Awesome. Been using XFCE for ages. It hits just the right spot of modern features and usability without trying to re-invent the desktop paradigm for the Nth time. If you just want "Win98, but in 2022," you've found your desktop environment.
WRT this update, the Thunar updates look fantastic. The File Highlight feature looks especially cool. I can imagine using that to highlight really frequently used folders in my home dir ("projects" folder etc) to make them stand out in the file browser. Customizing the toolbar buttons is a welcome feature. I'm also glad to see improvements on the default application feature, which I found difficult to use before.
Woah, that brings me back. There used to be a Linux Mint theme that was a facsimile of Mac OS Classic, I've since lost track of what it was called and digging through the themes repository yields no results.
As an enthusiastic XFCE user, do you mind answering a question? How do you usually launch applications?
I can appreciate the discoverability provided by a nested start menu but I've grown very fond of text launchers with autocomplete provided by gnome, mac os, dmenu, etc.
Here's what I did back when I used XFCE a couple of years ago:
The xfce whiskermenu plugin includes a text search feature that looks similar to the one from Windows. On Xubuntu the whiskermenu is the default "start menu" while in some other distros you may need to add it in the panel settings. Finally, in the keyboard shortcuts bind Super to the xfce4-popup-whiskermenu command, to bring up whisker menu for a text search.
> Finally, in the keyboard shortcuts bind Super to the xfce4-popup-whiskermenu command, to bring up whisker menu for a text search.
I've had this trigger the popup menu when there is another shortcut that binds the Super key in combination with something else. Say, if I had something under Super+R, then the menu would also open. Though maybe this has been patched out in the newer versions, I remember that issue being the case in an XFCE desktop from 2020.
But other than that, this is indeed a really nice and usable setup!
ksuperkey[0] addresses this, though it is unfortunately not widely packaged so you likely have to compile it. I haven't used it in a while, but it worked well when last I did.
I worked around this issue using xcape to map my Super key to another key combo:
xcape -e "Super_L=Alt_L|F1"
Then set the keyboard shortcut for xfce4-popup-whiskermenu to the new combo (Alt+F1 in this case). This allows other Super shortcuts to work without triggering whiskermenu.
I use rofi on pretty much any desktop environment, it's super great. I'm eagerly awaiting its window-search feature getting wayland support (Knowing wayland it will be compositor-specific though...).
For super common stuff, I have icons in my panel for them and I use the mouse. I open Terminal so often that I gave it its own global keyboard shortcut.
For less often used things, I use the xfce program launcher, which I think is what you're looking for. I have it mapped to some keyboard shortcut (the muscle memory is so automatic I don't even remember what the shortcut is and I'm not at my PC at the moment). It automatically focuses the text entry box, so no need for the mouse at all. Here's a screenshot from the linked article: https://alexxcons.github.io/images/blogpost_8/appfinder.png
Not the parent but I have the Xfce AppFinder bound to the Super (Windows) key. I think I'm somewhat misusing it, but it's fast enough that I can strike Super and then immediately start typing the name of what I want. Dropped keys are rare, but it's not quite as fast as something like dmenu.
I bind <ctrl> + <esc> to the "Application Finder". This makes it launch with keybindings matching those that launch the Windows start menu. I start typing the program and it narrows down the results until the program is selected. Then, I hit <enter> and it opens the program.
* In Applications -> Settings Manager -> Keyboard Shortcuts
* + Add
* command: xfce4-appfinder
* shortcut: Ctrl + Escape
----
My other favorite bindings are to tile a window into a quadrant of the screen.
<super+R> (at least on my settings, don't remember if that is the default) opens "Application Launcher", which gives you a search prompt that finds (AFAICT) by executable name and definitions in .desktop and .service files.
Are you using WhiskerMenu? It should really have replaced the default application launcher by now. It upgrades the launching experience from Windows 98 to at least Windows 7.
I use gmrun for many years, in every DE, bind to Alt+F2. I am happy that now there is a new home here https://github.com/wdlkmpx/gmrun. I cannot imagine using something else.
I know my desktop is a mess but I usually have one window with many terminals open.
So if I want to start a program without going through the menu
Alt Tab to the terminal window, then I start it from the commandline (gimp, code, blender, godot, etc.)
