I don't consider XFCE as the best desktop environment, however it's still lighter than GNOME, it's still not under the contamination attack from the Mono guys, and it's increasingly tempting in recent times, since GNOME seems to be a captive of Novell, KDE3 is a dead end, and KDE4 is Vistaesque to its best. Now that Fedora has an XFCE spin, it reminded me that special touch Xubuntu is still having... despite its Canonical ascendancy.
To my amusement, even Nicu is mentioning The Fedora Xfce Spin, however fan of GNOME he might be (and stay that way).
To my surprise, Vincent from xubuntublog commented on Nicu's post: "It looks like this release is really targeted at older computers? That's not really my preference, unfortunately, but a lot of people prefer Xfce just because it's the only thing that will run on their computers, so I guess it's good to see a large distribution having a spin-off like this. This spin will likely also be more attractive to them as the Ubuntu base is really getting heavier and heavier, so Xubuntu can't really target that old machines anymore."
Now, it's my turn to have an opinion. No, I won't be amazed that the owner of a blog named "xubuntublog" is bashing Xubuntu — this is only part of the fun of life.
IMHO, XFCE 4.4 is not anymore as light as XFCE 4.2 was, so it's not targeted to the very old machines, regardless of the distro you're using it with — so I can't see what has to do the use of XFCE as per Xubuntu with the general bloatedness of Ubuntu?!
OK, so the Fedora XFCE spin is nevertheless supposed to be lighter than the GNOME and the KDE LiveCDs (or installed systems). Under the circumstances, how can you explain that tracker-search-tool is included on the LiveCD and started?
Tracker is no Beagle, yet it's resource consuming...
The funny thing is that Xubuntu doesn't come with any desktop search tool on the CD, while Fedora does include one! How about that, and then say of Xubuntu that it's bloated?!
Now we enter the usability land. Fedora is a distro that can hibernate (suspend-to-disk) or suspend-to-RAM, but nobody cared enough to hack the logout dialog to include the suspend options!
Fedora's XFCE spin sports the standard logoff dialog...
...while Xubuntu 7.10 adds some more options to XFCE
A third issue is the default XFCE layout. Although I have been a long-time user of FVWM and of other environments that contained a panel not covering the whole width of the screen, I have always considered that xfce4-panel has a problem by design: it's useless to have it be less than the screen width, as long as you can't have neither icons nor anything else at its left or right side, so when you maximize a window you'll have two small portions of the wallpaper still visible, but no real advantage! (See my older Good and Bad in XFCE on that issue.)
This is why I usually spend some time to configure XFCE's panels to look like the default GNOME layout. ("Default" like in "vanilla" and most distros, except for Novell's openSUSE and Mint, who make GNOME have a single panel like in its early ages or like in KDE.) If it has two bars, let them cover the full width of the screen, unless you can put something else in the non-covered space.
The default XFCE layout is exactly what makes Xubuntu more attractive than other distros, and more attractive than to install Ubuntu and then replace the desktop environment!
To my knowledge, Xubuntu is the only distro to come with a "GNOME layout for XFCE" out-of-the-box!
With the upcoming 8.04, Xubuntu is making XFCE to look even closer to GNOME than before, as it's now having a "Places" menu by default. Along with the ability of XFCE to run GNOME applets (but not right out of the box, as xfce4-xfapplet-plugin is not on the LiveCD), this would make for a perfect GNOME replacement.
Xubuntu 8.04 will have by default a "Places" menu (icon and label).
UPDATE/CORRECTION: You can have the "Places" menu in Xubuntu 7.10 too, but it's not added in the default layout for the LiveCD.
This is sad that Fedora's XFCE spin doesn't have absolutely anything to differentiate it from the many distros that ship XFCE!
Oh, wait, the advantage is that you'll be still running Fedora.
On the other hand, Xubuntu 8.04 will be a Long Time Supported release...
I'll add that Canonical is nevertheless guilty of short-sightedness: Xubuntu should have been a fully-fledged official project of them, yet it's not; ShipIt doesn't ship Xubuntu, nor does the Canonical Store sell it!
I suppose that — distro wars set aside —, Xubuntu is a winner here.
UPDATE: Xubuntu 7.10 has the GIMP 2.4.0 on the LiveCD — the Fedora XFCE spin doesn't have it. On the other hand, Xubuntu lacks a launcher for xfce4-terminal, and Fedora XFCE has it — is it a tie score, or Xubuntu is still ahead?
Nevertheless...
UPDATE: In my case, Xubuntu 7.10 is simply unusable because of Bug #192337: Can't add keyboard layouts in XFCE's "Keyboard Preferences" dialog. Typically Ubuntu: it can't ship without serious bugs! Mea culpa! I forgot that XFCE doesn't have (yet) a GUI tool to configure multiple keyboards! (I added by hand two keyboards to xorg.conf in Wolvix, but then I forgot about it.) I suppose the mentioned keyboard layouts dialog is only a placeholder for now, as it doesn't show in other XFCE-based distros!
RE-UPDATE, 02/18: I just noticed that Fedora's XFCE has a better selection of panel plugins, i.e. it includes xfce4-notes-plugin. I love it! Fedora's XFCE is also "purer" than Xubuntu's: while Fedora uses XFCE's xarchiver, Xubuntu is using GNOME's File Roller instead. Based on such tiny issues, I might even reconsider that Fedora's XFCE is overall better!
