Xfce 4.10 Desktop Feature Release

[Silverthorn]

All of a sudden I feel compelled to start compiling my own version instead of using the outdated version supplied by Ubuntu.

[curaga]

It's moving to gtk3, and still claims to be light? Not that it wasn't already bloated for several years, but only getting worse.

[gilboa]

Yes they did it in 4.10.

gtk 3.0 is planned for 4.12. [1]

- Gilboa
[1] http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4...er/029342.html

[gilboa]

It's moving to gtk3, and still claims to be light? Not that it wasn't already bloated for several years, but only getting worse.

Please post a link to benchmark that proves that gtk 3.0 is slower / more bloated than gtk 2.0 (or stop spreading mindless FUD).

- Gilboa

[clavko]

I was a KDE myself, however, lately I found that I'm not using
many KDE apps, and that I could live with something lighter that
with added Qt libraries. XFCE it was and at first I couldn't believe
how fast apps started. It's not a fast machine (2 Ghz, 2GB ram),
however KDE 4.6 was just too much for it.

XFCE is a blessing. It's not a DIY, like a Fluxbox or E11, and it supports
Gnome plugins. I considered LXDE, but XFCE is mature and good enough.
If you had enough of wobblies and rotating cubes, clavko recommends.

[ssam]

in the past XFCE was trying not to be GNOME2. is it now going to try to become GNOME2?

also lets hope that 'alt-tab improvements' does not mean what the GNOME3 folks think.

[curaga]

Please post a link to benchmark that proves that gtk 3.0 is slower / more bloated than gtk 2.0 (or stop spreading mindless FUD).

- Gilboa

Every version of gtk3 so far has required XCB, which gtk2 does not. That's clear bloat.

Note that upstream considers it a bug ( = should not need xcb), but that's the status quo still in 3.4.1. I have a bug open: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674465


Then there's the size. Comparing gtk3 3.4.1 and gtk2 2.24.8:
libgdk.so 595kb - 455kb
libgtk.so 4.3mb - 3.8mb

I don't have benchmarks, I'm afraid. My definition of bloat is about size, a bloated app may still be faster than a lean one.

[Awesomeness]

they have support for gtk3 now iirc.
the themes and the gtk-xfce4-enginge have been ported, but i think that the xfce applications are still useing gtk2.

So? The KDE dudes also have GTK2 and GTK3 versions of their Oxygen widget themes. The question was, however, if Xfce was ported to GTK3 and the answer is no.

XFCE gets more and more awesome. In contrast to the gnome team they actually respect wishes from their users. Seen long term I think XFCE has the potential to get most gnome users to switch.

No GNOME user with half a brain would ever switch to an environment that never ever has bugfix releases. Roughly once a year there is a feature release and in between not a single bugfix is released to its users whereas in GNOME and KDE land users get monthly bugfix releases until six months later a new feature release is made (in contrast to Xfce’s 18 months).
And why would a happy GNOME 2 user switch to a DE that after years is still playing catchup with GNOME 2? Xfce 4.0 was released in 2003 and moved from a CDE clone to a GNOME 2 clone. Cinnamon manages to do new releases way quicker. I expect GNOME 2 fans to either adapt to GNOME 3 switch to Cinnamon, Unity or Plasma Desktop.

[gilboa]

Every version of gtk3 so far has required XCB, which gtk2 does not. That's clear bloat.

Note that upstream considers it a bug ( = should not need xcb), but that's the status quo still in 3.4.1. I have a bug open: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674465


Then there's the size. Comparing gtk3 3.4.1 and gtk2 2.24.8:
libgdk.so 595kb - 455kb
libgtk.so 4.3mb - 3.8mb

I don't have benchmarks, I'm afraid. My definition of bloat is about size, a bloated app may still be faster than a lean one.

You *got* to be kidding me.
XFCE is bad (??!?!) because of a redundant (?) dependency that requires an additional 3.3MB (!!!), and this, within an DE that weights in at (at least on Fedora 16) ~38 MB (well over 40MB with dependencies).

Once word: IceWM.

- Gilboa

[nschermer]

Then there's the size. Comparing gtk3 3.4.1 and gtk2 2.24.8:
libgdk.so 595kb - 455kb
libgtk.so 4.3mb - 3.8mb

You are comparing 2 different libraries: if you compare libgtk-x11-2.0.so (gtk2) and libgtk-3.so (gtk3) you'll see there is not much difference in size. Same for the 2 gdk libraries (in fact there is the gtk3 version 30% smaller). Nonetheless this says nothing, the library size has no relation to the actual memory usage.

The port of gtk3 to xcb is a good thing, libx11 is evil in many ways and xcb is its successor that tries to resolve many of the libx11 [locking] issues.

About Xfce and Gtk3 it is fairly simple: there are plans to port the code to gtk3 and in a perfect world you wouldn't see _any_ difference between the gtk2 and gtk3 applications. That said the biggest issue holding us off from porting is theming. During the gtk3 releases a number of times the css theming in gtk changed, making it hard to get good working themes.

So in the next couple of days a discussion will start about which gtk3 version Xfce requires to get decent (comparable to gtk2) theming, if all required functionality is there etc. In case it will be a step back from gtk2: no gtk3 in Xfce 4.12, otherwise porting will start in separate branches until everything works.

The truth about gtk3 is that is has no visible gain for the average user, so IMHO highly overrated. From the development point of view it's a lot of work and because the policy changed after gtk2 (regarding deprecated api removal) it will in the future often lead to problems [because Xfce has a slower development cycle than GNOME].