For browser windows and terminals I have special Launcher buttons on the panel. For the rest, sometimes from the menu, often straight from the command line in a terminal.
> WRT this update, the Thunar updates look fantastic
Nice! I'm a Thunar user (but not XFCE in general) and missed that updates to Thunar was included until I saw your comment. As someone who deals a lot with images, the preview is a very welcome change! Really happy with Thunar.
I've used XFCE (since Mar 9th, 2008 until Apr 7th, 2021) now using "i3-wm v4.21" as my main window manager on all computers. But I still use a lot of XFCE software like Thunar been most notable. Thunar has received much needed love, thank you to all developers making it better. Thunar now has "Split View" (dual pane mode) this is one of the reasons why I used more "PCManFM" or "ranger", but unlike Thunar "PCManFM" never had an option to hide "menu" in GTK only in QT. And now Thunar's menu/toolbar is more customizable. File Highlight is a nice addition, I've been using custom "LS_COLORS" for terminal for a while now. Now all the Thunar needs is embeded file info dialog similar to side pane and maybe ability to have toolbar vertical (on left or right) ;-)
EDIT: One of the best choices XFCE team made is to not use/enable CSD [1] by default. This would of killed XFCE project for those of us who love classic XFCE look. Please never force users to use CSD, make it an option(al). Thank you!
[1] Window Header Bars - All header bars of Xfce Windows/Dialogs by default will be drawn by the window manager now (Xfwm4). Some dialogs optionally support 'GtkHeaderBar' (CSD) which can be enabled via a xfconf setting.
You should give i3 + XFCE a go... Start an XFCE session, launch Session and Startup settings, disable xfwm4 and xfdesktop, add i3, relogin. Done! XFCE DE with i3 window management.
Interesting. I also run i3 with XFCE components but I cherry pick them and start them under my i3 session. Specifically I use the xfsettingsd from xfce so I can still customize the appearance using the Settings app, and without having to restart the session for them to take effect
Is this what they do with the Fedora i3 spin? Sounds (looks) a lot like it. I'm very new to Linux and I was wondering about "that other DE" when I just wanted i3. Maybe I have to go for Fedora Core + i3 separately then.
I have almost the same config as you. Wonder what distro you are using. I use Ubuntu 22.04 with XFCE and i3, installed in that order. However, I noticed that the file chooser for snap apps (firefox, chromium) does not work. Every time I want to save a file, a 'Save as...' dialog appear and when you start typing the file name, the dialog starts showing all file names that matches whatever your are typing (ie it triggers the file searcher).
One of the nice things about XFCE is that its window manager includes a style called “Kokodi” (on CentOS 8 Streaming) which shows the active or focused window with a distinctive blue title bar.
I’ve found that many other window managers (including MS Windows), don’t make this visually obvious (i.e., there’s little difference between the focused and non-active windows) which makes it harder to discern which application is currently active while using multiple monitors.
I remember the days when you could pick a theme (which was just a set of bitmaps with a fixed palette) and then pick a couple of "accent colors" to customise it. If you picked your favourite shade of dark wine red as your GTK_ACCENT_COLOR (might have been called something else, I forget), then highlighted things like buttons, selected text, and the title bar of the active window only would be that color.
I loved the old flexibility of being able to choose the shape of my buttons, title bars and widgets and then tweak the color myself - "I like that theme's rounded buttons, but I want them in red not blue" kind of thing.
Does anyone know of a good way to disable that braindead window fading "feature" in GTK? If you look at the changelog, the text in the inactive window is barely readable. I have to squint to read it on most monitors.
Fading it is also unnecessary in most applications. Gnome apps need to do it because they have no titlebar, but this isn't a problem in most cases, and xfwm can draw titlebars just fine.
I know I can manually overload the GTK theme's backdrop properties but I was kind of hoping someone on the Interwebs found a way that doesn't require me to drag .css hacks over umpteen computers.
Background: a good chunk of my work involves things like comparing simulation and measurement results among multiple applications/windows. Text in inactive windows being unreadable is a little counterproductive when I try to do that. I begrudgingly put up with the huge widgets but having to squint at screens for eight hours a day is not fun.
