While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there’s also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it’s called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).
This isn’t a review; these are just a few quick notes about Xfce and Xubuntu.
I find Ubuntu to be the best Linux distribution there is. It’s easy to install and use, has a good balance between stability and bleeding-edgeness, and makes it very easy to overcome some of the hurdles of desktop Linux such as restricted drivers, encumbered codecs, and non-Free software. On top of that, I’m simply biased towards it because it’s Debian-based, and I feel most at home on Debian.
Where Ubuntu fails, in my opinion, is the overall aesthetics of the system. I know themes and the like are easy to change, but the brown and orange just had its time, and while it serves its role in giving Ubuntu a distinctive look, it also means having to do extra work to get it to look to my pleasing.
I’ve tried Kubuntu on a number of occasions, but it just doesn’t come even close to the amount of polish Ubuntu delivers, and it seems to have only gotten worse with the advent of KDE4. The Kubuntu guys just do not seem to be able to implement KDE4 to its fullest potential, which is a shame. Then again, I must say that other distributions also seem to have trouble with really utilising the flexibility of KDE4 to its fullest.
So I figured I’d give Xubuntu a try, and I must say, I was very, very pleasantly surprised. I haven’t used Xfce in a long time, so it was also a good opportunity to find out how this other desktop environment is doing. As it turns out, both Xubuntu and Xfce have grown up, and I can honestly say that I find Xfce more pleasant to use than GNOME, and Xubuntu more polished than Ubuntu.
Xubuntu’s presentation of Xfce is more professional and grown-up than that of Ubuntu-regular. Instead of an eye-piercing orange, the default theme and colours of Xubuntu are more subdued, making it more pleasant to look at. Xubuntu opted for the Murina Gtk+ theme engine, with StormCloud as its Gtk+ style, which goes very well with my favourite part: the beautiful default Xfwm4 window decorator. Again, it looks much more professional than the default Ubuntu theme.
Moving on from the shallowness of themes, Xfce is like GNOME, but just less of it. It’s like a miniature version of GNOME, but with additional goodies. One of those is of course the excellent file manager for Xfce: Thunar. Thunar is small, lightweight, and it has a clean and unobtrusive interface. Sure, you can install Thunar on Ubuntu, but that’s besides the point: defaults matter.
Another very welcome goodie is Xfce’s support for iconification. Sadly, it does feel like an afterthought, and not a core part of Xfce. For instance, icons on the desktop are an OR…OR situation; you can have or regular icons, or iconified windows. I want the ability to have them both, with iconified windows being distinctly different from regular icons. In addition, it would be nice if it had a subtle visual cue which would indicate where the window is iconified to. I had hoped Compiz could solve this issue, but sady, Compiz’ minimise effects will only “minimise” to the task list.
Still, iconification earns Xfce major brownie points, and hopefully future versions will improve the concept.
The compositor built into Xfce also deserves a mention. It’s simple and limited, but it works very well and makes the whole experience of using Xfce just that little bit smoother. Some sort of method of extending functionality would be welcome though; a plugin framework of some sort like Compiz has. You can run Compiz on Xfce too, of course.
Overall, Xubuntu made a good impression, and if you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you give it a go. It provides all the benefits of regular Ubuntu, but it all looks a bit more polished and professional. Until the Ubuntu team implements a more coherent and less eye-piercing default look, Xubuntu will be my new variant of choice.
KDEs problem:
It just does not get the same attention from big companies. Novell, Red Hat, Intel, Nokia, Canonical etc. all employ a lot of GTK/Gnome hackers.
Qt is well maintained by Nokia, but for KDE they only employ Aaron Seigo. Novell has a few older SUSE KDE hackers on the payroll, but let go a few go lately. Mandrake has very few and Canonical has one.
That is why KDE gets a lot more development in the Summer because of Googles Summer of code.
Same with distros. Kubuntu is much more a community project than Ubuntu. It lacks developers. For Fedora KDE is only a special interest group.
There are only a few distros that do some KDE development (Pradus does a lot of config/glue Python stuff. Others do similar superficial stuff, but no core development.)
