The Xfce Desktop Environment

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So far the desktop environments reviewed are Ubuntu’s Unity, as well as KDE’s Plasma. Both have their up and downs, and can be customized down to fairly small details. This week we will be looking at the Xfce environment, which “aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly” (1). Xfce ships with seven core components: the window manager, desktop manager, panel, session manager, application finder, file manager, and setting manager. Xfce tries to follow the philosophy of Unix with modularity. My usage of the Xfce environment has been fast and pleasant. When first booted up, the desktop looks simple and intuitive. There are two “panel” objects on the screen, one that stretches across the top of the desktop, and one smaller on the bottom that resembles the Mac OS X dock. The top panel acts as a taskbar with widgets, while the bottom panel acts as shortcuts. These panels can be edited to the user’s preferences by simply right clicking on them, and selecting Panel -> Panel Preferences. The default desktop can be seen below in figure 1.

Figure 1: The Xfce Desktop (enlarge)

The Xfce window manager comes with many built-in keyboard shortcuts, all of which are changeable by the user (2). Many shortcuts that the average user would know, such as Alt+Tab and Alt+F4 exist from the get-go. An array of other keyboard shortcuts exist, such as Super+Tab, which switches windows within the current application. There is also an Alt+Shift+Tab which cycles windows in the reverse direction (this keyboard shortcut also works on Plasma and Unity). These keyboard shortcuts, along with many more can be found and edited under Applications -> Settings -> Window Manager -> Keyboard. You can see this window in figure 2. Many shortcuts are not bound to any keys by default. There are many more settings under the window manager, such as window styles (or themes), how the windows change focus, how they snap, etc.

Figure 2: The Xfce Window Manager (enlarge)

To open applications, Xfce follows the same default key bindings as Plasma. Alt+F1 opens the Xfce equivalent of the Window’s start menu, which displays all installed applications; while Alt+F2 opens a program called Application Finder, that allows a user to begin typing to search for an installed program. This program can be seen in figure 3. Unity and Plasma’s application launchers are more intuitive than Xfce’s, as sometimes the Xfce application search doesn’t always find what the user looking for. For example, when Alt+F2 is pressed and “calculator” is typed, no applications will appear until the green arrow on the right side is pressed down to expand the search.

Figure 3: The Application Finder (Alt+F2) (enlarge)

On the desktop, there are default shortcuts to the Trash bin, home folder, and hard drives. The desktop settings can be changed by right clicking on the desktop background, and then clicking Desktop Settings. These settings allow access to change the background, how the desktop can be interacted with, and how icons display. If you have more than one display, they can be individually edited simply by moving the desktop settings window to the display the user want to affect. The desktop settings window can be seen below in figure 4. The user can right click on the desktop–or any folder in the file explorer–and open a terminal to that working directory. The terminal emulator that Xfce comes with is simple and elegant.

Figure 4: The Desktop Settings window (enlarge)

Xfce is absolutely the fastest and most bare-bones desktop environment when compared with Plasma or Unity. Everything seems to open or load in a split-second, rather than a small delay that can sometimes happen with Plasma or Unity. Despite being stripped down, Xfce is surprisingly usable out of the box. Almost all of the settings that a user would need are simple to find, usually leading to little searching. One can definitely see that the Xfce developers were going for the most light-weight environment that they could possibly create, and in a good way. Next week I will be reviewing Cinnamon, which is a desktop environment designed by and for Linux Mint.

(1) https://www.xfce.org/about

(2) http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/preferences

36 Thoughts.

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