Just shy of two years since Xfce 4.16 the latest release has landed with Xfce 4.18 that comes with tons of new features and a "gazillion" bug fixes. It's still one of the most popular desktop environments for Linux, that offers up a lightweight experience without a lot of the fancy shiny stuff found in GNOME and KDE.
A lot of this release went into the Thunar file manager, some of the improvements noted include:
- Image preview in the file manager, with two different modes available. You can have the preview pop over the left panel, or have it so its own panel appears on the right.
- Undo and Redo support for various file operations like moving, renaming, sending to trash.
- File highlighting accent colour support. You can adjust the background and filename to different colours.
- A customizable toolbar.
- A new split view.
- Recursive searching.
- A new Recent file view.
- Bookmarks moved to their own menu.
- + more
There's plenty of improvement elsewhere like the Application Finder having support for systems with hybrid graphics, the compositor now supports adaptive vsync with GLX, better support for UI scaling, you can now decide what to do when a new display is connected and much much more.
More can be seen on a developer blog post and full changelog.
I'm glad it's getting some love.
I'm very happy about that change, even though I probably won't switch back to Xfce any time soon.
Quoting: denyasisThis is probably my favorite DE. Gnome and KDE are nice, but they are heavy and very full off features and other things. More like a whole suite. XFCE I like because there's not a lot too it. It's stays out of my way and let me game and do other basic things.
I'm glad it's getting some love.
KDE has been light for years now for me considering it is a full desktop suite .. a fresh install of KDE on most distros for me takes under 1GB of ram for me and on my Arch install takes under 900mb. most of us have upwards of 16gb of ram these days so that VERY light
Last edited by tohur on 15 December 2022 at 7:40 pm UTC
Last edited by Avikarr on 15 December 2022 at 10:24 pm UTC
Quoting: MinuxI've always been a huge fan of KDE. I've tried xfce but not much. Do you recommend it? How would you compare it to KDE?
It offers everything you need from a desktop, and not much else. A great file manager. A decent panel and desktop. A pretty good terminal. Plenty of customizability and a limited but sufficient amount of bells and whistles.
Nothing trendy or exciting, but it does exactly what I need and in a way that feels intuitive to me. But that might just be the fact that apart from a few brief digressions, I've been running Xfce on my computers pretty much exclusively for the last two decades or so.
I couldn't really compare it to KDE, as I never got along with that particular DE enough to get to know it properly. The last time I tried it, it felt big, buggy and clunky. But that was obviously quite a while ago.
Will give this one a shot, even though I am pretty happy with gnome nowdays.
Last edited by STiAT on 16 December 2022 at 8:52 am UTC
See more from me