another poster near this message.
Perhaps my lack of problems with NVIDIA may be explained by the fact that I am using Gentoo, so I always have up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, while the users of other distributions mention having some problems with updating the drivers.
Only in my latest desktop, which was assembled this summer, I have installed an Intel Battlemage GPU, instead of an NVIDIA GPU, because the Intel GPU has increased its FP64 throughput, while the NVIDIA GPUs have decreased their FP64 throughput. Thus I hope that Intel will not abandon the GPU market, even if the intentions of their current CEO are extremely nebulous.
As an example of some very simple customizations, which are trivial on XFCE but surprisingly difficult on other desktop environments, I use a desktop with a completely blank, neutral grey background, without icons or any other visual clutter. I launch applications from a menu accessed with a right mouse click or with CTRL-ESC, and I have an auto-hiding taskbar for minimized applications and for a very small number of utilities, e.g. a clock/calendar and a clipboard manager. A few frequently used applications are bound to hot keys.
I've been using XFCE for a long time now. I often give GNOME and KDE Plasma a try, but I have to tweak GNOME so much to make it usable, and KDE Plasma keeps crashing and has weird issues (Steam friends list being delayed for example), which just got worse when they switched to Wayland. I really do feel like XFCE on x11 is the logical choice, it "just works" and every app runs well (Discord has broken hotkeys on Wayland), it's stable, and whenever people see my XFCE setup they think it's something like KDE Plasma because it looks so "good" (or different at least). It even works well even on my 32:9 aspect ratio monitor, which isn't something I can say about some other desktops.
I love and use xfce, but it “just works” for me only ~98%. Window snapping dimensions are oft still wrong, i get visual artifacts sometimes , etc. minor issues. With gnome i may not love everything about it, but i change nothing and it does “just work” closer to 99.9+%
I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time to time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again.
I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after trying yet another distro that went tits up), I was going to stop playing around WITH linux and start playing around ON linux for computers that I needed to get actual work done on. If one wants a classic Linux feel that is fairly stable, XFCE and a Debian base is pretty good for that.
I am a little concerned about the whole Wayland situation, since the XFCE team seems to be taking a fairly anti-Wayland stance at the moment. It has forced me to manually move from Wayland back to X11 on new installs to get a relaible experience, which is not reliably straightforward and seemingly may become more problematic as time progresses.
I'm genuinely wondering why everybody hates modern GNOME.
I have long been running Linux on headless systems but Windows on my daily, and only recently switched to dailying a Linux desktop. I started with Kubuntu LTS, it was easy to switch from Windows (shortcuts, UX) but it felt too "complicated" and distracting, not very good looking OOTB and had some graphical glitches here and there (w/ nvidia).
Now I'm on Fedora GNOME and I like it with its clean and modern design language. Very few extensions later and I can see myself being productive with it.
Gnome is quite 'opinionated' in what it chooses; if you like their choices you enjoy it; if you don't....hmm.
Personally I also have some things I specifically dislike; I prefer to have a fixed 3x3 virtual desktop grid, and Gnome didn't let me do that. I generally don't like the heavy use of menus and random stuff in the title bar of windows.
I like GNOME for the most part. But I really dislike needing an extension to change the date away from US format. Extensions in general seem unstable. Every now and then GNOME just locks up and I have to kill it from a terminal session to avoid losing my work.
I think it wouldn't be the default on many distros if everybody hated it.
I think we face the prism of the internet. Since it is the default on so many distros, almost everyonr has been faced to it at some point and those who don't like it are very vocal about it. Those who have been presented Gnome 3 as their first Linux Desktop and have been liking it have had no reason to try out other desktops and will be less vocal against them.
Yeah, my worry has recently been the opposite: That at least from afar they seem onboard the same Wayland track as the other DEs just at a slower pace.
As long as Xorg is around I hope Xfce never deprecates X.
Xfce is really good, used to have it as a daily driver.
His points about how they do not feel the need to change does seem correct, and it is amazing. As a windows user you should be able to figure it out pretty easily!
Xfce is pretty customizable. Out of the box it may look like OSX, or like Windows. But you can make it fit your needs, not adjust yourself to the machine and somebody's design decisions, or (often) lack thereof.
Unlike Gnome, Xfce is pretty un-opinionated; I can do away with everything that annoys me in Gnome, macOS, and Windows, while keeping the good bits, and having many more good bits none of these offer.
Xfce is way too minimal to be great. An great DE must be written mostly in JavaScript and hoard gigabytes of memory in order to render a single window.
If I understand the target of your snark, Gnome shell on my machine uses 172MB of RAM, if I sum all other gnome-related stuff (gdm-wayland-session, gjs, gnome-session-service, etc), it's 200MB.
yeah, i have a couple older machines and tried xfce and it wasn't really worth it memory wise, sure xfce is probably lighter but it's easily less than 100 meg difference
Lovely post, Xfce indeed is what I also reach for, especially when I need something for limited hardware, a small install size or just something quite stable and dependable! It’s probably not the #1 in all of those categories, but does a good enough job across all of them that I’m satisfied.
> I stopped writing posts like this for years, out of fear of how people from specific desktop environments would respond.
I personally also quite liked Cinnamon with Linux Mint, which was similarly pleasant out of the box, but I’m also sorry that the author had to deal with people I guess getting kinda heated over their preferences?
Cinnamon is indeed great ! Looks great out of the box and easy to configure quickly. I generally have to set a bunch of options and set up two shortcuts and I can do that under a minute. I think it deserves more praise. GNOME is too limited and I get lost in KDE, cosmic does not support gestures yet... I always come back to it.
Desktop Zoom (Xubuntu/Kubuntu): In Xfce (Xubuntu) and KDE (Kubuntu), Alt + Scroll is the default shortcut to zoom in and out of the entire desktop. This is an accessibility feature used to magnify specific parts of the screen.
A shell injection vulnerability ad soon as somebody copies the same approach somewhere else or trained your LLM on it.
Write correct code by default, always, otherwise it will end up somewhere you care about.
The best way to do that is to avoid shell, as a language that makes writing insecure code the most convenient.
(The original intent looks like it's making a desktop/launch icon, e.g. you might call it with "firefox" as an argument and it would put its logo into an application starter, provided a logo of the correspond name is already in the place the script expects.)
xfce way back in the day was trying to clone CDE which is open source and actively maintained these days https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (really. last release was in november 2025)
Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
> Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.
I won't consider XFCE vintage but sane, boring but working. Vintage would be a vanilla FVWM, or MWM, or TWM/CTWM. But not so much, as things come full circle.
EvilWM would look outdated
and crappy under Slashdot threads in 2001 or close, because it looked something from the 80's, altough some bright users stated that it saved tons of RAM for applications.
Its clone CWM nowadays it's highly praised by OpenBSD users as a no-bullshit, floating-no tiling madness window manager (and by me too). It works, it can work without any mouse for every window action (even resizing), it doesn't need dmenu, you can use virtual desktops and search between opened windows with autocompletion. So, forget about RSI's, your hands can literally rest.
Long time user. It really is the absolute chefskiss. It's all about the small details, keeping things constant, and the minimalism. Can't praise it highly enough and I'm very grateful to everybody who works on it!
If anyone is actually switching to Linux in the current hype cycle, I'd very much recommend starting with XFCE if you can. In my experience it really does seem to be the lowest-BS desktop out there, like the good parts of Windows XP.
I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.
Yeah, I think it might be a driver thing (or driver interaction with XFCE code).
After ~10 years of using XFCE, I recently for the first time encountered flickering, after an NVidia driver update. I disabled compositing and it went away. Still happy, but clearly something broke there. Pretty sure someone's trying to fix it, somewhere.
> the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need
Who is actually getting this impression? What thing that they "need" is in doubt?
> I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to,"
You assume incorrectly. Every OS and DE finds some way to be obnoxious, even when you've learned the tricks and keyboard shortcuts. XFCE just seems to have the least of them. It's predictable. I think a new user will be able to navigate it immediately. I don't know about KDE, but I sure couldn't say the same about Gnome 3.
For older machines I'd recommend Mate. It's a fork of old Gnome 2, so it got a lot more polish back on the day, even though some of it bit rotted away.
It's still a very nice desktop and you can combine it with Compiz if you want to have some fun.
> The settings feel like you're almost in a config file.
What on earth?
No, the config has dialogues and intuitive controls. There is a settings-editor you can go into if you need to, with a bit more of a regedit kinda feel, but I haven't looked in there in years.
> Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in? Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
> In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in?
No.
> Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
Yes, 100%.
COSMIC feels like GNOME but done right to me. It's not as pretty but while it looks and works pretty much the same by default, you can choose what goes where.
I usually end up with XFCE by necessity. I’m usually running Linux on older systems. I completely gave up on KDE many years ago, as it was always so heavy and slow. I want to like Gnome, but some of their decisions are ones I can’t wrap my head around or get used to. Depending on the system, it can also be a bit slow.
Absolutely categorically false: I daily-drove such a config on openSUSE for 4 years, 9-5 Mon-Fri.
