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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The move to Wayland from X enables the commercialization of linux solidifying DRM stakeholders in the ecosystem. I assume this promotion of XFCE is a veiled protesting of DRM. I support this.
I have no idea what - or why - you wrote these three sentences. Do they have anything to do with the xfce entry linked in? Because I don't see the connection.
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.
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.
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.
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? 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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Xfcd is still a pc knockoff. Let's see more attempts to knockff macs, which have far, far better thought-out ui. Then maybe we can make something better! I'd pay serious money for a decent os that tries to copy macos.
That's hilarious. Remind me, which colour represent “maximize” again? And why are half of the apps I constantly use stuck in a group together such that I have to use a different key to switch between them? And where is the handle to resize a window, anyway?
You only think osx is better designed because you're used to and therefore blind to the various papercuts that osx inflicts upon its users.
This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.
Gnome is only similar to macOS in the most superficial of ways. You don't even have to go beyond skin-deep for the illusion to start to fall apart. It compares more closely to iPadOS or Android in desktop mode.
Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.
Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.
Gnome is still a windows knockoff yea? Can you use readline bindings in a textfield?
Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application.
> You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?
Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguishable from other windows knockoffs
readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line.
bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically.
macOS adopted some (but not all) of the common keybinds from that era into their UI. I.e., in a GUI text entry field in macOS, you can hit ^A to move the cursor to the start of the text entry.
(I don't know that this particular UI-ism would make or break an OS for me, personally, though.)
Given how UI is implemented, this would be up to the toolkit. In GTK3, this was called "key themes"; there was, I think, an "Emacs" theme that would do what they desire. I do not know if GTK4 still has this, however (and I suspect it was removed).
(I think more users are going to expect ^A to be select-all, and home/end and ^← for word navigation, etc. These are the defaults. Thus key themes were probably little used.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Loved XFCE but it's borderline unusable with high DPI monitors and dual monitor setups that aren't the same.
Yeah, I noticed this recently with my ultra-widescreen monitor. That was indeed strange; normally XFCE works super-well.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
Anyone using it with Niri?
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.
The move to Wayland from X enables the commercialization of linux solidifying DRM stakeholders in the ecosystem. I assume this promotion of XFCE is a veiled protesting of DRM. I support this.
I have no idea what - or why - you wrote these three sentences. Do they have anything to do with the xfce entry linked in? Because I don't see the connection.
What on earth do the Direct Rendering Manager api have to do with commercialization?
That 500x313 screenshot of the desktop does not help any argument.
Try this one: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330
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.
XFCE is great for VNC setups where a full desktop is unrealistic
Yup. That’s what I use it for.
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.
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.
XFCE is X11-only, isn't it? Wayland support is still in development/experimental. I personally use XFCE with X11 to this day.
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.
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? 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’d say optimizing a WM like this makes sense. Why would I want to optimize a panel or desktop?
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!
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
"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.
Xfcd is still a pc knockoff. Let's see more attempts to knockff macs, which have far, far better thought-out ui. Then maybe we can make something better! I'd pay serious money for a decent os that tries to copy macos.
> far, far better thought-out ui
That's hilarious. Remind me, which colour represent “maximize” again? And why are half of the apps I constantly use stuck in a group together such that I have to use a different key to switch between them? And where is the handle to resize a window, anyway?
You only think osx is better designed because you're used to and therefore blind to the various papercuts that osx inflicts upon its users.
Can I pin a specific window to the front?
- macOS (Quartz): No, you'll need a third-party app.
- Windows (dwm): No, you'll need PowerToys.
- xfwm4: Yes, you can do it out-of-the-box.
This seems like a concern specific to people who want to use windows. I don't know what pin means.
You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?
This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.
Gnome is only similar to macOS in the most superficial of ways. You don't even have to go beyond skin-deep for the illusion to start to fall apart. It compares more closely to iPadOS or Android in desktop mode.
Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.
I’m wildly confused at this claim. More like iPadOS, really??
Philosophically, yes. See decisions like hiding the minimize button, systematically eliminating menu bars, large highly padded touch-like control metrics, and generally omitting functions wherever possible. There’s also the mobile OS style top bar. It’s more customizable than iPadOS and doesn’t obscure the filesystem, but otherwise the two are very similar.
Gnome is still a windows knockoff yea? Can you use readline bindings in a textfield?
Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application.
> You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?
Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguishable from other windows knockoffs
> You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field.
We "PC" users have a dedicated key for that on our keyboard, it is called "home". We even have the opposite, a dedicated key called "end".
I am more confused than when we started, what exactly are you saying macOS is doing that nobody else is doing?
> use readline bindings in a textfield
I don’t even know what this means.
They mean pretty much like they say.
readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line.
bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically.
macOS adopted some (but not all) of the common keybinds from that era into their UI. I.e., in a GUI text entry field in macOS, you can hit ^A to move the cursor to the start of the text entry.
(I don't know that this particular UI-ism would make or break an OS for me, personally, though.)
Given how UI is implemented, this would be up to the toolkit. In GTK3, this was called "key themes"; there was, I think, an "Emacs" theme that would do what they desire. I do not know if GTK4 still has this, however (and I suspect it was removed).
(I think more users are going to expect ^A to be select-all, and home/end and ^← for word navigation, etc. These are the defaults. Thus key themes were probably little used.)