16 commentsIf you want the best XFCE experience use Vector 5.9 standard gold. Its a great system with plenty of software in the repos.
Vector has the disadvantage to have XFCE configured like KDE (or like Windows), with a single panel and a huge start button like in Linspire.
It's an advantage when you really want a single panel, but I am not a fan of this layout.
As for "plenty of software": no gxine, no Anjuta, and some other missing applications I would like to have.
I must say I am very much in favor of running a "mono-free" desktop... I don't today, as I know Mono comes out of the box in Gnome, my primer DE. I am having fun experimenting (once again) with Xfce on my Mint partition... But I can't live without Nautilus, the very best file manager on the market, as much as I enjoy Thunnar or PCManFM...
As usual, my desktop is a bit of a cocktail...
I did it anyway, as I felt the need today... I took away all Mono and Mono-related things, as well as all KDE things from my Mint partition... Will try Exaile instead of Amarok, just to do something different from my regular Rhythmbox in Fedora...
It's all part of the fun...
Tracker... at least is not beagle :p
Regarding the logout dialog: AFAIK this spin was driven by Rahul, who is also not a full time Xfce user. This is the *first* buid of the spin, I see it mostly like a starting point as an invitation for all Fedora Xfce enthusiasts to gather together and improve it.
Layout and what differentiation: I think a Fedora spin *should* use the default Fedora wallpaper, the default Fedora icon theme and so on. If it is Fedora then it should look and feel like Fedora, otherwise call it something else. Maybe subsequent will address this.
Nicu, I didn't say it was bad.
I also didn't say it shouldn't use Fedora's icon theme and wallpaper.
But notice I haven't mentioned either that some people *might* think of some specific *extras* brought by some other XFCE-based distros, say:
-- Wolvix Control Panel in Wolvix;
-- VASMCC in Vector;
-- Zenpanel in Zenwalk.
Of course, this would need important efforts and a specific SIG (or a sub-SIG in a specific XFCE SIG :-)), and I suppose there isn't a tremendous pro-XFCE feeling in the Fedora community.
But a GNOME-looking XFCE is something I would have expected from Fedora.
Aaah, and what's the degree of adoption you are expecting when a F8 spin is released some 10 weeks before F9? Once there will be a F9 XFCE spin, I agree, it might attract quite some people...
Hi,
I happened to stumble across this post. I am the owner of xubuntublog.wordpress.com, so it was funny to see me quoted here :)
Regarding the "bashing" - being a Xubuntu evangelist does not mean that I cannot admit that Xubuntu is not perfect. It just is true that Xubuntu builds on a heavy Ubuntu base (what with Python and some HP libraries loading on startup). My comments regarding this Fedora spin were only juding by the first looks from Nicu's screenshots (which I supposed I should've emphasized better).
As for the search tool: yes, this is a loss. I don't see why Xubuntu wouldn't include tracker, but at least the addition of gnome-utils (which includes a search tool) was discussed on the mailinglist.
Regarding the Hibernate and Suspend buttons: those were added by Jani (who started Xubuntu), making use of Ubuntu services, and thus could not be pushed upstream. This means that someone from the Fedora Xfce spin would need to have known how to add this and actually add it (a matter of priorities). Besides, Hibernating and Suspend still rarely works, so it's not that much of a loss ;)
> the addition of gnome-utils (which includes a search tool) was discussed
This is the *only* ACCURATE search tool ("accurate" means grep). All the others are usually relying on "databases" that are not actualized right away.
> Hibernate and Suspend buttons: those were added by Jani (who started Xubuntu), making use of Ubuntu services,
> and thus could not be pushed upstream.
Ummm... a good subject to study! If it's Ubuntu-specific, maybe someone will manage to make them "neutral" so they could migrate upstream or/and to other XFCE distros!
> Besides, Hibernating and Suspend still rarely works
Hibernating *works* reliably on ALL my home hardware (a PC and 2 different laptops) with ALL of the following: *Ubuntu 7.10, Fedora 8, Mandriva 2008, RHEL 5.1 clones, and a few other distros (UHU-Linux, Pardus, Parsix, etc., but I have not tested those distros on ALL the 3 systems).
> so it's not that much of a loss ;)
so it *is* a loss.
Unfortunately, Xubuntu XFCE layout is much more Gnome-ized than panels. Try right-click on desktop and ask where the hell is well-known XFCE right-click menu ...
Roberto, you're simply wrong.
Desktop Settings -> Behavior, check "Show desktop menu on right click".
Xubuntu's problem in my case is Ubuntu Bug #192337:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/192337
Yes, but is not DEFAULT like vanilla XFCE or Zenwalk, Archlinux, Dreamlinux - you named it - XFCE. Talkin' about usability.
@Béranger - well, yeah, but why wouldn't your cases be edge cases? You might just be "the exception that confirms the rule", as we say in the Netherlands ;-)
But of course, the addition would be better, just not *that* much better :P
And anyway, IIRC those databases are updated by a daemon that runs in the background, adding changes as they are made. Tracker is said to be especially fast at this, and using a database, search is much faster too, so I'd say it's a reasonable candidate.
Oh, and how about running Tracker ON THE LIVECD SYSTEM? Shouldn't it be started on the installed system only?
Comments are closed, complaints to info@.
Reading that article makes me feel like installing a complete Xfce desktop on my Linux Mint 4.0 partition, which I am now using exclusively (haven't been booting back into Fedora 8 since...)
I'll then have a Xubuntu 7.10 experience...