It's not the compositor, sadly, this is a GTK "feature". GTK allows you to define colors for various elements separately, depending on whether the window has focus or not. This is a good idea on paper, but in practice it seems this either doesn't have enough granularity (to allow e.g. dimming button text, which is probably useless when the window doesn't have focus, but not the text in text views, for instance, which you might actually want to read even from unfocused windows), or most theme designers, including Adwaita's, use it indiscriminately.
If you have a high-DPI monitor with good contrast it actually looks okay. But I routinely have to work with work-issued, ten year-old monitors in artificially-lit offices. It's really terrible.
I see. I guess the only solution is to go on a theme hunt, then. I use Bunsen themes with XFCE, and haven't encountered that problem, but I don't use a lot of GTK3 apps.
That is not what I'm asking about. I don't mean the opacity of inactive window. What I want to disable is GTK's setting of the color of various elements depending on whether the window has focus or not. Even with compositor opacity set at 100%, GTK windows that don't have focus get that dim grey text. The color is, technically, theme-defined; unfortunately, both Adwaita and Greybird use a really low-contrast color that I find really difficult to read on some monitors.
That's what I'm doing at the moment. However, that means a) maintaining a custom GTK theme which, given upstream's commitment to theming, is about as fun as chewing nails and about as reliable as a teapot made of chocolate and b) dragging it with me across multiple computers. I was hoping there's a better option.
No solution, only sympathy, but I agree, what an unpleasant situation. You get me started I will go on and on about how much better our desktop environment could be if designers cared a little more about how things work, not just how they look.
unable to select/copy any arbitrary text(A major saving grace of the web app is that you can actually select text)
modal dialogs.
being able manipulate a lower window without raising it.
My personal pet peeve is "crowded interfaces". Lots of modern facelifts attempt to solve the "clutter" problem by making the widgets larger and improving widget space and padding. Which does actually make the whole thing look nicer, and does make things easier to find to some degree...
...except it also reduces the document viewport, literally making the space I look at most of the time more cluttered just in order to get the part I almost never look at to look better.
I swear to God the quality of modern interfaces would skyrocket if the people who design them had to learn how to use them first and just go through a project with them, start to finish. Bullshit like monochrome icons you can't tell apart and touch-sized widgets on professional workstations would evaporate in a matter of months.
Scanning through the feature list, the more straightforward management of the application/mime type associations is a big win to me.
Like probably most people who use XFCE, I appreciate how it focuses on small, incremental quality-of-life improvements instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Kudos for the xfce team to keep up the project after all these years. I haven't used desktop Linux in a couple years, but xubuntu and Debian / xfce were always great experiences.
I think this project is really underrated, and I think xfce yo and attitudes towards interface are really good. It's also super stable!
I've been using XFCE for many years now (currently though Xubuntu). It stays out of the way. I'm glad to see continued improvements without forcing a complete remake or overhaul for the sake of change.
Issues i have with the path bar (from the top of my head)
1. it is not permanent, it disappears and never remember anything
2. it doesn't respect the paths (can't navigate)
3. i don't want to play a keyboard shortcuts game
That's just one of the issues i have with the Gnome Filepicker, there is also the mounted disks that appears like it's a mobile UX, and many more, i have a document with everything that i hate about it, but i'm not on my PC to share it, it is an UX disaster
I wish i could use Thunar as a filepicker, that would be perfect
> i have a document with everything that i hate about it
I can save you the effort by reminding everyone that the GTK3 file picker is a significant setback from the Windows 98 filepicker, and it the amount of times I encounter it on Linux is beginning to feel like flagellation.
> 1. it is not permanent, it disappears and never remember anything
What is it supposed to remember? Last path you opened? Seems to work fine for me in Firefox at least. First I tried uploading a image to imgur from my Downloads directory, then next time I wanted to select a picture it opened into the Downloads directory. Then I uploaded a image from my Pictures directory and next time it opened, it opened directly to the Pictures directory. Is this not what you mean?
> 2. it doesn't respect the paths (can't navigate)
Not sure what this means, if you type in /tmp and then Enter it'll navigate to /tmp just as you expect it to. If you're in /tmp/directory it shows "$DriveName / tmp / directory" and clicking on any of them navigates to the right place.
> 3. i don't want to play a keyboard shortcuts game
Why do you want to have a path bar that you type into then if you don't want to use the keyboard? Just manually double-click your way to success instead of using the keyboard, nothing is stopping you. Either use the keyboard, or don't. Both approaches work.