That is also why KDE4 lacks a lot of enterprise functionality that was there in KDE3, because volunteers are not so much into that stuff. They like to build flashy new desktop stuff.
I think KDE should embrace these facts and not try to be something it isn’t. It is a enthusiast desktop and it should embrace its users and listen to their brainstorm at forums.kde.
It should work on a social desktop and try to integrate better with Debian. A true community distro is KDEs best option right now.
Try getting new versions of KDE into Debian Testing fast would be a great choice for most people.
And it should work on a more social desktop.
I great suggestion in this regard is this:
http://whilos.blogsite.org/?p=144
I think KDE is doing fine. The number of active contributors is steadily growing: http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors
I personally like the fact that KDE is mostly developed by the community. I think it would be nice to have a really good KDE centric distribution, but personally I can live without.
I honestly think Nokia/Trolltech needs to develop a Qt only desktop similar to Antico.
http://www.antico.netsons.org
I think part of the point to Qt v4 was portability. KDE lib dependencies just prevent apps to be easily ran on multiple platforms unless you plan on installing KDE on that platform, I just don’t see it catching on unfortunately. It’s sad because there are some KDE apps I really want to see cross platform like Amarok, Koffice.
Uhm, you do realise that Amarok 2, KOffice 2, Kontact, Konqueror, DragonPlayer, in fact the whole KDE4 stack is cross-platform, right? You can run them on various Linux distros, FreeBSD, Windows XP/Vista/7, MacOS X, Solaris, probably OpenBSD and NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD, and probably a few others that I’ve forgotten.
Although KDE could do with some corporate assistance in many places, mainly to do with polish and general finishing work, KDE certainly still has a lot going for it. I think you’re selling it a bit short when you say its future only really lies as an enthusiast desktop.
I think the thing which was putting off major commercial distros in the past was that Qt was GPL, which would really limit any distro as a target platform for proprietary software. It’s not really been very long since the license change to LGPL, and I am still holding out hope for greater corporate interest due to this improved situation.
The situation may have improved but it never wasn’t only the about the GPL. It was also control and Gnome always had better accessibility.
Specific examples? We always seem to lurch from one reason to another on this topic.
I don’t have any numbers but I could imagine that there are more people employed for working on Qt then for working in GTK+
This is actually not correct.
Aaron is the only one being paid by Qt Software to work on KDE full time, others like David Faure are paid to work on it part of their time (in David’s case 50% IIRC).
There have to be more, I know at least Jonathan Riddell, Aurélien Gâteau and Bo Thorsen.
Not counting all of the KDE PIM developers working for KDAB, the guys working fo KO Gmbh on KOffice, etc.
It could be that those companies are just not as well known to people wathing KDE development from a distance.
Could be, still besides my point.
OK, one more. Bo is at KDAB. I just mentioned the distro guys, because you need at least a few dozen to really shape a distro and release a quality product if you want to release every 6 month. And even with a dozen you won’t do a lot of development or polishing. Mainly you do bug fixing.
Then I probably didn’t get your point. I though it was about companies being actively involved in development of Free Software desktop stacks by employing key developers.
You need to update more often
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3908
I am pretty sure all of the distributors have “a few dozen” people working on their products.
My guess would actually be several hundred.
Yeah, one of the unfortunate side effects of employment. The individuals will work on Free Software full time but usually more on company related things than the project they came from.
Which is why contracts like Aaron Seigo’s are so special as they allow them to work in their original project at all times.
No my point was that KDE does not get a lot of attention from distributors. Qt does not really matter in that regard.
OK, I stand corrected. It is three now, maybe even four. But Riddel was for a very long time the only one that was employed to work on Kubuntu. And it shows.
Not on the KDE part they don’t. The biggest distributor has exactly zero.
This I don’t get. Which company related things would that be for Canonical, Novell etc. other than making the KDE part of the product good and advance it??
Ah, I see. That wasn’t obvious from your first posting, you wrote “GTK/GNOME developers” so I though you included people working on libraries as well.
Why do you think so?
They create and ship all the relevant packages, they maintain not-yet-upstream patches fixing problems on their distributions, they provide fixes to their paying (enterprise) customers, etc.
