Xfce Archive
XPde 0.3.5 Released; InterfaceWM, XFCE and XWin.org News
XPde 0.3.5 has been released, which according to the site is a major upgrade to the XPde desktop environment and window manager. We reported on the (Pascal-written) XPde before (shots). On other X11 news, InterfaceWM 0.2.4 was recently released, XFCE 4 is getting closer to release (screenshots and one more), while the XWin.org team had another conference call last week.
XFCE 4.0 a Step Closer to Final Release
The popular X11 desktop environment XFCE, which originally created to offer a free CDE-like DE for Unix/Linux, is closer on releasing the next big version, 4.0. XFce 4 has a radically different architecture from XFce 3. It embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. All of XFce 4's core components have been written from scratch in order to fit into the new architecture. Another priority of XFce 4 is adhereance to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org (new screenshots, the first one in that list is the newest and most relevant one, showing the components of the DE). You can visit the CVS, or you can download a daily CVS snapshot and compile it. XFce 4 is under active development and should be considered alpha quality.
XFce 4, to Support the FreeDesktop Standard
XFce is an easy-to-use environment for X11 based on GTK+. There is an initial version of xfwm4, a brand-new implementation of the window manager for XFce. It is a very lightweight, fast, and fully-themeable window manager compliant with freedesktop.org standards (i.e., fully compatible with KDE 2/3 and GNOME 2). It is based on GTK+ 2.0 and uses pango for font rendering (eg. antialiased text & Unicode). Oliver Fourdan sent us two new screenshots of XFce4 (1, 2), running next to KDE3/Gnome2.
XFce: Not Just Another Desktop Environment for UNIX
Oliver Fourdan, a French developer who works his day job at embedded Linux company Anfora, explains how XFce got started: "Back in late 1996, I'd started working on HP workstations that used CDE and I really liked that interface. I was very disappointed with Microsoft Windows 95 and its 'Start Menu,' so I found the concept of the toolbar in CDE very much more convenient. I had been using Linux since 1994, so it sounded natural to me to try to reproduce a concept I liked, on Linux. And at that time, there were no other projects like this--well at least, none really usable." Read the review of the XFce desktop environment at NewsForge.