At least on normal Ubuntu 22.04 the path bar behaves as you'd expect - it shows what you've clicked on, and if you click on the path bar and start typing a path it goes where you say.
I really enjoy the Linux lightweight desktop environments. Not as whizzy as some of the heavyweight environments, but so much more usable and functional, in my opinion.
I am personally a fan of LXDE. It just gets out of my way and lets me do stuff!
Yeah, that's the direct reference[1] but also more recent junk like ads in Explorer on Windows[2]. They're examples of the DE (maybe the wrong term, sorry) devs getting in the way of users doing what they want to do.
Not sure exactly what the OP was getting at, but it might be a dig at Windows and the random junk it keeps popping up now and again (news updates and whatnot).
Nice, and congrats to the team that have worked on this!
I look forward to this rolling on through to debian in the coming weeks and months. HiDPI improvements are welcome, and the other tweaks and updates look good. Xfce has been my daily driver for over ten years now (I think...), and I hope that it's unopinionated, configurable attitude has a lot of life in it yet.
I used to use XFCE as a desktop of choice, but switched to Plasma/KDE instead as XFCE didn't have great HiDPI support. Maybe I should try it out again.
I think at least one of their devs uses OpenBSD as their primary OS, but I read that as a comment, so not sure if ture. It's great XFCE is available across distros and the BSD's
Should be worth noting that NetBSD is its own thing; FreeBSD and OpenBSD haven't had problems getting the newest GNOME versions for the entire lifetime of 3.0 and higher.
Unlike Linux, the BSDs aren't distributions of some "upstream BSD"; instead they are developed independently with different feature sets and different goals. Unique challenges for NetBSD don't reflect on how other BSD derivations behave.
I know that, but GNOME support on FreeBSD and OpenBSD wasn't frictionless either. They just took care of it a lot faster/sooner. A ton of work has gone into getting GNOME working on both FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as it does from some developers on the GNOME project and FreeBSD and OpenBSD developers helping out too. Just because it doesnt appear to be as big of a problem today, doesn't mean it never was.
XFCE was my main desktop for a long time, it's what I'd go back to if Cinnamon ever stopped been the one I use everywhere - Cinnamon in many ways feels like what XFCE would have been if it was started decades later - it also (like XFCE) doesn't screw with the standard desktop UX approach and that's a must for me, 28 years of using basically the same approach makes me feel uncomfortable on anything else.
Could probably be theme dependent, as I have what look like 3 pixels in there https://i.imgur.com/LD4BF4E.png :) (I use the Arc Dark theme)
I usually do right click on the title bar to resize the window. But that muscle memory might have been conditioned from having to deal with 1px corners in the past!
That's fine and all (I make heavy use of this — always miss it on Windows), but it's a workaround to a legitimately inferior UX decision.
It's similar to when early Dell XPS's would overheat when gaming with the monitor open, because the monitor itself would block the sole exhaust vent. The workaround then was to attach an external monitor and keep the laptop screen at 45 degrees.
Same here. I love XFCE, but this is really annoying. I would solve it by protruding a small shape from the windows external sides/angles that can be grabbed more easily as soon as the mouse pointer approaches them, rather than using thicker windows borders.
I don't use XFCE, but maybe it's possible to fix this with an xfwm4 theme? The theme I used on sawfish back in the day had a similar 1-pixel grab area, and I was able to change it by forking the theme and modifying it.
I've used XFCE seemingly forever, at least 20 years.
In recent years I've grown to dislike Thunar and a variety of other things that were mostly GTK issues and some XFCE issues. I was really frustrated with clicking on the system tray and having that click register as a click on the menu that popped up, that just so happened to be 'Quit', and closing the app.
Then I upgraded my computer in a huge jump. Sure, games were faster, but I wouldn't enjoy the results of my investment at any given moment. So I switched to KDE for the first time ever, with animations and sexiness everywhere. It's got it's issues, and it's multi-monitor support is really sub-par, but so many things suddenly work better.
Best example: The flow of clicking on a ZIP to download and ultimately looking at the extacted output in new folder is suddenly effortless and intuitive.