One portrait, one landscape: fine. 2 portrait flanking one landscape: fine. Laptop + 2 external displays, 1 big in portrait, 1 small in landscape: fine. 2 screens, vertically stacked: fine. 2 side-by-side, one big one small: fine.
Everything works exactly as expected. Panels stay put. Some apps can't remember their positions but they can't on any WM or desktop.
Very dissimilar resolutions gets tricky but that's down to Xinerama not Xfce. It's true on all X11 desktops.
Xfce can do fractional scaling on a per-display basis to get on-screen features the same size, but it results in some displays getting slightly blurry. Tolerable for short-term use but not all day every day, for me.
But Xfce is 100% usable in heterogenous multihead and indeed handles this as well or better than almost any other mainstream X11-based desktop.
I very recently upgraded from a dual fullhd to a dual 4k setup and I was genuinely surprised how little problems I had setting everything up to the high DPI displays. I am genuinely interested in hearing what pitfalls might still await me.
Most HighDPI issues on X based DEs is from lack of fractional scaling, which means the scaling needs to happen in the applications instead (with separate configs for each UI toolkit), leading to lots of weird issues with inconsistently scaled UI elements on monitors sized such that integer scaling produces an inappropriate scale.
It doesn't affect all monitors, but some DPIs really don't play well with X. The fractional scaling you get on Wayland leads to some element of blur instead, but that's a far lesser evil, the jank is a bigger issue IMO.
I've been using XFCE for several years on 4k screens and I agree that it's not great out of the box.
Once you've set it up it works pretty well though.
Now if only I could remember what I did to get it working nicely...(luckily I've had the same installation of XFCE on my machine for the past 5 years so haven't had to fiddle with that in a while)
This is why I switched from XFCE to KDE. I still use XFCE for server desktops (if they have one) as it gets out of your way and lets you do easy things easily. I did spend a while recently trying to figure out how to get a Gnome desktop to autostart a terminal and ended up mucking around with installing desktop extensions just trying to specify a startup command.
You can do some xrandr magic to make it better and set a virtual rendering target that keeps things consistent across screens. It's a bit of a pain to work out though.
When KDE 4 came out, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 came out in (checks notes) 2011, I switched to XFCE. And that was that. I have a minimal taskbar at the bottom of my screen, with a little tray and a little button for the whisker menu. But I usually launch that using hyper + space. It gets out of my way, it gets shit done, I love it. Let's hope that it will survive the Wayland transition.
I don't have as much hatred towards Gnome 3 like everyone else does.
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not defending it. I was a little heart broken as I really liked Gnome 2. However, I tried to be optimistic with their plans overall.
(I think the early days on Gnome 3 featured something call Gnome Legacy to keep that Gnome 2-ish feel. I likely stayed on that for a while)
I still use Gnome 3 today... but Xfce would certainly be my second choice.
I don't have "hatred" towards Gnome3. I use it for friends and families desktops, they seem to like it. I have also rolled out about ~20 Gnome3-based desktops for my employer.
That said, there are definitely areas were Gnome could be improved. Some of them are understandable and probably stem from a lack funding / devs. Others less so, like removing the options to scale / stretch / center the wallpaper w/o installing "Gnome tweaks".
XFCE and LXDE are saviors for old machines. I frequently install Xubuntu and Lubuntu on old Chromebooks (e. g. HP Chromebook 14 from around 10 years ago, 2GB RAM, Celeron processor), and you can quickly get a fully functional, usable system. I'm not writing code on them, but you can easily use them for all the things the average person needs on a daily basis from their computer.
It's great that these projects have not given into "the times" or tried to become things they're not. They're great at what they do and I hope they remain that way.
They have a visual language that's not changed for decades and just works.
I prefer tiling window managers with no decorations, but whenever I have an app that doesn't play nice with xmonad I open an xfce x server and do my work there.
I've found Xfce with Wallis theme to be quite comfortable after I ditched Windows 7. Been using it for 3 years now.
Also I enjoyed how easily I could modify it:
- xfwm4: zoom only to multiples of integer, nearest neighbor only
- xfwm4: stop moving zoomed area after the cursor when Scroll Lock is on
- xfce4-screenshooter: supply custom actions with parameters %x %y %w %h of a selected rectangle, allowing me, for example, to select a rectangle and then launch a screen recording script.
Never found the use for multiple desktops, though.
The only part that irritates me is having to interact with the GTK file chooser (file open dialog). Someday I might be annoyed enough to replace it.
The file chooser can be somewhat tamed in the settings editor. For example to get the buttons back to the bottom of the dialog where they belong: disable the "DialogsUseHeader" setting under "xsettings" in xfce4-settings-editor
I ran XFCE back in say, 2005, 2006 or so. It looks almost exactly the same! I guess that's also the purpose of XFCE - to provide a minimal environment without the instabilities of modern GNOME and KDE or be exposed to Wayland quirks. Just roll with it like it's 20 years ago.
Basically whenever I use a machine that has an nvidia gpu, I always use xfce, as it just works, has least amount of issues & babysitting nvidia drivers & breakages. For everything else I use KDE.
I have some old chromebooks (flashed with chromebox firmware) that uses xfce too, which works great!
So kde & xfce is the only two desktops I use these days & have patience for.
Does the DE matter for your GPU? Can you give some examples of what xfce does better than kde when you've got Nvidia? Because I've got Nvidia and am using kde.
I love the idea of a minimal desktop environment, but I've never tried XFCE. Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? I find the screenshots on their homepage very intuitive but a bit ugly.
I'd choose Zukitre better. No dark theme or a light one blinding your eyes. Pretty neutral, gray.
As for the icon theme, Elementary XFCE works perfectly well with Zukitre. If not, ePapirus or Papirus itself. Simple and flat but contrasted, the opposite to a good chunk of flat themes today, where you can't guess where the buttons start and end.
Once you get used to that theme the Night Mode it's useless as I you can just spawn
sct 5500 #or xsct
at daytime, or
sct 3500
at night time.
xsct/xsct will work with any window manager, too. And the Zukitre
themes blend really well with minimal window managers as CWM, i3,
DWM and the like, as it has neither curves nor gradients.
I use Arc-Dark with elementary-xfce-dark icons (but have a script to switch to toggle dark-mode, where light mode is Adwaita with elementary-xfce icons).
TBH I typically run things fullscreen, so the only part of xfce I normally "see" is a thin task bar at the bottom with open windows and clock and such. Well, except for when I use Thunar, which is a nice enough file manager.
I use XFCE since 2000. It run great on 8 MiB of RAM on a diskless 486,
with hard drive mounted over Ethernet. It is my robust daily driver.
For dark mode, try:
- in 'Appearance': set Adwaita (dark),
- in 'Window Manager': set 'Default',
- in 'Panel': set dark mode.
This works in Debian 12 (running XFCE 4.18) and looks beautiful.
Easy on the eyes, readable, comfortable.
For other themes look at xfce-look.org. You install these
by decompressing tarballs into ~/.themes/$(theme_name) folder
and then selecting these in settings manager.
Are you sure just switching up the colors and background image wouldn't do it for you?
I just looked at the homepage to see if it was anything different than I see on my machine, and if anything it looks nicer there. It's certainly nothing fancy, but I feel like there's hardly enough there to really count as "ugly". It all fades into the background quickly when you're doing actual work on it. But YMMV I guess.
Yep LXQt is a beast, super snappy and complete. I use it on an old laptop (2012) and it still works great with a very low memory footprint (much lower than XFCE when I tested a bunch of them).
If I want something light, I tend to gravitate towards fluxbox, icewm, i3/sway, windowmaker or twm depending ony mood and the paradigm I am looking for.
LXQt is great, except for the fact it can only do 'regular, italic, bold, bold italic' for font weights even when a font supports medium (my preferred font weight, regular just seems so dainty now I've gotten used to medium).
I also like the fact that it allows use of any window manager and even supports Wayland now (so Wayfire is an option).
This was my first DM, i even put my mother on it on her home laptop. I use i3 nowadays, glazewm on windows, and aerospace on macos. anything that’s not a tiling window manager nowadays just feels wrong to me. Even if sometimes my screen doesn’t look pretty because i randomly threw on virtual screen 7 all the windows i don’t currently use.
Xfce is what I settled on, when still using GNU/Linux desktops.
I used a multitude of UNIX environments since 1994, starting with IBM X Windows terminals connected to DG/UX, and thanks to the way Unity got dropped, the way GNOME 3.0 went down, windowmaker no longer being actively developed, Xfce it was.
From where I am standing it feels more like bug fixing than anything else, like it was back in the 2000's, when I used to see what were the new WINGs coming out, and play around with GNUStep integration.
I ran a pretty vanilla xfce setup from about 2010 until 2024 until I moved to i3. Xfce is great generally, pretty easy to backup and share the whole config, ideal collection of apps. I'm sure gnome and kde have more features but for a good, solid, predictable desktop experience, cannae beat xfce.
It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs.
And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card.
Anyway, I LOVE XFCE. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in my DE, I just need it to launch applications, bind some hotkeys, and otherwise stay out of my way.
I have to agree. In fairness I am biased in that I have used xubuntu (xfce Ubuntu distro) for many years, but the one "feature" is that now I find it hard to use any other OS because of "perceived latency".