Sure, KDE is a well engineered product and might not require dozens of people working on it, but since those things don’t miraculously do themselves, there must be some humans doing it
Since Novell and Red Hat have people working on KDE, that would then be Oracle? Or maybe Microsoft?
They could be working on things like the SUSE Build service, products for customers, internal applications, customer support, training interns, attending conferences, writing papers and so on.
Stuff employers expect their employees to do.
Only very few people are lucky enough to get fellow status and be allowed to work full time outside the usual corporate workload.
I disagree. I like KDE (Kubuntu) better than Ubuntu. It looks nicer and is more user-friendly than Ubuntu. Further, the widget-oriented mentality is what all operating systems are going to (including OS X and Windows 7).
The Gnome desktop is late to revamp, which it is due to do this year. KDE is actually ahead of the curve, not behind, even if it might be doing farsighted revamps with less resources.
Xfce is a nice, lean little desktop, but go ahead and try to figure out how to use it. There is little to no documentation for Xubuntu, while Ubuntu and Kubuntu have guides (ubuntuguide.org and kubuntuguide.org), forums, community documentation, etc.
Besides, if you are really looking for speed, try Puppy Linux, a pretty, really fast, small Linux distro that does everything a netbook user could want to do.
For everyone else, the increased speed of Ubuntu/Kubuntu Jaunty makes a lot of discussions a bit, well, old-fashioned.
Or or? Isn’t it “either this or that”? Anyway, it sounds weird. Besides, this is an exclusive OR, or XOR-situation.
About the defaults: If the defaults (including theme, software selection ..) were so important nobody would use Windows, but *buntu. After installing Windows I need to adjust _a lot_ of settings, install _tons_ of software .. to get a (for my personal needs) usable desktop.
Edited 2009-07-17 11:21 UTC
after reading your article I have installed Xubuntu (already tried few years back).
It’s true. XFce has improved a lot.
But for the brown-ish ubuntu’s look vs. xfce i personally prefer ubuntu, even if is the first thing i change on new installations.
this just to say that l&f is a personal taste…
thank you for the article, gave me the possibility to re-try a desktop env., often forgotten.
Kindly
elvisd
(sorry for horror-english
)
Only a window manager is all? And that you have more themes? You can replace the window manager (metacity/compiz) with the XFCE one, even it does not look so amazing. My issue with XFCE is that it starts fast only the basic desktop. The rest of GNOME libraries are already cached, so any libgnome application does it’s job. Also, the basic tools of Gnome are equal or better than the XFCE counterparts. Taking a bit more memory is not the main concern for most people, but the problem to Just Work.
KUbuntu also excluding the start time of KDE, afterward is snappy, even on an Atom machine with 1G of RAM.
The issue of XFCE IMHO is that it does not drive so much tracking in it to makes person that have paid developers inside it. This is a problem that both KDE or GNOME do not have. Also XFCE seems limited when you run around. You cannot move the icons out of the desktop grid…
Sounds silly, but excluding that you don’t have a machine that for real have low RAM, I am really thinking that XFCE is not (yet) a replacement for GNOME/KDE. Or may be, but a painful one.
You can tell XFCE to start GNOME and/or KDE daemons from the configuration panel. Just tick the boxes.
BTW, Tom, the iconification of programs is not an afterthought on XFCE. It is the filesystem icons that is an afterthought actually. Earlier versions of XFCE didn’t have filesystem icons.
Anyway, it is true that XFCE has grown a lot and is a fantastic DE, but Xubuntu is probably one of the worst implementation of it. If you like XFCE, you should try Zenwalk. It’s not debian-based but it is a very good distro.
Edited 2009-07-17 15:12 UTC
XFCE has been my choice since ’02… couldn’t be happier with it.
Xfce + AWN + stalonetray + brightside = happy
only word of warning, with proprietary ATI drivers there are problems with compositing (as with kde i believe)
Try it out
XUbuntu is an awesome distribution but Linux Mint with Murina-Blue (included) style and URW Gothic L Book font with size 9 and Subpixel Smooting setting for fonts looks really good. Of course, Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. Also to my surprise, the Print Screen button in Linux Mint actually captures a screenshot. I will try XUbuntu as I like Xfce but currently I am hooked on Linux Mint. I have downloaded the Universal Gloria edition. Linux Mint is trully aimed at looks and functionality!
