Last time I tried to switch to Xfce, I abandoned due to lack of time to configure it to my needs/habits. This weekend I tried again, spent the necessary hour to get my panel launchers in order and everything, and started to test things…
I’m impressed. Xfce 4.4 works really well. It’s much more reactive than GNOME, especially the file manager, but every desktop app appears in a snap. Mousepad starts in half a second compared to approximately two for gedit, for example. I sometimes miss the new window appearing because I didn’t have time to recenter my look away from the menu.
Speed is great, but not everything, else I’d be using ion or fluxbox. Well, I’m happy to state that Xfce doesn’t lack the little bonuses at all compared to GNOME. There are all the little panel plugins I love, volume control, cpu load, weather thingie (which actually has more features (that work) than GNOME’s weather applet), battery monitor, clock with a calendar, …
I’ve noticed a few glitches in the interactions between Claws Mail and Xfce, for example sending files via email, so I fixed that in our CVS and it’ll be in the next release. I’m surprised that this bug didn’t get reported, so I suppose it’s new since Xfce 4.4 that Thunar attaches files using URIs and not paths.
Finally, it looks like the Orage clock developers wanted to add external iCal feed to their clock, so I may be able to patch it when they’ll have done the infrastructure, so that integration with our vCalendar plugin is flawless. Or maybe the patched one will be vCalendar, I don’t know yet how it’ll be done in Orage.
You know how I’ve made comments relative to building our code ever faster at work? How I twiddle makefiles, cut out code and remove unused includes?
Out of the 20 developers at NITI, all ran Linux, but there was something like two KDE users and one GNOME user. I used Window Maker (with all of 600KB of memory usage! on an SMP Athlon with a gigabyte of RAM, of course) and most of my co-workers actually used ion, yes.
It’s never fast enough. :-)
Indeed :)
I’ve been working on making static all functions that should have been, but weren’t for some reason (laziness?) on Claws recently. Next step will be useless-includes-hunting. The change is usually visible!
reactive also means that some work is being done in threads instead of blocking the user interface.
I’ve also been using XFCE for long now and I also prefer it over gnome, window maker or ctwm (I have been using the latter for a long time before XFCE).
reactive also means that some work is being done in threads instead of blocking the user interface.
That’s not really my definition of reactive. It can play a little part, non-blocking is of course always better than blocking, but reactive is, in my definition, the fact that a given task is performed in a short time. I’d prefer a GUI frozen for a few milliseconds than a non-blocked GUI with a nice progress bar that does the same job in two seconds :)