I see a top comment here speaking about an inefficient architecture.. that may be the case under the hood, but if you use it for a while, the "click lag" is very noticeable when you move off it.
Maybe it's not a good thing! /s. When I started a new role, I had to use a mac for a week until IT did a Linux swap out, and I found it so frustrating. Mostly the inability to set shortcuts that were muscle memory, but also the lag.
I have noticed lag more on a brand new iPhone (the pro one) then on my face... Which is something
Maybe I do need to check out xfce, then. I use kfe, and I'm often frustrated by the ui freezing, and the mouse cursor slows down a lot. Sometimes the delay between clicking and something happening is seconds. I'm baffled at how modern OSs can be so bad at ui (because Windows and Mac do it too.)
This kind of stuff was happening to me maybe 2 years ago on Plasma 5 with X11 (I can't believe Plasma 6 is two years old now!). After I switched to Wayland during the Plasma 6 upgrade, the DE has been buttery smooth and most of the major bugs were gone.
When I read about the awesomeness of Wayland I become tempted to try it. Then I remember I am immersed in Xfce4 which I can never leave and I forget it. Really, Wayland Vs Xfce is the current war of DEs.
Years ago, one of the most intelligent and brightest guys I worked with was using xfce
His setup was almost non existent apart from few customisations.
I remember he told me that xfce was the best one could get, while not being unpolite, he implied the problem was that people liked too much too have bells and blinking lights.
I kept using for a while what I was using, but after giving a try, yeah, that was all I needed.
that's pretty much what I get with i3/sway and why i'm sticking to them. is it ugly? probably. does it gives me screen real estate? definitely. does it get out of the way? heck yes!
in the days before I went full on tiling, xfce was one of my go-to choices.
I made the jump to Mint Xfce when MS announced it would stop supporting Windows 7. Pretty seamless transition. I still enjoy that older minimal style reminiscent of the early 00s.
I've used Xfce exclusively since Gnome jumped the shark many years ago. It's fast, does the job nicely, and stays out of your way.
I do hope they get stable on Wayland sometime soon, because X11 seems to have lost its momentum, and I would probably like to enable fractional scaling on my next laptop.
The workaround for me is to always resize by clicking Alt, right click, and drag. At the end of the day, that's probably just straight up easier, since you never need to bother getting close to the borders of the windows.
I just learned that you can use Super + Left Mouse to drag windows around and Super + Right Mouse to resize, due to this discussion.
I have been using XFCE forever, mostly using hotkeys for tilling, and just did not know :D
Yes, it is best to use Meta/Windows key for system related actions (copy/paste, screenshot, application start, various windowing actions), and let Ctrl and Alt be used by the applications.
I used to like Xfce until KDE 4 won me over. Since Xfce switched to GTK 3, though... if you put Thunar and the Xfce system settings next to each other they don't look like they're part of the same project and that's a shame.
I used XFCE (MxLinux) for 5 years until recently when I moved to KDE Plasma (Fedora) because of Wayland support. Imo, KDE is better and more resource efficient. I also got a free 10 fps boost on DotA 2 on the same hardware and settings. Zed and a lot of other apps are better supported on Wayland.
I don't think so - have you tried popOS's latest Cosmic DE though? I think it's in Beta now - it's a written from scratch desktop environment, that puts the tiling extension like behavior as a first class citizen.
If you wanted something more lightweight and minimal, but complete with tiling, it's a good option.
You can configure a window resize hotkey. I use Win+(drag the window with right mouse) and it resizes it i the way you expect, moving the corner closest to the cursor. Left click would move the window instead of resizing.
This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.
Yup, there are hacky workarounds, but what I'm after is the industry standard of grab areas that extend beyond the visible borders of the windows (which became more popular as high DPI monitors became the norm - and then Apple recently took to excess). And this is something the XFCE team have expressly said that they will NOT do.
I used to be on Gnome when it was the old interface (windows XP style), then moved to MATE. Never used Xfce. How does it compare to MATE? I remember mate being ever so slightly unstable (not sure if it was HW compatibility issues).
Xfce has long been the only DE that gets out of my way enough for me to actually be productive instead of excited by the possibility of different configurations.
The main tiling window manager using Wayland is Sway, although personally I like the simplicity of DWM. You can easily edit the configuration and compile it yourself.
One of the things I love about XFCE is its modularity. It's literally just a collection of programs that work independently, so while I use DWM, if I need a panel, I just type "panel" into dmenu, and XFCE panel runs right on top of it with no problems, aligning perfectly over the DWM top bar.
If you want to try a more complete DE, I'd recommend COSMIC. It's fresh and fast and very customizable.
I concur with the author - XFCE is a great desktop.
I first used it on an eeepc because something light was the order of the day. But then Gnome 3 happened and I made the switch on my full-strength machines too.
It works and it works well. It's theme-able. It's not opinionated about how I should use it so I can put bars wherever I want, launchers, menus, systrays wherever I like, and I can do it all with a few clicks and dragging and dropping stuff.
Generally a great DE and one that won't screw you over on update, which is something I've come to value.
Yeah, xfce is as close to an ideal desktop experience on Linux as it gets. A competent desktop environment really doesn't need that much.
Post-2010ish Gnome and kde are like some sort of sick joke. The fact that there are people who actually contribute their precious free time to these, feels to me profoundly sad.
GNOME is indeed annoying, but Plasma is a flagship Linux desktop experience, which has become self-evident with it's adoption by Valve for SteamOS as well as increasing number of newer distributions choosing it as default.
I am a fvwm person, but if I had to use a desktop environment, xfce would be my first choice. I find it works great for me. Once it ends up on Wayland and I am forced to use Wayland, right now xfce will be my choice.
Only one thing I wish I could set, allow windows to cover the 'bar'. Yes, I can make the bar auto-hide, but I cannot have a portion of it covered by a window.
The same is true for GNOME, but KDE it is allowed. I expect this is a gtk thing.
Let me join on this XFCE love fest. I also think it rocks, but it's more than that. It's also my go-to install for "friends and family" linux installs (Debian stable and XFCE).
I've been doing a couple of these over the years, and the great thing about XFCE is that it doesn't change, while at the same time being fairly intuitive and discoverable to the tech-unsavvy people.
So, with XFCE, I explain things once and I don't have to explain things to that person ever again. It stays as is over the years!
One only have to make sure to disable the virtual desktop (4 screens by default) thing and be sure to only keep one. That's the most confusing thing to non-tech-savvy that ever was. "Where have all my windows gone?! I moved the mouse and poof! they were gone"
Also, it runs great on old hardware. It's mostly what I've been doing. Family and friends tell me how they'll need to buy a new computer because theirs can't go on the internet anymore. I tell them "no you won't!". And then their computer becomes super fast again. Make my Computer Great Again.
I used to use XFCE a lot, but since then, even though it sucks in its own ways quite a lot, Gnome defaults to a nicer environment nowadays and doesn't seem so resource intensive anymore.
I moved away from XFCE over the CSD drama, despite winning that battle, the resistance showed me the project lacks the backbone to resist GNOME long term
I like XFCE for capturing the spirit of an era, and it’s still lightweight, so in that sense it’s excellent.
If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.
Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.
Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.
At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.
But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.
While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency. It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a performance antipattern in the modern display server model.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need.
(Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive FPS where a single extra frame of latency lowers your chance of being productive.)
It's a specific setting in XFCE you have to turn on, and most people try to bypass it anyway by manually disabling the compositor with hotkeys. Auto detection of the full screen windows has been hit or miss, especially when running things through proton/wine.
Also with x11 if you go through the steps to get Variable Refresh Rate going and you are dual monitor, it will max the refresh of both to the slowest monitor. :(
These are valid concerns for those who spend more time playing maybe. I mostly work, all of my monitors are 60Hz, and I only play single-player games.
If I were into hardcore gaming, and used the same machine for daily work, I would likely just end the X session, and switched to a minimalist Wayland session with a menu of games for the entire desktop.
I understand what you are saying about efficiency in theory.
Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
Xfce runs decently on my 10 year old 2-core Atom laptop with 2GB of RAM. It might use some inefficient patterns, not sure about that. But all the modern bloat software has brought basically little added value while eating much more resources, despite the claimed efficiency improvements.
What? The window manger and the panel (plasmashell) are separate processes in a Plasma desktop. In Sway, users typically choose from a range of totally separate applications like swaybar or quickshell for the panel. There’s absolutely no reason the panel has to be coupled with the compositor under Wayland and nobody actually does it that way that I’ve seen.
I do not know what xfce really has to do with X11 vs Wayland, but you could - if one wanted - build an X server that integrates a compositer and window manager. I do not think this has any real technical advantage and I think a modular design is stronger from an engineering point of view.
Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default
What are you talking about? Author is talking about user experience, they way changes (as far as user is concerned) Do Not Happen (much), how they don't try to invent new UI paradigm (cough Gnome cough) and are Not Fucking It Up (cough KDE4 cough).
