Not all that long ago I wrote about KDE4 and how impressed I was. I’m not retracting those thoughts. I still feel the same way, and think KDE4 represents a solid step forward for the desktop environment running on X.
However, my time on X is relegated to my secondary computer, a dual 1.46GHz pentium 4 laptop with only 1 Gb of ram. My growing sentiment about running KDE4 on that laptop is that the experience is rather, well, pokey. The wife likes KDE4 though, and more than that, doesn’t want to be forced to learn yet another desktop environment. Fair enough, KDM allows for choosing a session type at login, and I decided to see if I could find a desktop experience that was a little snappier than running KDE4 or Gnome.
The first thought in my head was Haiku. I’ve been playing with Haiku on VirtualBox lately, and it’s the definition of snappy, just like BeOS was before it. However, Haiku is only available as a virtual machine hard drive image at this time, so until they release a live cd it’s not an option to use as a standalone os.
I also didn’t want to ditch Mandriva, as it runs perfectly with no unexpected behavior on that laptop. I can’t say the same for some of the other flavors of linux and BSD that have been on that machine’s hard drive, so I am loathe to abandon Mandriva until I have a compelling reason to do so.
I didn’t really have any interest in running just a window manager. I spent years using Window Maker, Blackbox and IceWM, and while there’s something to be said for traveling light, I’m a grown-up now and prefer a desktop environment to a window manager.
So, I had three ideas in mind: Xfce, LXDE and ROX Desktop.
ROX Desktop takes some ideas from RISC OS and puts them on the X desktop. It doesn’t decorate it’s own windows, it needs an external window manager for that task. It does have an interesting filesystem browser, and can be coaxed into looking like RISC OS, but my impressions after a little bit of toying with it was that I would revisit in a year or two; it’s just not ready.
LXDE is another X desktop environment that is supposed to be feather weight and good for old hardware. Sure enough, that’s exactly what it is. However, I was turned off very quick. Not much more functionality than IceWM, and very spartan in appearance. Think Gnome, but with absolutely no bells and whistles. LXDE is the modern day equivalent of running FVWM with the Motif theme. Not enough to make me ditch KDE4 and all it offered.
So, I moved on to Xfce.
I hadn’t used Xfce since it’s infancy, so I had no idea what it had in store for me. I did know that there were Xfce-centric versions of Ubuntu and Linux Mint, which indicated that Xfce had a pretty loyal following as an alternative to KDE and Gnome.
I installed the metapackage for Xfce, and was greeted with a desktop that initially reminded me of Gnome. I’m not a big fan of the two panel desktop. I want my desktop real estate, and I would like my GUI to stay out of the way as much as possible. See ya panel #2. Next, panel number one is shrunk to be more of a dock than a taskbar, and voila, a nice, lightweight desktop environment that doesn’t look like a Gnome or KDE clone.
The Xfce 4 Desktop Environment
Now, I read that Xfce 4 isn’t as resource light as it used to be, and uses resources on par with Gnome. I don’t believe it. I save about 125 megs of ram running Xfce over Gnome, and it just “feels” lighter. Maybe Xfce isn’t as light as it used to be, but it certainly is lighter than KDE and Gnome, and it provides more desktop experience than a mere barebones window manager.
Now, if you really want to get snazzy with Xfce, you can make a pseudo OS X desktop using Compiz for hardware acceleration and Cairo Dock for a OS X dock clone. Maybe you admire OS X but don’t have a Mac, or maybe you’re like me and are just more at home on a system that emulates OS X than on a system that takes it’s design cues from Windows.
Xfce plus Cairo Dock
I think Cairo Dock is a great idea, but I don’t think it’s production ready, yet. This one needs a little more time in the oven, as you can see from the screenshot. I experienced some weird draw issues, even though Compiz was running just fine on the system.
Also, I noted that when running Xfce plus Cairo Dock my memory usage spiked as high as 800 megs just sitting there. That’s 200 megs of ram more than KDE 4 uses on my laptop. I do like the ideas they have wrapped into the project, and I will revisit it a few revisions down the road. It’s just not ready for day to day use yet.
So, after playing with Xfce the last couple of days I find it to be a fairly complete, lightweight X desktop environment. It’s not as ambitious as KDE4, but that’s ok. It allows me to do what I need on my laptop, and in my case where my hardware is not blazing fast, it gives me back some performance that I lose with KDE4 or Gnome+Compiz. Before too long, Xfce users will have two viable options: good old fashioned Xfce for a quick, lean desktop, or Xfce+Compiz+Cairo Dock for a full featured OS X-alike desktop. In either case, it represents a viable alternative to the two desktop division that has split the X desktop for over the last decade.
If you’re using KDE4 or Gnome, give Xfce a test drive. It will remind you of the days when the X desktop was a little more spartan, but also speedier and tolerable on less than bleeding edge machines.
I like it, and I’m sticking with Xfce on my laptop.