Edited 2009-07-17 13:02 UTC
http://www.linuxmint.com/
I find it’s pastel shades of green to be quite soothing.
No screenshots? It’s a bit weird to wite an article about how nice some desktop looks without providing some screenshots.
poor me i have never had the pleasure of using 0-day cpu and computer configurations so yes it is sort of obvious Xubuntu and maybe the newest linux mint maria? are both good on older machines, i would also like to add on older mechines default Xubuntu i feel is more user friendly than a plain install of xp on the same computer, is it really that much fun looking, waiting for, and installing windows drivers to…….use your computer or just pop in a live cd and 5-10 minutes later up and running full fledged OS……when i say older machines i mean any x86 base that is older that ’05 or ’06.
As I mentioned above, XUbuntu is a very descent distro and I agree with Thom on the points he raised.
… it has problems with one thing I need everytime: access to smb:// network shares. You have to install one or two programs or mount all the damn shares, and when you try to mount them sometimes it gave me an wierd “segmentation fault (core dumped)” error.
Besides this minor problem it’s a very very cool DE.
🙂
Sounds like the avahi daemon isn’t started, this happened to a buddy of mine recently and it took us forever to diagnose it.
What does the Avahi daemon have to do with that?
The problem is that, at least when I last tried it, XFCE did not have anything similar to gvfs or kio, which would allow the user to access remote storages without root privileges.
Actually, I feel that gvfs is the best such solution currently available (apart from the “translator” concept of The Hurd, which unfortunately will forever remain pre-alpha software), as it even allows applications without gvfs support to access smb shares, webdav storages, ftp servers etc, through its use of FUSE (if correctly configured, gvfs file systems are mounted through FUSE under ~/.gvfs, so that you can access them with any app, you can even cd ~/.gvfs and you will have the full might of the shell available)
I last tried XFCE a year back or so and at least by that time, I did not see any equivalent to gvfs there. Has this changed in the meantime?
Well, it should have absolutely nothing to do with it, but there are issues with some Samba versions where, if the avahi daemon is not running, they will randomly segfault when attempting to mount a remote folder or to share a folder itself. It’s an internal assumption that avahi is running and, when it’s not, certain memory access can go out of bounds. It’s been fixed, but I’m not sure if *buntu has the fixed versions.
As for gvfs, I’m not sure. I don’t use Xfce, but gvfs or the lack there of would not have caused the segfaults the OP described.
I’ll have to disagree about the Ubuntu choice of colors being 70s. In the 70s, people had brown and orange curtains, brown and orange car seats, NOT brown and orange GUI desktops.
The Ubuntu desktop is a way to make working on your computer easier on the eyes, and it’s a definite break from the “let’s make everything blue…blue is good…blue is corporate…blue is soothing…blue is calming…blue is water..” that is so prevalent.
I personally like red, orange, green, grey, even purple, and seeing the Debian desktop, with its lighter blue background, is refreshing. It may not be suitable for many hours a day work, though.
I should mention that I live my life in Vim, varying between dark-blue and just-dark themes, but having Ubuntu running means I’ve been inspired to make my own “70s” theme, and it’s turning out to be quite pleasing on the eyes. That’s what matters when you’re actually working on your computer.
Oh, and I like the top bar of this site a lot too…what’s that? Orange? Yellow’ish green? Logo lettering in fat swung style? 60s hairstyle default avatar icon?
Hmm…if they could just get rid of all that WHITE…
Too be honest, I don’t see much point in Xubuntu. It’s pretty much like Ubuntu but with a different color scheme. The overall look and feel is pretty much the same and all the major apps are the same.
Btw, they’re called earth colors and they’re pretty popular outside the western hemisphere, especially in latin-american and african countries. You know, the countries that aren’t horribly dull and cold.