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
Fvwm ran exactly that way on my Pentium-60 and I do not recall ever experiencing performance or latency issues; matter of fact, my Linux desktop of the time was more efficient than Windows. The FvwmPager, FvwmButtons, and FvwmTaskBar modules are separate programs launched by fvwm and communicate with it via IPC. Sacrificing modularity to avoid performance issues that were hard to see even on machines from 30 years ago—let alone on today's hardware—is a bit penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Hmm, I'd say that on a 2018-era machine, you won't measure this in raw CPU throughput. In all probablity, your cores are fast enough to mask the context switching. The performance deficit here is strictly in the domain of motion-to-photon latency or frame pacing. I guess my point is that in xfce's split architecture, the compositor acts as just another X11 client.
This enforces a path where window contents often round-trip through the X server before composition. Quantitatively, this typically adds at least one frame of input lag compared to the zero-copy direct scanout path available to monolithic wayland compositors. You likely won't notice this while editing text. However, the architecture doesn't perform well when you attach an external monitor. Since X11 shares a single virtual coordinate space, it cannot synchronize VBLANK across two outputs with different refresh rates or clock domains.
ps: and please don't call your 2018 machine vintage, it makes my secondary thinkpads feel prehistoric :D
My newer desktop (2020 era with a 3070) has 4x 4k monitors attached running XFCE and I have never noticed the lag you speak of. I don't run external monitors on it but my thinkpad x200 with a core 2 duo also does great with xfce.
I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.
You shouldn't notice lag. On modern Xorg the only round-trip is context switches between server and compositor, because the only thing what is shared is texture dma-bufs (there is inefficiency in mesa code for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension, but it is other story). And if dma-bufs is working (Xorg needs to test and pull one MR) you have buffer direct scanouts as in wayland.
As someone who runs modern XFCE on a core 2 duo I still have without noticable perf issues, the problems the parent talks about are theoretical and not observable.
I am running XFCE on a 2019 vintage desktop. CachyOS and 16GB RAM. It is snappy and very performant for my needs and I work on it daily for software development
True. And Fluxbox maybe uses less than 10 MB ram. Context is important - when compared to GNOME and KDE, XFCE does use less resources and is indeed snappier, with near feature parity.
I used to love Xfce, when KDE felt clunky to me and Gnome went in directions I found insane. Since then Gnome remains Gnome, but KDE has matured to a stage where most of the defaults feel like they were designed for me - and any that doesn't can be easily changed. After a period of using more and more K* applications, I realized I might as well switch desktop... Xfce is now a fond memory, and the times have moved on.
I want to like KDE, but it's just too unreliable for me. My last foray was about a year or two ago, I had to stop using it because an update something in KDE's power management broke and my laptop no longer reliably suspended when the battery was low (manually triggered suspends still worked fine.) I've been repeatedly having experiences like this with KDE, each time I fall back on LXQt with kwin and everything looks a bit uglier but just simply works.
I don't know what's going on in KDE, but I assume they've got too many software architects with their heads in the clouds, designing a byzantine mess of abstraction and indirection until even they lose track of where in the code the functionality actually lives. That's all just my assumption though, all I really know is that basic features keep breaking between releases.
Could also be packaging issues. Kde has been pretty stable for me on debian 13.
I had a similar experience. I only moved from xfce when my nvidia board kept killing my X session in creative ways. I'm pleasantly satisfied with kde, but I only have high praise for xfce usability.
Xfce is my default go-to, but I recommend and use KDE for touchscreens, like for Surface tablets.
I’m still on xfce, but haven’t used KDE in more than 10 years. Hearing lots of good things about it lately so maybe it’s time to give it another shot.
KDE 3.5 has been the best desktop environment for me (mainly due to its extreme customization facilities), far better than the contemporaneous Windows XP or Mac OS X, while the following KDE 4 was an unusable atrocious piece of garbage (despite having waited to make the transition to KDE 4 until it was claimed that all its initial bugs had been solved; when I tried it there were no bug problems, only bad design choices that could not be altered in any way).
For a few years I had kept the last KDE 3.5, but eventually I grew tired of solving compatibility problems with newer programs and I switched to XFCE.
I am still using it because I have never seen any reason to use anything else. There are a few KDE or Gnome applications that I use (for instance Okular or Kate), but I have not encountered yet any compatibility problem with them, so I have no need for one of the more bloated environment systems.
I have been using Linux on a variety of laptops and desktops, all with XFCE and without problems. XFCE does not do much, but I do not want it to do more, it allows my GUIs to be beautiful and to reach maximum speed and it has decent customization facilities, which is very important for me, as I have never encountered any desktop environment where I can be content with its default configuration.
Whenever I happen to temporarily use some Windows version for some work-related activity, I immediately feel constrained in a straitjacket by the rigidity of the desktop environment, which does not allow me to configure it in a way that would please me and would not interfere with my work.
On my main desktop, and also on my mobile workstation laptop, I have used only NVIDIA GPUs for the last 20 years and I have never encountered even the slightest problem with them, at least not with XFCE, so I am always surprised when other users mention such problems, like another poster near this message.
Perhaps my lack of problems with NVIDIA may be explained by the fact that I am using Gentoo, so I always have up-to-date NVIDIA drivers, while the users of other distributions mention having some problems with updating the drivers.
Only in my latest desktop, which was assembled this summer, I have installed an Intel Battlemage GPU, instead of an NVIDIA GPU, because the Intel GPU has increased its FP64 throughput, while the NVIDIA GPUs have decreased their FP64 throughput. Thus I hope that Intel will not abandon the GPU market, even if the intentions of their current CEO are extremely nebulous.
As an example of some very simple customizations, which are trivial on XFCE but surprisingly difficult on other desktop environments, I use a desktop with a completely blank, neutral grey background, without icons or any other visual clutter. I launch applications from a menu accessed with a right mouse click or with CTRL-ESC, and I have an auto-hiding taskbar for minimized applications and for a very small number of utilities, e.g. a clock/calendar and a clipboard manager. A few frequently used applications are bound to hot keys.
There's still Trinity DE if you want an updated KDE 3.5:
https://trinitydesktop.org/
bro, new copypasta just dropped
I've been using XFCE for a long time now. I often give GNOME and KDE Plasma a try, but I have to tweak GNOME so much to make it usable, and KDE Plasma keeps crashing and has weird issues (Steam friends list being delayed for example), which just got worse when they switched to Wayland. I really do feel like XFCE on x11 is the logical choice, it "just works" and every app runs well (Discord has broken hotkeys on Wayland), it's stable, and whenever people see my XFCE setup they think it's something like KDE Plasma because it looks so "good" (or different at least). It even works well even on my 32:9 aspect ratio monitor, which isn't something I can say about some other desktops.
I love and use xfce, but it “just works” for me only ~98%. Window snapping dimensions are oft still wrong, i get visual artifacts sometimes , etc. minor issues. With gnome i may not love everything about it, but i change nothing and it does “just work” closer to 99.9+%
Seems like YMMV
I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time to time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again.
I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after trying yet another distro that went tits up), I was going to stop playing around WITH linux and start playing around ON linux for computers that I needed to get actual work done on. If one wants a classic Linux feel that is fairly stable, XFCE and a Debian base is pretty good for that.
I am a little concerned about the whole Wayland situation, since the XFCE team seems to be taking a fairly anti-Wayland stance at the moment. It has forced me to manually move from Wayland back to X11 on new installs to get a relaible experience, which is not reliably straightforward and seemingly may become more problematic as time progresses.
Wayland just seems really unstable to me. I try it occasionally, but glitches, freezes or crashes quickly drive me back to X.
That's not wayland - you have some config or driver issue.
I've been using Wayland as my daily driver for a few years now. Any issues I have are from my window manager or apps and not wayland itself.
I'm genuinely wondering why everybody hates modern GNOME.
I have long been running Linux on headless systems but Windows on my daily, and only recently switched to dailying a Linux desktop. I started with Kubuntu LTS, it was easy to switch from Windows (shortcuts, UX) but it felt too "complicated" and distracting, not very good looking OOTB and had some graphical glitches here and there (w/ nvidia).
Now I'm on Fedora GNOME and I like it with its clean and modern design language. Very few extensions later and I can see myself being productive with it.
People who say “clean and modern design language” might like it? It’s very unconfigurable and impossible to adjust it to your tastes.
Gnome is quite 'opinionated' in what it chooses; if you like their choices you enjoy it; if you don't....hmm. Personally I also have some things I specifically dislike; I prefer to have a fixed 3x3 virtual desktop grid, and Gnome didn't let me do that. I generally don't like the heavy use of menus and random stuff in the title bar of windows.
I like GNOME for the most part. But I really dislike needing an extension to change the date away from US format. Extensions in general seem unstable. Every now and then GNOME just locks up and I have to kill it from a terminal session to avoid losing my work.
I think it wouldn't be the default on many distros if everybody hated it.
I think we face the prism of the internet. Since it is the default on so many distros, almost everyonr has been faced to it at some point and those who don't like it are very vocal about it. Those who have been presented Gnome 3 as their first Linux Desktop and have been liking it have had no reason to try out other desktops and will be less vocal against them.
It probably depends on how far back one started using Linux on desktop. For me that was a while ago.
xfce wayland seems to work fine/most components are ported. I started it up in wayland mode just now and it seems to work fine.
they're actively working on Wayland and very much want it to work well there? https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
One problem is I think Xfce has no paid developers, it's all spare time.
