First experience with XFCE - An Air of Nostalgia
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We're going to take a look at the last major desktop environment that I have never really touched, and that's XFCE. This is the first video in a series that will cover the desktop, the default apps, and the customization options. I don't know much about it, I never used it more than a few minutes to record a few images, so I'm going in fresh.
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I decided to go for the Fedora XFCE spin, because it was the easiest to install out of the available options. It's pretty much vanilla apart from the theme, which I had to revert to the default "Greybird" from XFCE.
XFCE aims to be fast and use few resources.
## The desktop
Let's start with the desktop, then. You have a top bar, and a dock with some shortcuts.
The top bar has an applications menu, a task list with all your open windows, a virtual desktop switcher, with 4 virtual desktops by default, the notification tray, followed by the date and time, and a user/system menu.
The dock only has a "show desktop" icon, and launchers for a few apps.
Now, all these elements work fine: both the top bar and the dock are panels, that you can really tweak to your liking.
The applications menu is a simple list of categories, with drop down menus. You get some favorites on top, which I couldn't find a way to change, and then the categories, including the settings.
The task list is pretty simple: it only shows your currently open apps, and lets you minimize them by clicking on their title, or restore them by clicking again.
The virtual desktop switcher is really simple, showing an outline of the app windows opened on each desktop, and letting you switch in one click.
The notification tray works as you'd expect, showing indicators, and icons for apps that integrate there. The default indicators are for the network, audio, power manager, and notifications. They are all really basic and simple. The date and time applet just displays a calendar, and the user menu lets you log out, shut down, or switch users.
Now, the desktop itself hosts some default icons, and you can use it as you might be used to, to store some files, shortcuts, or mix both.
Right clicking on the desktop shows a little context menu, with some quick options: to change how things look, and sort your desktop icons, or create folders and documents. It also lets you quickly start any application you want.
XFCE also comes with a bunch of default keyboard shortcuts to make things a bit faster.
The "old school" feel permeates the whole desktop in general: the look of the menus, of the applets, how you use and interact with panels, it all screams GNOME 2 to me, and that's not necessarily a bad thing: personally, I prefer more modern looking stuff, but for people who want to use their linux desktop like it was back in the old days, it's definitely a great choice.
It also helps in terms of resource usage. Out of the box, on a clean launch, XFCE used less than 1 GB of RAM, out of 16, and CPU usage was constantly at 0%.
## Settings
The settings are exploded into small configuration panels that you can access through the "settings" category of the applications menu, or with a right click on the desktop. There is also a main hub that regroups all these settings.
I quite like that approach of not hiding everything behind one application, although I found the way GNOME 2 did it a bit better: having a dedicated settings menu in the panel made them easier to access, with one less sub menu to enter.
Out of the box, you can change the theme, the icons, and the fonts, and the cursor theme, which is nice, but XFCE can go a lot deeper than this: you have a host of options to tweak how your window manager will work, including options to handle transparency and shadows of the windows, their placement on screen, or the modifier key you want to use to move them.
You also have fractional scaling in the display settings, and tons of options to make your panels look and feel like what you want to use.
They even ship panel profiles that let you change between various default layouts, including a mac os-like one with a dock that serves as the task list as well, a GNOME 2 layout for the nostalgic ones, or a Windows 7 like layout with a bar on the bottom and nothing on the top edge of the screen.