Monday, November 13, 2006

Six reasons to use Xfce

I saw this blog post by Paul-Sebastian, and I just had to post this about my favourite DM for Linux.

1) Speed
Xfce is lightweight and fast. It is not bloated by little-used features and options. Yet, when the need arises, there are plenty of plugins available... including support for GNOME panel applets! At the same time, Xfce can run on computers that would grind if GNOME or KDE were loaded.

2) Stability
Xfce is stable, development may not be as fast as some other DE's, but this is paid off for by the end stability.

3) Standards
Xfce aims to be fully compliant with freedesktop.org specifications, meaning it will work flawlessly with other applications that do the same.

4) Usability
Xfce is a very intuitive interface. It is not hard to locate settings, or customise the panels. I found it by far the easiest to use for users moving from Windows.

5) Applications
Xfce comes with a minimal set of applications, like the file manager Thunar. Thunar is a very fast, simple file manager, and also very customisable.

6) Good looks
Xfce comes with *loads* of themes, that, once applied, work with all GTK2 applications on your system - giving a very consistent UI throughout.
Xfce also supports the X composite extension, on graphics cards that support it.

7) Mice
The mice want it!

(Couldn't resist #7 :D)

PS. Don't just take my word for it... Xfce on ArchWiki