Yeah, my worry has recently been the opposite: That at least from afar they seem onboard the same Wayland track as the other DEs just at a slower pace.
As long as Xorg is around I hope Xfce never deprecates X.
Quote from your link:
"It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all)."
Xfce is really good, used to have it as a daily driver.
His points about how they do not feel the need to change does seem correct, and it is amazing. As a windows user you should be able to figure it out pretty easily!
Xfce is pretty customizable. Out of the box it may look like OSX, or like Windows. But you can make it fit your needs, not adjust yourself to the machine and somebody's design decisions, or (often) lack thereof.
Unlike Gnome, Xfce is pretty un-opinionated; I can do away with everything that annoys me in Gnome, macOS, and Windows, while keeping the good bits, and having many more good bits none of these offer.
Xfce is way too minimal to be great. An great DE must be written mostly in JavaScript and hoard gigabytes of memory in order to render a single window.
If I understand the target of your snark, Gnome shell on my machine uses 172MB of RAM, if I sum all other gnome-related stuff (gdm-wayland-session, gjs, gnome-session-service, etc), it's 200MB.
Hardly GB. You don't have to lie to make a point.
yeah, i have a couple older machines and tried xfce and it wasn't really worth it memory wise, sure xfce is probably lighter but it's easily less than 100 meg difference
I wish there was a Chrome extension to filter out snarky meme comments like these.
I just don’t see the point in posting something like this aside from baiting an argument. There’s nothing about JS or Electron in this article.
Lovely post, Xfce indeed is what I also reach for, especially when I need something for limited hardware, a small install size or just something quite stable and dependable! It’s probably not the #1 in all of those categories, but does a good enough job across all of them that I’m satisfied.
> I stopped writing posts like this for years, out of fear of how people from specific desktop environments would respond.
I personally also quite liked Cinnamon with Linux Mint, which was similarly pleasant out of the box, but I’m also sorry that the author had to deal with people I guess getting kinda heated over their preferences?
Cinnamon is indeed great ! Looks great out of the box and easy to configure quickly. I generally have to set a bunch of options and set up two shortcuts and I can do that under a minute. I think it deserves more praise. GNOME is too limited and I get lost in KDE, cosmic does not support gestures yet... I always come back to it.
The greatest drag on Linux adoption is Linux evangelists.
I just discovered alt-scroll just by accident.
Also I have "make-icon" to bragg about:
What exactly do we see here?
A shell injection vulnerability ad soon as somebody copies the same approach somewhere else or trained your LLM on it.
Write correct code by default, always, otherwise it will end up somewhere you care about.
The best way to do that is to avoid shell, as a language that makes writing insecure code the most convenient.
(The original intent looks like it's making a desktop/launch icon, e.g. you might call it with "firefox" as an argument and it would put its logo into an application starter, provided a logo of the correspond name is already in the place the script expects.)
Erh? Bash-reading disability?
make-icon ABCD:
1) Makes a small picture ABCD.png from the first letters of the string "ABCD".
2) Makes ABCD application icon to using the picture ABCD.png.
3) Moving youres pointing device on that icon and pressing appropriate button now executes ABCD.
"convert" is from Imagemagick of course.
Neat! Does someone know a way to implement this in hyprland?
Nobody knows. I wanted preset zoom for watching widescreen movies on laptop. But xev does show anything at alt-scroll.
xfce way back in the day was trying to clone CDE which is open source and actively maintained these days https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/ (really. last release was in november 2025)
Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
There's also people trying to keep the SGI experience alive, but this one is a clone: https://docs.maxxinteractive.com/
As for as early xfce check out https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/xfce-default.jpg (I'm actually on that site from 25 years ago: https://xteddy.org/xwinman/screenshots/twm-cjmckenzie.gif)
> Just in case you want an even more vintage experience.
Just to clarify, it's not about "vintage experience". Xfce is deceptively simple - it gets out of your way and let you do whatever you wish. The original settings are sensible as they are, but you also can customize it as you wish. It is pretty un-opinionated.
Sourceforge gives me the heeby-jeebys though.
I have no idea why they use that either. It was legitimately great 25 years ago but it's just felt like an SEO farm for at least 15 years.
(25 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20010301045035/https://sourcefor...)
Once you get down into it, it's fine. https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/
I mean ok, it's fine.
> It was legitimately great 25 years ago but it's just felt like an SEO farm for at least 15 years.
You should see github. /s
Instead of Maxx Desktop, check EMWM plus the goodies:
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
I won't consider XFCE vintage but sane, boring but working. Vintage would be a vanilla FVWM, or MWM, or TWM/CTWM. But not so much, as things come full circle.
EvilWM would look outdated and crappy under Slashdot threads in 2001 or close, because it looked something from the 80's, altough some bright users stated that it saved tons of RAM for applications.
Its clone CWM nowadays it's highly praised by OpenBSD users as a no-bullshit, floating-no tiling madness window manager (and by me too). It works, it can work without any mouse for every window action (even resizing), it doesn't need dmenu, you can use virtual desktops and search between opened windows with autocompletion. So, forget about RSI's, your hands can literally rest.
EMWM is really nice. Too bad that Wyaland will make alternative WMs like this one very hard to use and obsolete in the long run.
Wayland isn't going to become defacto until this difficulty disappears.
X "just works" well enough for too many use cases
There was some barebones X server runnng on top of Wayland.
https://wayback.freedesktop.org/
If I have to suffer that in a near future, I want my CWM setup working like before.
Long time user. It really is the absolute chefskiss. It's all about the small details, keeping things constant, and the minimalism. Can't praise it highly enough and I'm very grateful to everybody who works on it!
If anyone is actually switching to Linux in the current hype cycle, I'd very much recommend starting with XFCE if you can. In my experience it really does seem to be the lowest-BS desktop out there, like the good parts of Windows XP.
I'm not sure I agree. It takes getting used to, and the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need. The settings feel like you're almost in a config file. Except for on old computers, Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to," and I'm not sure minimizing it immediately is the best approach to bring people into the ecosystem.
I've tried Cosmic recently and it's glitches galore right now (on nvidia at least). I think safest point is KDE. The most familiar paradigm, mature wayland support with mixed refresh rate displays, HDR and other modern features that XFCE can't do.
Yeah, I think it might be a driver thing (or driver interaction with XFCE code).
After ~10 years of using XFCE, I recently for the first time encountered flickering, after an NVidia driver update. I disabled compositing and it went away. Still happy, but clearly something broke there. Pretty sure someone's trying to fix it, somewhere.
yes. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/580-release-feedback-d...
That was the Nvidia 580 driver, its a known issue. 575 dirver is working fine.
> the default designs tend to feel old-fashioned, giving a false impression that it won't do what you need
Who is actually getting this impression? What thing that they "need" is in doubt?
> I guess I assume "BS" means "UX flourishes that most end users are used to,"
You assume incorrectly. Every OS and DE finds some way to be obnoxious, even when you've learned the tricks and keyboard shortcuts. XFCE just seems to have the least of them. It's predictable. I think a new user will be able to navigate it immediately. I don't know about KDE, but I sure couldn't say the same about Gnome 3.
For older machines I'd recommend Mate. It's a fork of old Gnome 2, so it got a lot more polish back on the day, even though some of it bit rotted away.
It's still a very nice desktop and you can combine it with Compiz if you want to have some fun.
> The settings feel like you're almost in a config file.
What on earth?
No, the config has dialogues and intuitive controls. There is a settings-editor you can go into if you need to, with a bit more of a regedit kinda feel, but I haven't looked in there in years.
> Gnome or Cosmic are safer starting points.
In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in? Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
> In Gnome, can I move the UI elements to locations I want them in?
No.
> Or are we still in a situation where it's opinionated and you have to seek plugins to get an experience that you actually want?
Yes, 100%.
COSMIC feels like GNOME but done right to me. It's not as pretty but while it looks and works pretty much the same by default, you can choose what goes where.
Saying that, I still much prefer Xfce.
I usually end up with XFCE by necessity. I’m usually running Linux on older systems. I completely gave up on KDE many years ago, as it was always so heavy and slow. I want to like Gnome, but some of their decisions are ones I can’t wrap my head around or get used to. Depending on the system, it can also be a bit slow.
XFCE seems to just work.
> I'd very much recommend starting with XFCE
Kids those days. twm or fvwm shall be ok.
Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.
> dual monitor setups that aren't the same.
Absolutely categorically false: I daily-drove such a config on openSUSE for 4 years, 9-5 Mon-Fri.
One portrait, one landscape: fine. 2 portrait flanking one landscape: fine. Laptop + 2 external displays, 1 big in portrait, 1 small in landscape: fine. 2 screens, vertically stacked: fine. 2 side-by-side, one big one small: fine.
Everything works exactly as expected. Panels stay put. Some apps can't remember their positions but they can't on any WM or desktop.
Very dissimilar resolutions gets tricky but that's down to Xinerama not Xfce. It's true on all X11 desktops.