Edited 2009-07-17 14:32 UTC
Exactly. My wife, who’s an artist, prefers the Ubuntu desktop to just about any other, including the Mac OS X one. She says most desktop designs are decidedly “male” looking (I think she means “tech” in the non-Giger way), not organic like a painting would be, a fact she finds disturbing on an aesthetic level; she calls the typical desktop designs “edgy” and “thriller movie-dark”.
I just asked her again, and she mentions the Ubuntu designs as “non-gender specific”, a further plus in her book.
An organic looking desktop would be horribly impractical. Computers aren’t organic there machines.
I just read that blue is the most favourite colours for both male and female. Must themes are blue, so that would make most desktops non-gender specific. But I have better thinks to as jugging if themes are male or female specific.
p.s. I hate blue.
My…you have better things to do…
I was taking the discussion seriously because it is a serious matter. Usability is a multi-billion dollar industry, the basis of a number of U.S. laws stating requirements for the public sector, the source of countless hours spent in frustration with bad user interfaces etc. ad nausseum.
Organic interfaces are both possible and nothing new, and I’ll gladly bet my future in this business on them BEING the future. The argument that computers are machines and that organic interfaces should thus not belong on them is unsubstantiated, my busy friend, and the tendency in computing to try to model real physics, EVEN in user interfaces, is not about computers but about the sentient beings USING them, just as it directly contradicts your sentiment.
I live in Arkansas (in the southern United States) and trust me it is not cold here right now, nor does it get very cold here in the winter. It is boring here though, unless you love the outdoors.
Edit: We love Earth colors in my state. This makes sense since our official motto is the Natural State. (Our unofficial motto is “Thank God for Mississippi”
)
Sorry for the multiple edits my brain doesn’t want to work correctly today
Edited 2009-07-17 15:21 UTC
Have you actually used it, or are you just going by screenshots and forum comments? Xubuntu is as different from Ubuntu as Xenwalk is from Slackware. It’s the same core, but the UI is worlds different. The default software is different too; Xubuntu has a lighter set of apps, with little crossover to regular Ubuntu. Try it and you’ll see that.
Try living here in northwest Georgia, USA and then tell me about earth colors and temperature. Our earth is a decidedly brownish-red due to the red clay that permeates the area, we have more trees than nearly any other part of the US, and in the autumn the tree leaves turn to a quite pleasing array of browns, oranges and yellows. Also, it’s 11:38pm local time and it’s still above 80 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s a balmy 27 degrees Centigrade) and the humidity is 72%.
Once again, get some experience before you dismiss something out of hand. Your air of superiority makes you appear petty and overly judgemental.
I have used it.
Are you talking about me not liking XFCE/Xubuntu or are you somehow miffed about the earth colors comment?
Maybe I just get a bit tired of all the whining about how horrible the ubuntu colors are and how awesome blue and white is?
Most of this whining do happen to come from westerners so far.
Just as I get tired of America-bashing and blind adherence to stereotypes just because not everyone agrees with you. We’re not all Europe-hating, beer drinking, xenophobic, racist, redneck neo-conservative f–ktards here, but that seems to be the image many outside our country judge the entire nation by.
You should be more open minded and you won’t be called out as often, you know.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention America anywhere in my post. Heck, I didn’t even know you are American.
I’m equally sure that “westerners” include Europeans. My post, if that wasn’t obvious, was targeted at westerners and the western color sensibilities (the blue rules thing) and the idea that everyone should have the same sensibilities.
Perhaps you shouldn’t be so quick to think that everyone is against you. You know, be a little open minded.
Look, we could go on like this ad infinitum, but that would be stupid. Yes, I take offense when someone talks about those “damn westerners”. I’ll leave it at that.
I found Xubuntu to be a little more lightweight on the GUI front, and prefer it when I set up a PowerPC Linux box. It seems to be the right balance of utility and performance.
Nice summary. I’ve been an Xfce user off and on since it was done with XForms, and having migrated back from KDE 3.5, the 4.6 version is the best I can remember. People looking it as a lightweight clone of Gnome aren’t giving it a fair shot, IMHO. There are a lot of customizations that Xfce can do that Gnome can not. I’ve never given Xubuntu a try (Kubuntu’s regression over past few releases has perhaps unfairly put me off from most Ubuntu derivatives), but Fedora 11’s version is nicely done. So too is Zenwalk, but I’m still waiting for a 64-bit version.
