Jan
24
2007
Overview of Xfce 4.4
Posted by luna6
Xfce is another Open Source Desktop Manager like KDE or GNOME, that has traditionally been known for being lightweight and able to run more efficiently on slower hardware. Through the years Xfce has gradually added more features, but still has kept the bloat down to a minimum. With the long awaited release of version 4.4, Xfce is now competitive with the big boys.
Some of the new features you will find Xfce 4.4 is an improved Thunar File Manager, improved Xfwm window manager, Xfdesktop, and Xfce Panels. In this review we will cover some of these new features and give our impressions on Xfce 4.4. Click the read the rest of this entry for the review.
One of the first things you will notice about Xfce 4.4 is the clean layout, with a modern style that say’s “2007″ from the get go. Xfce has its own file manager named Thunar, which has been seriously improved in 4.4. So much so that I now prefer Thunar over Nautilus and Konqueror. The file manager feels light, yet has ample features and allows for heavy customization. There is even a “Bulk Renamer” function built into Thunar! The amount of customizability, without the bloated feelings, is what most impressed me in Thunar. As an example, you have the option (under View setting) to select either View as Icons, View as Detailed List, or View as Compact List. Although the icon and detailed list view are common, the View as Compact List is not so common and I found that view to be the most appealing of the three choices (less scrolling and information is all there).
Also under View in Thunar/Location Selector, you can pick “Toolbar Style” which will add a handy input box, where you can type in the directory you want to see.
Some other options in Thunar can be found under View/Sidepane. There you have a choice for Shortcuts (default) or Tree View. This is an awesome feature, which allows the user to easily drag and drop files from from one directory hierarchy (on the right) to another folder hierarchy (on the left). While using Thunar I get the lightweight feeling of Gnome’s Nautilus, but having the options (especially 2 seperate window panels) that KDE’s Konqueror provides. I was very impressed with Thunar!
With Xfce 4.4, you can now do something that has been available on most other Desktop Manager for a long time, which is the ability to add icons on the actual desktop itself. Although I prefer a clean layout without icons on the desktop, it is nice to have this simple choice and that choice is now there. Albeit, the manner in which applications are added to the desktop was less intuitive than it should be. You have to first right click on the desktop, then select Create Launcher, then fill in the boxes for name and command, and then select an icon from a pop window. It would have been nicer to just right click on the desktop, see a list of installed applications, and click the one you want added to the desktop. Maybe this could be added for the next release?
It seems the Settings Manager under the main Applications on the top menu bar, has also seen a lot of improvements.
The control panel like Settings Manager, organizes the applets that are useful in customizing Xfce to your needs. One of the more nifty applets found in Xfce Settings Manager would be Window Manager Tweaks. This applet allows users to enable Compositing effects that are built in Xfce 4.4. Furthermore, you can easily control the opacity of windows, inactive windows, windows during moves, during resize and even popup windows. This allows applications to have a translucent effect that looks neat. With most desktop eye candy, I prefer just a little of the bling, so I ended turning down the opacity to a bare minimum. Yet, I has very pleased with the results.
Other useful applet settings you can find within Xfce Settings Manager is for the customization of the Desktop, Display, File Manager, Splash Screen, Sessions & Startup, and Sound. A new applet included in Xfde 4.4 is the Orage calendar applet and you can find the settings for Orage within the Xfce Settings Manager as well.
For users not familiar with Xfce, you should know that you can change the locations and sizes of the two Xfce panels located on the top and bottom portions of the desktop. Another new feature in Xfce is the ability to have the panels floating anywhere on the desktop. Also, you can select to have to have the panels float either vertically or horizontally and with or without translucency. Although I don’t think I would use the panels in this fashion, they did look kind of cool.
As most people should know, applications are not generally dependent on the desktop manager, so you can run any of the KDE/Gnome or 3rd party application in Xfce. Furthermore Xfce shares the gtk toolkit that is used by Gnome, so common Gnome applications (Gimp, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc) look great within Xfce. Also just in case anyone is wondering, you can have your eye candy (bling bling) in Xfce as well. I had no problems running Beryl within Xfce, although I did encounter some minor bugs which would be related to the Beryl program itself. Here’s some pictures of the bling.
To conclude this overview of Xfce 4.4, I will say that Xfce 4.4 has matured in a very impressive manner. Although Xfce 4.4 won’t make me ditch KDE or Gnome, I wil have it installed on my computer and use it often. Furthermore, if I had a slower computer, I would definitely use Xfce over Gnome or KDE. The improvements in Xfce 4.4 were noticeable and appreciated (as it well should be, since this release took almost 2 years). My favorite feature of Xfce 4.4 would easily be the new and improved Thunar File Manager. Thunar is lightweight (no bloat) similar to Gnome’s Nautilus, but allows for the customization that Kde’s Konqueror offers. Other refinements in Xfce 4.4 that were appreciated were the compositing effects built into Xfce 4.4 and the very well organized “Settings Manager.” To be honest, I haven’t used Xfce in a long time, and with Xfce 4.4 I was surprised by the amount of customization available to their users. For anyone interested in Xfce 4.4, I would most whole heartedly recommend you try out the desktop yourself. You should be able to find Xfce as an option in the next versions of all the major Linux distos. For Ubuntu & Kubuntu users, just a simple “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop” will do the trick.