Xfce can do fractional scaling on a per-display basis to get on-screen features the same size, but it results in some displays getting slightly blurry. Tolerable for short-term use but not all day every day, for me.
But Xfce is 100% usable in heterogenous multihead and indeed handles this as well or better than almost any other mainstream X11-based desktop.
How high? What kind of problems?
I very recently upgraded from a dual fullhd to a dual 4k setup and I was genuinely surprised how little problems I had setting everything up to the high DPI displays. I am genuinely interested in hearing what pitfalls might still await me.
Most HighDPI issues on X based DEs is from lack of fractional scaling, which means the scaling needs to happen in the applications instead (with separate configs for each UI toolkit), leading to lots of weird issues with inconsistently scaled UI elements on monitors sized such that integer scaling produces an inappropriate scale.
It doesn't affect all monitors, but some DPIs really don't play well with X. The fractional scaling you get on Wayland leads to some element of blur instead, but that's a far lesser evil, the jank is a bigger issue IMO.
I've been running 2× 4k 27" monitors for about a year on Xfce. I set it to 144 ppi and nothing feels weird to me, though I run a custom theme.
I've been using XFCE for several years on 4k screens and I agree that it's not great out of the box.
Once you've set it up it works pretty well though.
Now if only I could remember what I did to get it working nicely...(luckily I've had the same installation of XFCE on my machine for the past 5 years so haven't had to fiddle with that in a while)
I just set dpi to 128 or 192. The out-the-box 96 could do with changing.
Yeah, everything on my notebook is quite small.
But now I have so much screen real estate, I'm almost considering using a tiling window manager.
Make sure you have a HiDPI theme selected and that you set a custom DPI that matches your screen in Settings->Appearance->Fonts.
Yeah, I noticed this recently with my ultra-widescreen monitor. That was indeed strange; normally XFCE works super-well.
This is why I switched from XFCE to KDE. I still use XFCE for server desktops (if they have one) as it gets out of your way and lets you do easy things easily. I did spend a while recently trying to figure out how to get a Gnome desktop to autostart a terminal and ended up mucking around with installing desktop extensions just trying to specify a startup command.
You can do some xrandr magic to make it better and set a virtual rendering target that keeps things consistent across screens. It's a bit of a pain to work out though.
Thing is: my default IceWM works better on the same monitor here than XFCE does. Something seems to not be considered by the current XFCE code.
Haven't thought about IceWM in ages, that's good to know it works out of the box well. I'll have to check it out!
When KDE 4 came out, I switched to Gnome 2. When Gnome 3 came out in (checks notes) 2011, I switched to XFCE. And that was that. I have a minimal taskbar at the bottom of my screen, with a little tray and a little button for the whisker menu. But I usually launch that using hyper + space. It gets out of my way, it gets shit done, I love it. Let's hope that it will survive the Wayland transition.
I don't have as much hatred towards Gnome 3 like everyone else does.
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not defending it. I was a little heart broken as I really liked Gnome 2. However, I tried to be optimistic with their plans overall.
(I think the early days on Gnome 3 featured something call Gnome Legacy to keep that Gnome 2-ish feel. I likely stayed on that for a while)
I still use Gnome 3 today... but Xfce would certainly be my second choice.
I don't have "hatred" towards Gnome3. I use it for friends and families desktops, they seem to like it. I have also rolled out about ~20 Gnome3-based desktops for my employer.
That said, there are definitely areas were Gnome could be improved. Some of them are understandable and probably stem from a lack funding / devs. Others less so, like removing the options to scale / stretch / center the wallpaper w/o installing "Gnome tweaks".
Yeah - I find it a little frustrating that the first thing to do after installing Gnome3 is to install Tweaks.
I did exactly the same series of switches.
XFCE and LXDE are saviors for old machines. I frequently install Xubuntu and Lubuntu on old Chromebooks (e. g. HP Chromebook 14 from around 10 years ago, 2GB RAM, Celeron processor), and you can quickly get a fully functional, usable system. I'm not writing code on them, but you can easily use them for all the things the average person needs on a daily basis from their computer.
It's great that these projects have not given into "the times" or tried to become things they're not. They're great at what they do and I hope they remain that way.
Xfce is the definition of comfy computing.
They have a visual language that's not changed for decades and just works.
I prefer tiling window managers with no decorations, but whenever I have an app that doesn't play nice with xmonad I open an xfce x server and do my work there.
Also prefer a tiling wm, but xfce is great to keep installed for guest accounts on your PC
I've found Xfce with Wallis theme to be quite comfortable after I ditched Windows 7. Been using it for 3 years now.
Also I enjoyed how easily I could modify it:
- xfwm4: zoom only to multiples of integer, nearest neighbor only
- xfwm4: stop moving zoomed area after the cursor when Scroll Lock is on
- xfce4-screenshooter: supply custom actions with parameters %x %y %w %h of a selected rectangle, allowing me, for example, to select a rectangle and then launch a screen recording script.
Never found the use for multiple desktops, though.
The only part that irritates me is having to interact with the GTK file chooser (file open dialog). Someday I might be annoyed enough to replace it.
> The only part that irritates me is having to interact with the GTK file chooser (file open dialog). Someday I might be annoyed enough to replace it.
That's probably my only annoyance as well. Is there an easy way to replace it? Not being able to see the path as a string is very "un-linux".
The file chooser can be somewhat tamed in the settings editor. For example to get the buttons back to the bottom of the dialog where they belong: disable the "DialogsUseHeader" setting under "xsettings" in xfce4-settings-editor
I ran XFCE back in say, 2005, 2006 or so. It looks almost exactly the same! I guess that's also the purpose of XFCE - to provide a minimal environment without the instabilities of modern GNOME and KDE or be exposed to Wayland quirks. Just roll with it like it's 20 years ago.
Basically whenever I use a machine that has an nvidia gpu, I always use xfce, as it just works, has least amount of issues & babysitting nvidia drivers & breakages. For everything else I use KDE.
I have some old chromebooks (flashed with chromebox firmware) that uses xfce too, which works great!
So kde & xfce is the only two desktops I use these days & have patience for.
Does the DE matter for your GPU? Can you give some examples of what xfce does better than kde when you've got Nvidia? Because I've got Nvidia and am using kde.
XFCE is x11 only which might alleviate some Wayland bugs with nvidia.
I love the idea of a minimal desktop environment, but I've never tried XFCE. Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier? I find the screenshots on their homepage very intuitive but a bit ugly.
If you are a dark mode addicted like me:
go for NORD theme
https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic
and I love this icon set (white)
https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1277095
for more NORD integration have a look here:
https://www.nordtheme.com/ports
have fun
I'd choose Zukitre better. No dark theme or a light one blinding your eyes. Pretty neutral, gray.
As for the icon theme, Elementary XFCE works perfectly well with Zukitre. If not, ePapirus or Papirus itself. Simple and flat but contrasted, the opposite to a good chunk of flat themes today, where you can't guess where the buttons start and end.
Once you get used to that theme the Night Mode it's useless as I you can just spawn
at daytime, or at night time.xsct/xsct will work with any window manager, too. And the Zukitre themes blend really well with minimal window managers as CWM, i3, DWM and the like, as it has neither curves nor gradients.
Remove all the xfce design elements you don't like. Ytou can even use a borderless theme, eg https://github.com/ushioichi/borderless-xfwm-theme
I added i3 so everything is on the keyboard.
XFCE is great because it lets you put it in the background. The GUIs are there when you need them, but it is just as happy if you don't.
This is precisely my point of view as well.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 is what most of my XFCE desktops have looked like for the past few years. I carry the theme around.
I use Arc-Dark with elementary-xfce-dark icons (but have a script to switch to toggle dark-mode, where light mode is Adwaita with elementary-xfce icons).
TBH I typically run things fullscreen, so the only part of xfce I normally "see" is a thin task bar at the bottom with open windows and clock and such. Well, except for when I use Thunar, which is a nice enough file manager.
My reflexive response was "xfce is ugly, and that's by design", but actually, this looks pretty slick: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/13k5p5o/xfce_my_x...
> Are there any themes that folks here would recommend to make it much prettier?
You're probably not the target audience then. It's not a DE that prioritizes prettiness.
If you want something that looks like the 90's desktop metaphor, it's exactly that and it's really good at that.
> It's CDE-conformant, I know this!
I use XFCE since 2000. It run great on 8 MiB of RAM on a diskless 486, with hard drive mounted over Ethernet. It is my robust daily driver.
For dark mode, try: - in 'Appearance': set Adwaita (dark), - in 'Window Manager': set 'Default', - in 'Panel': set dark mode.
This works in Debian 12 (running XFCE 4.18) and looks beautiful. Easy on the eyes, readable, comfortable.
For other themes look at xfce-look.org. You install these by decompressing tarballs into ~/.themes/$(theme_name) folder and then selecting these in settings manager.
Not sure if you think Windows 95 is pretty, but I'm compelled to drop a link to this on every Xfce post: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-Classic (and other repositories under https://github.com/B00merang-Project/ ) includes a GTK+ 4 theme that works quite well with Chicago95.
Are you sure just switching up the colors and background image wouldn't do it for you?
