Xfce 4.16 (opens in new tab)

Same. We had this 2010s bubble of design space exploration and constant 'disruption' but in the end .. the good old paradigm is still way more than enough.

I agree, XFCE is there when you need it. No weird experiments, always consistent.

Wow, I just learned from your casual remark that you can actually search in the xfce console. Awesome!

I'm a die hard KDE user but, my office workstation runs on XFCE (because I like to use different things overall).

My main reason is not presence of advantages but absence of disadvantages.

I like XFCE's simplicity and stability. It's as stable as the big boys in the town. I like how it looks in default configuration (I started this thing with C64. I love how old computing looks).

You can work relatively fast in XFCE. While it doesn't go above and beyond like Dolphin, Akonadi and KDE in general, it can accomplish what it needs to do out of the box. Thunar is capable enough (4.16 brings per folder view preferences, which is important).

XFCE, because lack of sheer eye-candy, uses screen space very efficiently. So, it provides you massive amount of space especially in big screens.

I don't miss KDE's interconnectedness and integration while using XFCE but, it needs different solutions. Again I want to emphasize that it's not a disadvantage, but a mere difference.

If you want a straight, run of the mill but well refined desktop environment, XFCE is the top choice in my book. It can provide you what you need without bloat. I personally don't understand why people continuously torture themselves by re-configuring various WMs over and over. I understand i3 and other managers are nice but, they're not practical in my book.

Xfce is lighter weight than Gnome 3, and actually allows you to customize things that matter (to me). You can set it up in various ways visually, even though the default look is usable out of the box.

Xfce's window manager is the best of all I've tried. Maybe not as configurable as e.g. Sawmill, it has a lot of useful functions that are missing from Gnome-based offerings, and from macOS: window snapping, automatic window resizing to grab available space (in several ways), simple automatic tiling, easy putting a window above others, etc. They all can be configured to have arbitrary shortcuts.

Xfce has fewer ambitions to integrate things and have their own everything. It allows you to just work with your apps without distraction.

Most importantly, Xfce is not trying to imitate macOS, but does its own thing, and stays consistent. It has very little magic in it.

Also, bugs are quite few and far between. They do not seem to rush to release new stuff.

I switched to XFCE after Gnome 3 was released and have used it ever since. There's been enough said here recently about the problems with Gnome 3 and the attitude of the Gnome developers, but the 10,000 ft view is that they refuse to stop pretending that my desktop PC is an iPad. Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8 / Metro, but at least they eventually backpedaled.

If you think Windows usability peaked around Windows XP, XFCE might be worth trying.

All I want is an application menu, some launchers, a window list, a widget/notification area, and some reasonable keybindings. Gnome 2 had these things, and then early Gnome 3 got rid of basically all of them. If some fancypants UX researchers want to experiment with replacing menu bars with hamburgers, that's fine, but I'm just not interested.

I've done more than my fair share of WM hopping (I still use i3 on my laptop because I like being able to resize windows with my keyboard when I don't have a mouse), but XFCE is my workhorse. It may look boring, but it's reliable. It has more than enough features for working productively, and I appreciate the fact that the development team doesn't completely change the way everything works every few years just to chase the latest flashy trend.

XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment that uses GTK. It has its own GTK engine, window manager (XFWM), and its own set of apps built on top of GTK... most of them much are faster than their Gnome counterparts.

Thunar is much faster than Nautilus, XFWM is faster than Mutter, XFCE panels are much faster than the Gnome Shell, XFCE GTK engine is much faster than Adwaita... and the list just goes on and on. The result is a really fast and responsive user experience, that will run fast even in low spec machines.

I am not a fan of the default panel layout and overall configuration, but XFCE panels are easy to configure as well as highly configurable. You can create as many panels you want, position them anywhere you want and put any elements on them... There's even a way to create a macOS-like global menu, although I don't recommend it.

Not OP, and I've never used KDE. But I used Gnome 2, when it was the default DE for Ubuntu. Then Ubuntu switched to that DE-which-I-cant-recall-the-name, with the sidebar and what appeared to me to be a strange desktop which made me lose some reflexes. So I switched over to Xubuntu and it made me feel more at home, it was a desktop as simple as I could ever hope, in fact, its logic was (for me) intuitive. I never felt the need to customise it beyond its defaults: it just worked. It's been ~8 years now, and I never looked back. So, to answer your question: the main advantage is that it looks and works like a known paradigm for someone coming from Gnome2 or Windows 9x/Me/2000/XP.

I'm also curious.

In the old days XFCE was the go-to DE for the low spec systems back when KDE and Gnome were massive bloats, but KDE slimmed down lately due to massive development efforts to the point of using less ram than XFCE so I'm curious which would be better for a laptop with 4GB of RAM since IIRC, XFCE apps do use less memory but that's because they also do way less than the KDE ones.

Hopefully there are some up to date DE connoisseurs on HN to shed some light.

New Linux user here. I switched from Mac a few months ago and wanted to try out Linux on a spare machine. It's not a beast, but it has a decent graphics card (1060), lots of ram, fast storage, etc. I found GNOME to be shockingly sluggish. KDE was better, but the animations still felt far from clean, snappy, fast.

Eventually i found my way to XFCE because i couldn't make it slow. Everything felt very snappy, no feeling of slow FPS.

That's about it for me, honestly. I haven't configured it much, yet. I use the desktops to shove some non-interactive apps like Spotify to the background. Nothing special, really. XFCE just works. Sure, the other desktops are more pretty .. but that wasn't worth the low FPS to me.

It shows windows, has a bunch of great QOL and power-user features, and doesn't have a bunch of bells and whistles. I don't want my DE to have a bunch of animations and transparency effects and things popping up in every corner every five seconds. I just want a thing to show windows and let me efficiently navigate them. XFCE does that perfectly.

KDE feels like Windows 10 to me, and that's a bad thing. It's so disorganized. But, Gnome 3 screwed up input, mostly trackpad scrolling, so I use KDE or XFCE.

Lighter, simpler.

It just feels simple and keeps out of the way. I used KDE way back, before v4, and it was my favourite DE then. But it always had these broken glitches and an over abundance of settings and utilities that were not always on par with the core KDE. I have learned that I prefer less with even quality than more with uneven.

My experience on ubuntu and arch, while memory usage is almost similar, KDE startup time is significantly slower. Turning off balloo helped, but not much.

KDE and Gnome are significantly more expensive resource wise.

There are dozens of icon themes available. They should already mostly work because, according to the post, XFCE has moved to the standardized icon naming.

LXQt as daily driver? May I ask what distro? Any annoyances?

You can assign a key chord with left and right mouse click-and-drag for window movement and resize. Configuring this is one of the first things I do.

I can hold Alt and left-click-and-drag to move the window, or Alt and right-click-and-drag to resize. This works from anywhere in the target window. Resize will move the nearest edge or corner to your click.

They did not :) I usually use the Resize window menu to do it but I usually use full size windows so I haven't taken the time to find a faster way or maybe a fix.

I agree. But there is hope. You can also switch to this fork: https://github.com/Xfce-Classic/libxfce4ui-nocsd

That's good then. I'd thought it was was going to be earlier than that.

Wait a second, why wouldn't TearFree be enabled by default?

Are there people who wish to have screen tearing out of the box?

Easy, GNOME 3 has too much JavaScript bloat, broken workspace concept, requires extensions for simple stuff like collapsing windows into their header bar, a basic feature in almost every X Windows window manager since forever.

Neither Unity nor XFCE suffer from that.