I love the polish of KDE and while I'm tempted to give XFCE another try, the thought of giving up on the effortless sanity of KDE for GTK funk makes me shudder.
I didn't really like the default look of version 4. Oxygen had depressing colors, it lacked fineness. I always switched the theme to Fusion, or Cleanlooks, which imitated the Clearlooks GTK theme.
Version 5, with Breeze, is really good. Very elegant. By the way I also tend to find Gnome with the Breeze theme way nicer than with Adwaita (which is already fine).
The only DE I find almost as nice looking as Plasma with the default settings is macOS.
They are also constantly cleaning up the UI and making it simpler, bit by bit.
Thank you for this information, I'm interested. Does Gala let you bind keyboard shortcuts for window moving/resizing actions? That's the main reason I'm still using OpenBox with XFCE.
Ever since I switched my desktop to Linux, I've been using Cinnamon. I've noticed XFCE, and occasionally used it briefly on some machine, but I've certainly not explored its capabilities (e.g. from the Chicago95 link I gather it can definitely be a "traditional desktop layout" style affair, perhaps with a different launcher.
Can someone point out to me, as a Cinnamon user - who remembers the Windows 5 UI fondly -some aspects of XFCE I might find appealing?
It just acts like a well-polished traditional desktop that doesn't try force you to change the way you work.
It's lightweight, theme-able, and you can put controls/widgets/shortcuts wherever you like on the panels. Whatever panels you want, wherever you want.
I have mine set up to look quite a lot like the default gnome-2 setup from Solaris 20 years ago.bottom bar is a task bar, top bar has the whisker menu (like the start menu) in the top left corner, a bunch of shortcuts, a cpu activity monitor and then on the right the 'systray' style thing.
You could set it up as one bar like win2k if you wanted. People do. Beyond that the experience is good, consistent, intuitive, and doesn't try to forcce you to work their way.
Weird that the page neglects to explain what xfce is, even by hyperlink
After several clicks:
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.
I love XFCE but it has some strange bug with custom keybindings that unfortunately spoils the experience for me. I have spent many hours trying to work around it but eventually gave up.
General population needs a "desktop," I get it. But for those comfortable with the CLI, a window manager (e.g., one that does not suck [0]) should be good enough. (Coming from personal experience - used Gnome/KDE/XFCE, enjoyed them all, in the end went back to a blissful world of MWM.)
> It is now possible to arrange custom actions in cascading submenus. Just enter the same submenu name for a custom action in order to place it into the same menu. If you require multiple menu levels, you can achieve that by using `/` in the path of the 'Submenu' entry.
In 2012 KDE AppMenu Runner was presented as a "plugin which allows to browse, search and select the menubar of the active application".[0]
In 2019 I requested to somehow implement a feature, similar to Blender's "Menu Search"/"Operator Search"[1], into Olive Video Editor.[2]
After resulted0 "Action Search" was implemented into Olive Video Editor (`/`) shortcut, its code was reused for "Action Search" in Scribus (`Ctrl+/`) and then converted into Qt5-plugin.[3,4]
Year later, this Qt5-plugin code reused in for implementing global "Action Search" in helloSystem FreeBSD distribution.[5]
Then "Search and Run a Command" (`/`) was added into GIMP.[6]
Guess, GIMP's implementation may be used for other GTK-based apps too (especially Inkscape, which still has no such feature).
XFCE should be spending all of its development efforts on supporting Wayland. The project's priorities are clearly not in the right place to ensure the future growth of the project. Market share will continue to decline until wayland support is added, no matter how great any new features are.
Switching to wayland is not a small feat, even if libraries like wlroots can reduce significantly the work.
XFCE is not a commerical project, it doesn't really care about market share I guess. They have plans to move towards wayland support but those things takes time.
> Market share will continue to decline until wayland support is added, no matter how great any new features are.
It might be that they are not interested on "Market share". Or they are but not enough to justify the work. I'm sure they would be glad to accept a pull request.
I had to abandon XFCE due to some issue with aging XFCE4 libraries and high cpu problems, switched to KDE Plasma 5.x,. got 50% longer battery lifetime and havent looked back.
They need to focus on these kinds of problems, not on adding new features, otherwise I would have stayed.