I just looked at the homepage to see if it was anything different than I see on my machine, and if anything it looks nicer there. It's certainly nothing fancy, but I feel like there's hardly enough there to really count as "ugly". It all fades into the background quickly when you're doing actual work on it. But YMMV I guess.
it's a lot to go through, but this is a great resource
https://www.xfce-look.org/browse/
Arc-darker GTK and Kvantum (if you use QT apps) themes.
Qogir-dark icon theme.
Whisker menu, application icon+ labels and the system tray thing in the bottom panel.
Basically, it looks like windows 7.
I like the greybird and greybird-dark themes, I think greybird is the default with xubuntu.
(edit - there are a ton of themes out there: https://www.xfce-look.org
Though personally I would avoid using their app)
Also try LXDE and LXQT if you would like a 'lighter KDE' vibe instead of the 'lighter gnome 2' vibe of XFCE.
Yep LXQt is a beast, super snappy and complete. I use it on an old laptop (2012) and it still works great with a very low memory footprint (much lower than XFCE when I tested a bunch of them).
If I want something light, I tend to gravitate towards fluxbox, icewm, i3/sway, windowmaker or twm depending ony mood and the paradigm I am looking for.
There are many other options though.
LXQt is great, except for the fact it can only do 'regular, italic, bold, bold italic' for font weights even when a font supports medium (my preferred font weight, regular just seems so dainty now I've gotten used to medium).
I also like the fact that it allows use of any window manager and even supports Wayland now (so Wayfire is an option).
This was my first DM, i even put my mother on it on her home laptop. I use i3 nowadays, glazewm on windows, and aerospace on macos. anything that’s not a tiling window manager nowadays just feels wrong to me. Even if sometimes my screen doesn’t look pretty because i randomly threw on virtual screen 7 all the windows i don’t currently use.
Xfce is what I settled on, when still using GNU/Linux desktops.
I used a multitude of UNIX environments since 1994, starting with IBM X Windows terminals connected to DG/UX, and thanks to the way Unity got dropped, the way GNOME 3.0 went down, windowmaker no longer being actively developed, Xfce it was.
Correction, UNIX GUI environments.
Windowmaker it's still developed.
From where I am standing it feels more like bug fixing than anything else, like it was back in the 2000's, when I used to see what were the new WINGs coming out, and play around with GNUStep integration.
I ran a pretty vanilla xfce setup from about 2010 until 2024 until I moved to i3. Xfce is great generally, pretty easy to backup and share the whole config, ideal collection of apps. I'm sure gnome and kde have more features but for a good, solid, predictable desktop experience, cannae beat xfce.
I have to agree, XFCE is great!
It's weird that when using something like Windows, KDE, or Gnome, I notice a delay between clicking and the thing happening on screen. It's maybe 100ms or so, but after using XFCE for years, there's a notable and, for me, infuriating delay in many modern GUIs.
And it's not my computer; I'm sitting here with 32 cores, 128GiB of RAM, and a somewhat fancy AMD video card.
Anyway, I LOVE XFCE. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles in my DE, I just need it to launch applications, bind some hotkeys, and otherwise stay out of my way.
I have to agree. In fairness I am biased in that I have used xubuntu (xfce Ubuntu distro) for many years, but the one "feature" is that now I find it hard to use any other OS because of "perceived latency".
I see a top comment here speaking about an inefficient architecture.. that may be the case under the hood, but if you use it for a while, the "click lag" is very noticeable when you move off it.
Maybe it's not a good thing! /s. When I started a new role, I had to use a mac for a week until IT did a Linux swap out, and I found it so frustrating. Mostly the inability to set shortcuts that were muscle memory, but also the lag.
I have noticed lag more on a brand new iPhone (the pro one) then on my face... Which is something
Maybe I do need to check out xfce, then. I use kfe, and I'm often frustrated by the ui freezing, and the mouse cursor slows down a lot. Sometimes the delay between clicking and something happening is seconds. I'm baffled at how modern OSs can be so bad at ui (because Windows and Mac do it too.)
This kind of stuff was happening to me maybe 2 years ago on Plasma 5 with X11 (I can't believe Plasma 6 is two years old now!). After I switched to Wayland during the Plasma 6 upgrade, the DE has been buttery smooth and most of the major bugs were gone.
When I read about the awesomeness of Wayland I become tempted to try it. Then I remember I am immersed in Xfce4 which I can never leave and I forget it. Really, Wayland Vs Xfce is the current war of DEs.
Years ago, one of the most intelligent and brightest guys I worked with was using xfce
His setup was almost non existent apart from few customisations.
I remember he told me that xfce was the best one could get, while not being unpolite, he implied the problem was that people liked too much too have bells and blinking lights.
I kept using for a while what I was using, but after giving a try, yeah, that was all I needed.
that's pretty much what I get with i3/sway and why i'm sticking to them. is it ugly? probably. does it gives me screen real estate? definitely. does it get out of the way? heck yes!
in the days before I went full on tiling, xfce was one of my go-to choices.
I made the jump to Mint Xfce when MS announced it would stop supporting Windows 7. Pretty seamless transition. I still enjoy that older minimal style reminiscent of the early 00s.
I've used Xfce exclusively since Gnome jumped the shark many years ago. It's fast, does the job nicely, and stays out of your way. I do hope they get stable on Wayland sometime soon, because X11 seems to have lost its momentum, and I would probably like to enable fractional scaling on my next laptop.
You do not need fractional scaling, just set the correct dpi in settings and use a high dpi theme.
If someone somehow enlarge the 1px handle for windows resizing by default (not default theme) I can say 'it's perfect'.
That is not XFCE itself, that is up to your theme. I'm on the Dracula theme and have about 16 pixels.
Are there any themes that allow changing window border size, title bar size, scrollbar width etc, like win 9x?
The workaround for me is to always resize by clicking Alt, right click, and drag. At the end of the day, that's probably just straight up easier, since you never need to bother getting close to the borders of the windows.
I recommend changing the key to Super. As holding down Alt and clicking/dragging is often used by many applications and simply won't work then.
I just learned that you can use Super + Left Mouse to drag windows around and Super + Right Mouse to resize, due to this discussion. I have been using XFCE forever, mostly using hotkeys for tilling, and just did not know :D
Thanks !
Huh, I'm over 10 years in and didn't know about the rightclick-resize either. I really like it! Thanks!
Yes, it is best to use Meta/Windows key for system related actions (copy/paste, screenshot, application start, various windowing actions), and let Ctrl and Alt be used by the applications.
I used to like Xfce until KDE 4 won me over. Since Xfce switched to GTK 3, though... if you put Thunar and the Xfce system settings next to each other they don't look like they're part of the same project and that's a shame.
I used XFCE (MxLinux) for 5 years until recently when I moved to KDE Plasma (Fedora) because of Wayland support. Imo, KDE is better and more resource efficient. I also got a free 10 fps boost on DotA 2 on the same hardware and settings. Zed and a lot of other apps are better supported on Wayland.
Is there something like a tilling extension for xfce? Not snappy corners but actually tilling by default?
I'm currently on popos (using GNOME) and enjoy the tilling of its GNOME extension. Actual tilling wms were too hackish for me whenever I tried them.
I don't think so - have you tried popOS's latest Cosmic DE though? I think it's in Beta now - it's a written from scratch desktop environment, that puts the tiling extension like behavior as a first class citizen.
If you wanted something more lightweight and minimal, but complete with tiling, it's a good option.
i3 + xfce works well for this
I really wanted to like XFCE, but the tiny tiny window grab area for resizing is just too damn frustrating.
You can configure a window resize hotkey. I use Win+(drag the window with right mouse) and it resizes it i the way you expect, moving the corner closest to the cursor. Left click would move the window instead of resizing.
This is by far my favorite way to resize and I don't know why it's not an industry standard.
The default config for this is to use Alt+(right-click drag) to resize and Alt+(left-click drag) to move.
I use this so much once I found it, this solved my frustration with the tiny resize border on the window itself.
This setting can be found in Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Accessibility > Key used to grab and move windows: Alt
I have deleted all window decorations and use F... keys to manipulate resize/move. But you could totally increase the height instead of deleting them
Yup, there are hacky workarounds, but what I'm after is the industry standard of grab areas that extend beyond the visible borders of the windows (which became more popular as high DPI monitors became the norm - and then Apple recently took to excess). And this is something the XFCE team have expressly said that they will NOT do.
And so I moved on to Mate.
I installed Fedora + gnome onnmy new Framework, it definitely works better out of the box, but i dislike the design :/
I learned to grab to resize windows in XFCE from upper right corner exactly because of this
Should be easy to correct the default behavior for the next release if the issue is reported.
It is configurable by theme or by changing something like bottom-active.xpm size.
alt-rightclick anywhere in the vague vicinity of a corner and you've grabbed it.
I used to be on Gnome when it was the old interface (windows XP style), then moved to MATE. Never used Xfce. How does it compare to MATE? I remember mate being ever so slightly unstable (not sure if it was HW compatibility issues).
Xfce has long been the only DE that gets out of my way enough for me to actually be productive instead of excited by the possibility of different configurations.
Have you tried a tiling window manager? All I want is an empty black screen and an app launcher.