I like the browns, tans, yellows, and oranges of the standard Ubuntu desktop.
For one, it gives Ubuntu a distinct and original look and feel, something that helps with perception and branding.
Two, I find it a warm, comforting, human feel, as opposed to, for my tastes, the rather cold, mechanical industrial lnf’s of some other Linux distros, and Mac, and even Windows.
What’s worse is the stupid Fisher Price interface of WinXP. Vista looks nice, but it’s a pig.
But Gnome with the standard Ubuntu theme is great to me. And those who don’t like the colors, well, of course it’s very easy to change it to your liking.
At distrowatch, they did a comparison of Debian with xfce vs the new xubuntu 9.04.
They concluded that Debian was more stable (big surprise…), faster, and better implemented.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090427#feature
One little issue that I had with Xubuutu was in how it handled switching keyboard layouts in 8.x; not until I switched to 9.0.4 the issue that I was having disappeared. Ubintu 8, of course, *never* had any keyboard-switching issues, which drove me to think that Xubuntu is always a bit behind in usability.
Yet, I am all for Xubuntu if one has to consider limited hardware resources, I had it working flawlessly (besides the keyboard rues) on a P3 box with an ancient ATI video card – good enough for a developer’s GUI.
…I used it before and I still keep an eye on it with every release. The reason I stopped using it was because it didn’t have support for mounted drives via smb and you had to install few programs for that and even then it didn’t work well. I also do a lot of stuff on remote servers via ssh and sftp and I like to mount those directories as well which Tunar doesn’t support, it’s much easier to use via Nautilus then Filezilla (for me). So that is why I came back to Ubuntu.
I always find it funny how X/K/ [younamit]buntu are always talked about as if these were seperate distributions. The are just metapackages. Every ubuntu user can test xubuntu by typing “sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop” in a terminal window. I mean, nobody ever referred to Debian with KDE installed as KDebian or Redhat with GNUstep as Gredhat.
And what makes XFCE on Ubuntu so much different/better from XFCE on any other distribution?
I cannot avoid the impression that the only reason why there is an article on XFCE on Ubuntu and not SuSE, RedHat or Debian is just the brand, nothing else.
Additional humor can be found from the fact that certain Linux/Ubuntu advocates dismiss Windows because it has “too many versions”.
Edited 2009-07-18 12:13 UTC
Who says so? Well, in fact what I said was that Ubuntu, Xubuntu etc. just pretend to be different distributions. In fact all those customisations (Server, GNOME, Kubuntu, xubuntu, Ubuntustudio etc) use the same repository, they are just different metapackages and therefore install different selections of packages from that pool. and if you want you can have all of them installed at the same time, just as you can have GNOME, KDE, XFCE, E17, GNUstep and LXDE installed in parallel on Debian. …
It may be that the different versions of Vista have the same technical base, but here switching between the versions is certainly much harder (and costier).
P.S: Why don’t we have LUbuntu yet? I.e. Ubuntu with LXDE installed…
I specifically said why I was talking about Xubuntu and not Fedora or anything else: I prefer Debian.
Also, I specifically talked about a *variant* of Ubuntu, which is *exactly* what Xubuntu is. It has a different desktop environment, different artwork, different set of default applications.
Inn other words, your comment is off in every possible way.
I don’t understand the obsession with desktop environments, all those do is tell you how to use your computer.
I prefer using a window manager and then installing only the tools I need. I use Ubuntu’s Alternate install CD and install a command line system, then build on that.
My window manager of choice is Window Maker. I turn practically everything off within it, no applets, no icons and no dock to be seen on my workspaces. Only a menu, which is access by right clicking the workspace (or pressing F12).
I do have nautilus installed, which I run when I want to browse windows/Samba shares but apart from that it’s mostly cli – save for firefox/conky/pidgin etc, I use the tools that suit me best.
Edited 2009-07-19 08:01 UTC
Sorry, but any file browser that cannot browse network shares is last century for me. That is not an extra feature anymore when it is becoming so natural to have several networked devices.
about xubuntu is that there’s no mono in it