I am happy they decided to spend their time first on supporting GTK v3. GTK v2 is disappearing from distro's and the situation was getting urgent. This happened on 4.16 and I suppose a lot more small work for it happened in 4.18.
I am also happy they decided to release more often, allthough once a year turned out to be too short. Supporting applications on Wayland is already a great step. How they decide to build their Wayland compositor is not fully clear, I think it is wise they take the time for that, to build something that they can support and maintain for years to come with a small team of people.
I've honestly never noticed the problem, so I never saw the problem with X in the first place.
(It is possible that I have never experienced a truly beautiful desktop, but my eyes are no longer particularly precise enough to operate at modern pixel densities)
People also complain loudly about Hi-DPI support and tearing with X. I've not noticed either of them being an issue ever. I can play videos fine and I can plug my laptop into a 55" TV, and it all just works (as far as I can tell) with plain old X11.
>People also complain loudly about Hi-DPI support and tearing with X. I've not noticed either of them being an issue ever.
Why wouldn't they complain for something that affects them? If you don't have any issues, that's great for you, but that doesn't help those who do in any way, so why do you downplay their issues?
X always worked fine for me and my basic use case. I do agree something new is needed to replace it, but I don't have a need to try it until it's more mature.
I see a lot of pushback here but I'll mention why I'm eager for my DE of choice to get Wayland support: Gaming under Xorg with multi-monitors can get very hitchy/teary, and Wayland is focused on smooth frame delivery.
Details if anyone wants it: The game itself may only be running on one monitor, but it doesn't matter, if I have multi monitors active it'll hitch. You can apparently mitigate this somewhat by making sure all your monitors are running the exact same frame rate, but two of my monitors run 59.95Hz while the third runs 59.92Hz, that's not close enough, and I can't seem to get them to something common like 59.00 Hz. I tried disabling two monitors while playing on the third, and it's better, but still far from perfect.
I tried a very recent KDE on Wayland and while gaming felt smooth, its multi-monitor support is very buggy right now -- actually the whole DE felt really buggy -- so that's out.
I really wish gamescope could be run on top of Xorg and the game could 'just' run in that...
I would love to try XFCE on Wayland. I used to love that DE, but I haven't been able to stand uncomposited Xorg in a decade (running xcompmgr is not good enough).
Are there concrete plans to migrate to wayland?
EDIT: of course you're getting downvoted because you dared utter the W-word. Come on people, this is not Reddit.
That page says: "For Xfce 4.18, the plan is to ensure our applications are working acceptably on Wayland"
Since this is the 4.18 release and Wayland is not mentioned in the blog post, it's reasonable to ask if that plan is still in place. (I do agree it's up to XFCE maintainers and contributors to set the pace, if any, for Wayland support).
> it's reasonable to ask if that plan is still in place
Do you think it is more likely that that user found the wiki page, performed the same analysis as you, then came back here to ask their question without mentioning any of the research they did; or they just turded out the first question they could think of and did zero research trying to answer it for themselves?
Er. Don't get me wrong, I like KDE and I like XFCE, but if you're hitting fewer bugs in KDE than XFCE then the least I can say is that your experience is very different from mine. That goes double for resource use, where KDE has made massive improvements but last I looked their file indexer was still a huge resource hog.
I am a big fan of XFCE and I can agree with biggunz. Thunar freaks out randomly. And there were some other issues which I don't remember. Thunar was always the most important one I remember. Talking about the reality shouldn't be the reason for downvotes.
It went on for a few years before it was fixed. In the meantime, I went to i3wm and started using PCManFM. Came back to Thunar after a year or so. But the issue still persisted so went for a while to Nautilus. Only recently was this fixed(I think last year or so?).
KDE is not buggy for most of it's core part and uses less or similar resources wrt XFCE. I use XFCE components cos it's interchangeable and can be used as independent components... Without dragging in a ton of dependencies like in a KDE component.
Am happy as there is a significant improvement in UX with the recent minor/major releases. So am happy and back to using XFCE components.
WRT this update, the Thunar updates look fantastic. The File Highlight feature looks especially cool. I can imagine using that to highlight really frequently used folders in my home dir ("projects" folder etc) to make them stand out in the file browser. Customizing the toolbar buttons is a welcome feature. I'm also glad to see improvements on the default application feature, which I found difficult to use before.