I admit I'm intrigued by the idea. Do you have any recommendations?
The main tiling window manager using Wayland is Sway, although personally I like the simplicity of DWM. You can easily edit the configuration and compile it yourself.
One of the things I love about XFCE is its modularity. It's literally just a collection of programs that work independently, so while I use DWM, if I need a panel, I just type "panel" into dmenu, and XFCE panel runs right on top of it with no problems, aligning perfectly over the DWM top bar.
If you want to try a more complete DE, I'd recommend COSMIC. It's fresh and fast and very customizable.
XFCE is great for VNC setups where a full desktop is unrealistic
Yup. That’s what I use it for.
I ve excludively used Xfce thru my linux journey, but cant make it work for a high dpi framework laptop. So Gnome it is :(
xrandr ?
I concur with the author - XFCE is a great desktop.
I first used it on an eeepc because something light was the order of the day. But then Gnome 3 happened and I made the switch on my full-strength machines too.
It works and it works well. It's theme-able. It's not opinionated about how I should use it so I can put bars wherever I want, launchers, menus, systrays wherever I like, and I can do it all with a few clicks and dragging and dropping stuff.
Generally a great DE and one that won't screw you over on update, which is something I've come to value.
Yeah, xfce is as close to an ideal desktop experience on Linux as it gets. A competent desktop environment really doesn't need that much.
Post-2010ish Gnome and kde are like some sort of sick joke. The fact that there are people who actually contribute their precious free time to these, feels to me profoundly sad.
GNOME is indeed annoying, but Plasma is a flagship Linux desktop experience, which has become self-evident with it's adoption by Valve for SteamOS as well as increasing number of newer distributions choosing it as default.
> Yeah, xfce is as close to an ideal desktop experience on Linux as it gets.
fvwm is better
nice joke
That 500x313 screenshot of the desktop does not help any argument.
Try this one: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330
Anyone using it with Niri?
xmonad is my main.
XFCE is when my backup when I break xmonad.
I am a fvwm person, but if I had to use a desktop environment, xfce would be my first choice. I find it works great for me. Once it ends up on Wayland and I am forced to use Wayland, right now xfce will be my choice.
Only one thing I wish I could set, allow windows to cover the 'bar'. Yes, I can make the bar auto-hide, but I cannot have a portion of it covered by a window.
The same is true for GNOME, but KDE it is allowed. I expect this is a gtk thing.
Let me join on this XFCE love fest. I also think it rocks, but it's more than that. It's also my go-to install for "friends and family" linux installs (Debian stable and XFCE).
I've been doing a couple of these over the years, and the great thing about XFCE is that it doesn't change, while at the same time being fairly intuitive and discoverable to the tech-unsavvy people.
So, with XFCE, I explain things once and I don't have to explain things to that person ever again. It stays as is over the years!
One only have to make sure to disable the virtual desktop (4 screens by default) thing and be sure to only keep one. That's the most confusing thing to non-tech-savvy that ever was. "Where have all my windows gone?! I moved the mouse and poof! they were gone"
Also, it runs great on old hardware. It's mostly what I've been doing. Family and friends tell me how they'll need to buy a new computer because theirs can't go on the internet anymore. I tell them "no you won't!". And then their computer becomes super fast again. Make my Computer Great Again.
I used to use XFCE a lot, but since then, even though it sucks in its own ways quite a lot, Gnome defaults to a nicer environment nowadays and doesn't seem so resource intensive anymore.
I moved away from XFCE over the CSD drama, despite winning that battle, the resistance showed me the project lacks the backbone to resist GNOME long term
I like XFCE for capturing the spirit of an era, and it’s still lightweight, so in that sense it’s excellent.
If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.
Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.
Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.
At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.
But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.
Never liked it. Terrible font rendering.
While I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency. It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a performance antipattern in the modern display server model.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need.
(Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive FPS where a single extra frame of latency lowers your chance of being productive.)
But maybe people want to run XFCE AND play competitive fps?
It would be embarrassing for gnome to be more performant there than XFCE.
Don't full-screen apps sidestep the DE compositor anyway?
It's a specific setting in XFCE you have to turn on, and most people try to bypass it anyway by manually disabling the compositor with hotkeys. Auto detection of the full screen windows has been hit or miss, especially when running things through proton/wine.
Also with x11 if you go through the steps to get Variable Refresh Rate going and you are dual monitor, it will max the refresh of both to the slowest monitor. :(
Wayland doesn't have that issue.
These are valid concerns for those who spend more time playing maybe. I mostly work, all of my monitors are 60Hz, and I only play single-player games.
If I were into hardcore gaming, and used the same machine for daily work, I would likely just end the X session, and switched to a minimalist Wayland session with a menu of games for the entire desktop.
I understand what you are saying about efficiency in theory.
Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
> Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
We call this evolution.
XFCE is X11-only, isn't it? Wayland support is still in development/experimental. I personally use XFCE with X11 to this day.
OpenSUSE Leap 16 has Wayland-only Xfce 4.20, using LabWC as the WM/compositor.
It works but keyboard-driven window management is broken: LabWC doesn't understand the standard (i.e. Windows) keystrokes.
Xfce runs decently on my 10 year old 2-core Atom laptop with 2GB of RAM. It might use some inefficient patterns, not sure about that. But all the modern bloat software has brought basically little added value while eating much more resources, despite the claimed efficiency improvements.
What? The window manger and the panel (plasmashell) are separate processes in a Plasma desktop. In Sway, users typically choose from a range of totally separate applications like swaybar or quickshell for the panel. There’s absolutely no reason the panel has to be coupled with the compositor under Wayland and nobody actually does it that way that I’ve seen.
I do not know what xfce really has to do with X11 vs Wayland, but you could - if one wanted - build an X server that integrates a compositer and window manager. I do not think this has any real technical advantage and I think a modular design is stronger from an engineering point of view.
Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default
What are you talking about? Author is talking about user experience, they way changes (as far as user is concerned) Do Not Happen (much), how they don't try to invent new UI paradigm (cough Gnome cough) and are Not Fucking It Up (cough KDE4 cough).
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
I’d say optimizing a WM like this makes sense. Why would I want to optimize a panel or desktop?
> In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context)
But that's not where we are, a lot of people still haven't moved and XFCE only has premliminary support for wayland at this time.
But it doesn't matter, xfce on X is still great.
Fvwm ran exactly that way on my Pentium-60 and I do not recall ever experiencing performance or latency issues; matter of fact, my Linux desktop of the time was more efficient than Windows. The FvwmPager, FvwmButtons, and FvwmTaskBar modules are separate programs launched by fvwm and communicate with it via IPC. Sacrificing modularity to avoid performance issues that were hard to see even on machines from 30 years ago—let alone on today's hardware—is a bit penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Can you quantify those performance problems? Would I notice them on a 2018 vintage laptop?
Hmm, I'd say that on a 2018-era machine, you won't measure this in raw CPU throughput. In all probablity, your cores are fast enough to mask the context switching. The performance deficit here is strictly in the domain of motion-to-photon latency or frame pacing. I guess my point is that in xfce's split architecture, the compositor acts as just another X11 client.
This enforces a path where window contents often round-trip through the X server before composition. Quantitatively, this typically adds at least one frame of input lag compared to the zero-copy direct scanout path available to monolithic wayland compositors. You likely won't notice this while editing text. However, the architecture doesn't perform well when you attach an external monitor. Since X11 shares a single virtual coordinate space, it cannot synchronize VBLANK across two outputs with different refresh rates or clock domains.
ps: and please don't call your 2018 machine vintage, it makes my secondary thinkpads feel prehistoric :D
My newer desktop (2020 era with a 3070) has 4x 4k monitors attached running XFCE and I have never noticed the lag you speak of. I don't run external monitors on it but my thinkpad x200 with a core 2 duo also does great with xfce.
I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.
You shouldn't notice lag. On modern Xorg the only round-trip is context switches between server and compositor, because the only thing what is shared is texture dma-bufs (there is inefficiency in mesa code for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension, but it is other story). And if dma-bufs is working (Xorg needs to test and pull one MR) you have buffer direct scanouts as in wayland.
Just thinking out loud here, but even if it’s a performance anti pattern, xfce is a light weight de so you wouldn’t see it over all I guess.
To my eye most Linux de’s are much lighter or responsive than windows or Mac
As someone who runs modern XFCE on a core 2 duo I still have without noticable perf issues, the problems the parent talks about are theoretical and not observable.
I am running XFCE on a 2019 vintage desktop. CachyOS and 16GB RAM. It is snappy and very performant for my needs and I work on it daily for software development
16gb of memory an. 2019 is not vintage lol.
2019 is also not vintage IMO.
Vintage would be my MBP Air from 2011 that also run Arch and XFCE on a 4GiB RAM.
"Xfce is lightweight, typically using ~400-600MB RAM at idle"
ROTFL. Moksha, the lightweight desktop for Bodhi Linux, has very low RAM requirements, with a default install using under 100MB of RAM
True. And Fluxbox maybe uses less than 10 MB ram. Context is important - when compared to GNOME and KDE, XFCE does use less resources and is indeed snappier, with near feature parity.