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Time to Replace XFCE?

Posted by the_doctor on · 5 comments
Datamation; By Matt Hartley
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The XFCE Linux desktop has much to recommend it, yet users might also look at alternatives.

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Comments (5)

Why, oh why, oh why is it the popular opinion that a project is only "viable" if there are tons of releases? That sort of thinking is what gives us cr@p like Windows 8. I use XFCE. Personally, I don't particularly find any large bits of functionality missing, and I for one am glad that the XFCE folks don't feel obligated to be constantly monkeying with it.

If I were the emperor of the universe and had unlimited funds, I'd encourage them to do some graphical stuff. Prettier icons and themes by default. Like that. But IMHO, that's largely unimportant, and as far as I'm concerned, XFCE is fine just the way it is...
My take on the article wasn't that XFCE wasn't just fine,... It's that it's based on the older GTK toolkit and is at risk of becoming obsolete/in conflict with the newer GTK toolkit. Apparently, the developers don't want to upgrade to the newer toolkit, which could impact the long term viability of XFCE...
I don't disagree with your analysis. I take objection to the following (my emphasis):

XFCE development has stagnated?

According to my sources, the last stable release of XFCE was about two years ago. By anyone's time line, that is a long time between stable releases. Bundle this issue with its apparent inability to play nicely with GTK3 friendly items and instead sticking to its older GTK roots. And others users have pointed out that the perceived GTK3 issues are largely with various desktop themes and the "fault" is to be directed at the GNOME project. Long story short, it's a debate showing few signs of being resolved anytime soon.

Well, couldn't they always set up a test-bed for working out the kinks in a transition to GTK3? (They could call it XFCF to avoid any confusion).
If I were the emperor of the universe and had unlimited funds, I'd sponsor/encourage folks to fork Gtk2/lib*Gnome2/glade2 out from under the control of the priests at the RedHat cathedral. Clean it up, document it clearly and completely, investigate and debug/document corner cases... maintenance mode for a critical resource. Maybe it's a festering pile, but (right now, at least) it works.

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