Comments
19 Comments so far
I love Xfce 4.4. Everything works quickly and smoothly. A few additions to this article are in order, however. First, thewegger was right: this is Xubuntu’s GNOME-like panel layout, not Xfce’s. Also, the article doesn’t mention Thunar’s most powerful feature: custom actions. Check out http://thunar.xfce.org/pwiki/documentation/custom_actions for more. Still, this was a nice review. Keep up the good work!
Thank I didn’t know about the Window Manager Tweaks fun stuff
Winston
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Xfce used to be a lightweight desktop alternative but I must say from using xfce a lot in the past 4.4 is disappointing. A lot of the new stuff requires extremely frustrating installations if your not using a distro that alredy has gnome installed. An example is the new dbus thats required for the file manager to work properly. If you don’t have dbus stuff doesent work properly and trying to get it installed manually is a fight worth forgetting to fight. This version has pushed me back to icewm im sad to say. But the light of all it is if you are using a distro and wish to have a middle ground WM between gnome and icewm this fills that spot nicely. I still do like the new one just wish it was a little easier to get stuff working properly.
What is nice about gentoo is the package management. Emerge does take some compilation time, but generally behaves very nicely on many architectures. This makes it easy to move from i386 to ppc. Emerge is very similar to apt. On the other hand, Emerge is more powerful, however because of useflags. Imagine the frustration of having to recompile netatalk on ubuntu because it was compiled without SSL support.
rpm distros have certainly come a long way, but the package management is what appeals to most users, not the “speed bonus”
Out of curiosity what’s so good about Gentoo? I’m not interested in tweaking my system endlessly to gain a few percentage points in speed improvement. Does Gentoo offer anything else besides this aspect? I have heard a lot about it and wonder if its worth my time to check out. - Currently using Suse 10.2
Damn, Gentoo’s going to take ages as usual hard masking this package. Until then I’m stuck with xffm.
Thunar is awesome! I could trash my gnome-desktop and use XFCE4.4 for this piece of software.
AFAIK thunar does not support network connectivity yet (i.e. an easy way to browse thru samba shares, nfs, ssh etc). That’s one of the main reasons for me to stick with gnome & nautilus. OTOH, I’m strongly missing the “compact list” view in nautilus.
The RPMs for Xfce 4.4 final are available in the development tree (a.k.a rawhide) for testing purposes. I think they will be in extras for FC6 in one or two weeks.
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sirrahn :
Good point, I should have mentioned that in the article. Basically for me to make the switch, the app has to be better and not just comparable. That was the main reason. Cheers
Nice to see you running Xubuntu. :)
Nice review & good screenshots, but it would have been nice to know the reasons why if xfce is so great you wouldn’t replace gnome or kde with it. What do they have that you, or possibly I, need?
I like the light-weightedness of Xfce. It definately at least *feels* a faster than regular gnome. But for me the only feature thats really awesome is “bulk rename”. Never been easier to deal with large collections of files without bothering with the command line ;)
By the way, sidepane tree view has been in nautilus for ages …
@Mack:
The Xfce 4 packages for FC6 are in the extras repository which is enabled by default. At the time of writing this, it’s at version 4.3.99 (Last(?) snapshot before saying its final). I’d guess they’ll release the final packages soon, anyway.
To install, type “sudo yum install xfce4*” and all available (quite a few) xfce related packages will be installed. Switch session … et voila.
This looks like the Ubuntu/Xubuntu configuration of xfce. The default looks similar to what it always has…not like a lightweight GNOME.
Having the separate tree view in the right side pane in Thunar looks very promising. One reason why I always found Nautilus lacking. Looking forwards to checking out Xfce 4.4 - good job guys!
Looking at those screenshots, It is clear to me that Xfce is getting real close to becoming the next Gnome. Besides the toolkit used (gtk+) the similarityes are screaming. Thunar looks like a stripped down Nautilus, the Settings Manager is identical to gnome’s, the Application’s menu, and even the about window resembles gnome. The question remains, is Xfce going to become the “Lightweight Gnome Desktop” ?
Damn, I am impressed with what the guys at Xfce has done. Hopefully the new features doesn’t add to much bloat, because I liked what I saw from Xfce in the past. Also, how do I install in this? I’m using Fedora Core 6.