XFCE Is Great - Hackdot

Re:XFCE Is Great by liampulles on Monday January 12, 2026 @03:30AM (#46585631)

I'm a longtime fan of XFCE. I try all sorts of DEs from time time on spare computers, but I reliably come back to XFCE, which is really just a fairly low-resource, stable embodiment of the classic GNOME feel. I used mainline Ubuntu for a few years until they released GNOME 3 (which I hated then and hate now) and then I switched to Xubuntu and was happy again.

I made a conscious decision a few years ago (after trying yet another distro that went tits up), I was going to stop playing around WITH linux and start playing around ON linux for computers that I needed to get actual work done on. If one wants a classic Linux feel that is fairly stable, XFCE and a Debian base is pretty good for that.

I am a little concerned about the whole Wayland situation, since the XFCE team seems to be taking a fairly anti-Wayland stance at the moment. It has forced me to manually move from Wayland back to X11 on new installs (to get a relaible experience, which is not reliably straightforward and seemingly may become more problematic as time progresses.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by davidgerard on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:29AM (#46586078)

they're actively working on Wayland and very much want it to work well there? https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

One problem is I think Xfce has no paid developers, it's all spare time.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by pamcake on Monday January 12, 2026 @08:18AM (#46588073)

Yeah, my worry has recently been the opposite: That at least from afar they seem onboard the same Wayland track as the other DEs just at a slower pace.

As long as Xorg is around I hope Xfce never deprecates X.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by liampulles on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:54PM (#46594818)

Quote from your link:

"It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all)."

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Re:XFCE Is Great by alextingle on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:40AM (#46586160)

Wayland just seems really unstable to me. I try it occasionally, but glitches, freezes or crashes quickly drive me back to X.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by JimmaDaRustla on Monday January 12, 2026 @10:00AM (#46589429)

That's not wayland - you have some config or driver issue.

I've been using Wayland as my daily driver for a few years now. Any issues I have are from my window manager or apps and not wayland itself.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by alextingle on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @02:28PM (#46606435)

Maybe you're right, or maybe your anecdote doesn't actually invalidate my anecdote.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by JimmaDaRustla on Wednesday January 14, 2026 @10:11AM (#46616915)

I think you should look for more anecotes - there's like a million of us using wayland daily with zero issues.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by MrDrMcCoy on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @03:42AM (#46598604)

Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself some non-Nvidia hardware.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by alextingle on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @02:27PM (#46606419)

Everything I have runs AMDGPU.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by honktime on Monday January 12, 2026 @06:48AM (#46587159)

xfce wayland seems to work fine/most components are ported. I started it up in wayland mode just now and it seems to work fine.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by laxis96 on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:07AM (#46587333)

I'm genuinely wondering why everybody hates modern GNOME.

I have long been running Linux on headless systems but Windows on my daily, and only recently switched to dailying a Linux desktop. I started with Kubuntu LTS, it was easy to switch from Windows (shortcuts, UX) but it felt too "complicated" and distracting, not very good looking OOTB and had some graphical glitches here and there (w/ nvidia).

Now I'm on Fedora GNOME and I like it with its clean and modern design language. Very few extensions later and I can see myself being productive with it.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by kelipso on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:29AM (#46587537)

People who say “clean and modern design language” might like it? It’s very unconfigurable and impossible to adjust it to your tastes.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by trebligdivad on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:22AM (#46587470)

Gnome is quite 'opinionated' in what it chooses; if you like their choices you enjoy it; if you don't....hmm. Personally I also have some things I specifically dislike; I prefer to have a fixed 3x3 virtual desktop grid, and Gnome didn't let me do that. I generally don't like the heavy use of menus and random stuff in the title bar of windows.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by EnergyAmy on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @02:12PM (#46606209)

You can do that with an extension, I do a 2x2 workspace. Although extensions can be problematic and break between versions, I haven't had any issues with this one.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by snoopen on Monday January 12, 2026 @07:20AM (#46587456)

I like GNOME for the most part. But I really dislike needing an extension to change the date away from US format. Extensions in general seem unstable. Every now and then GNOME just locks up and I have to kill it from a terminal session to avoid losing my work.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by prmoustache on Monday January 12, 2026 @01:35PM (#46592362)

I think it wouldn't be the default on many distros if everybody hated it.

I think we face the prism of the internet. Since it is the default on so many distros, almost everyonr has been faced to it at some point and those who don't like it are very vocal about it. Those who have been presented Gnome 3 as their first Linux Desktop and have been liking it have had no reason to try out other desktops and will be less vocal against them.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by liampulles on Monday January 12, 2026 @04:56PM (#46594837)

It probably depends on how far back one started using Linux on desktop. For me that was a while ago.

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Re:XFCE Is Great by MrDrMcCoy on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @03:50AM (#46598658)

There are many reasons to dislike GNOME:

1. Very little can be customized. 2. Extensions that let you customize things are unlikely to work in the next release because the APIs keep changing. 3. GTK apps have enormous padding around everything that eats my precious screen space. 4. It's heavier and slower than KDE. Probably thanks to all the embedded JavaScript. 5. Its' "my way or the highway" approach to workflows is abrasive.

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