Linus Ditches KDE and Gnome (so what?)

Michael Reed — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 15:16:17 +0000

Having made an earlier defection from KDE to Gnome, Linus Torvalds has now rejected both in favor of Xfce. It’s only natural that the actions of the creator of the Linux kernel would attract extra scrutiny, and I think that his decision is reflective of a wider disenchantment amongst long-term Linux users.

So is this post a sky-is-falling complain-fest? Not at all. It might be time for some of us to say, “I don’t like the way that the big two DEs are shaping up, so, I’m going to use something else.”

There was a time when KDE was the desktop for geeks who liked an intricate, customizable interface and Gnome had found its niche as a business desktop. No prizes for guessing which one Linus chose. However, upon the introduction of KDE4, he jumped ship in favor of Gnome 2. He stated that he was disappointed with the performance and reliability of KDE4, in addition to being unconvinced about the new direction that the developers were taking.

He made the announcement of his latest defection via Google+. His first remark was fairly benign:

“While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment?”

but then he followed up with some more specific and scathing criticisms:

“I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3.”

“In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's "too complicated" to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do.”

“I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really.”

Ouch. But also... not ouch. I think that there’s a positive side to all of this. Linus wants to get back to what he considers to be his favorite era of the Linux desktop. What we’re talking about here is a desktop that uses an interface mechanic that is reminiscent of both MacOS and Microsoft Windows and that favors a modular approach to application selection. KDE4 and Gnome 3 are breaking with traditional desktop mechanics while introducing some new elements. KDE4 fails on the second criteria of the the “classic” Linux DE as it will increasingly make use of highly integrated applications.

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Xfce 4.8 Desktop Environment

Michael Reed — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Although often classed as light-weight, Xfce qualifies as a medium weight amongst the Linux front ends. It's heavier than, say, LXDE or Window Maker but it uses less resources than KDE or Gnome. However, it is a desktop environment rather than simply a window manager, and as such, it comes with a set of associated utilities.

Actually obtaining and installing Xfce 4.8 proved to be a bit of an adventure in itself. At the time of writing, the Xfce devs haven't released any binaries, instead leaving this to the distributions themselves and other third parties. When I looked, all I could find was an Ubuntu 10.10 PPA that was 64 bit only. Compiling from source is daunting as it involves downloading and unpacking a collection of tar files and then building them in a special order. In the end, I installed a beta of Zenwalk, an Xfce orientated distribution. Take into account that I am therefore not basing my observations on plain, stock Xfce 4.8.

Behind the scenes, Xfce has dropped support for some older frameworks such as HAL in favor of GVFS and others in order to offer more modern, comprehensive hardware and networking support.

Thunar, the file manager, is probably the best known of all of the Xfce stand-alone applications, and it's an increasingly popular choice for use within other desktop environments. It is now possible to browse the network resources such as Samba shares and FTP sites, an improvement which will remove a long-standing barrier for a lot of people. It's also possible to eject removable devices from within Thunar. I presume that both of these advances have been made possible by the aforementioned move to a more modern set of frameworks. Progress indication for file operations now makes makes use of a single, shared window to avoid cluttering up the desktop.

The panel, an application launcher that sits at the bottom of the screen has been overhauled. Configuring the panel is now easier thanks to an improved configuration dialogue and the fact that you can now drag and drop applications onto the panel itself. It also has a pop up menu that allows you to browse the filing system in order to open terminals or file manager instances in the desired directory.

Xfce can now do quite a lot of the work of setting up the screen resolution and layout from within its configuration dialogues. It claims to be able to set up even multiple screens on a RandR compatible system. Unfortunately, this excludes systems using the proprietary Nvidia drivers. However, I presume that Nvidia's own GUI utility will work as normal in this case.

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XFCE

Linus Ditches KDE and Gnome (so what?)

Xfce 4.8 Desktop Environment