Xfce

Recently, I was on a spree of trying desktop environments. My primary desktop has been KDE so far. I had used GNOME from Ubuntu live cds and on my roomie's laptop. So the two giants are out of the question and I went for other desktop environments.

I had heard that Xfce had recently shown improvements. I tried it for the following two basic reasons:
(i) speed
(ii) less resource consuming.

To quote Olivier Fourdan, the creatorof Xfce, it is a free software desktop environment based on the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+ 2.x) and aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. "Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources." (Olivier Fourdan, creator)Xfce is a free software desktop environment based on the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+ 2.x) and aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. "Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources."

Getting Xfce was easy with YaST. I just had to check the Xfce pattern and accept the selections. The rest was taken care of by YaST and SUSE. openSUSE can be considered really productive in this regard.

Xfce is said to be a CDE clone and therefore is obviously lightweight and performance oriented. I liked the availability of a button for shade mode for all windows as you can see above. There is also a Mac style dock at the bottom. By default it provided me double click environment unlike KDE's single click one. It supports XMMS as its media player. However I got Amarok playing on it as I am kind of obsessed with Amarok now. You can find the Amarok in the systray in the top right corver above.


Thunar the default file manager for Xfce, is seen above. It resembles Nautilus and is designed for speed and a low memory footprint. It is highly customizable through plugins.

My next post will be about the next trial - Enlightenment.