Xfce 4.6, what do they think about it?
Xfce 4.6 has been out only since yesterday but there are already a great number of reviews spawning all around the Web. I'll try to keep a list of the main ones here:
- Phoronix
- Tectonic.co.za
- Zdnet.com
- Osnews
- Linux magazine
- Softpedia
- Ostatic
- Detector Pro
- Xubuntublog
- Arstechnica
French:
Spanish:
- And I've found a Spanish translation of the Xfce 4.6 tour, that's a nice work!
Czech:
As usual, Béranger found something to complain about 
But as he is complaining about the transparency of desktop icons, I think we can still say that 4.6 is a good release!
Reading those reviews, I can see two main issues: the desktop right click menu and the menu editor. For the menu editor, our rocking Jannis Pohlmann is already on it and is making really good progress on libxfce4menu: it'll allow us to use Alacarte to edit menus in Xfce 4.8 or to develop our own menu editor, if someone volunteers for this. For the right click menu, just find a beautiful wallpaper and remove all those ugly non-transparent desktop icons that hide it and your old beloved menu will be back!
If you find any other interesting reviews, please share them!
Edit: I added some links from the comments.
Comments
I've listed many of them at http://xubuntublog.wordpress.com/20... (see "which has already been picked up in various articles all over the web.").
Hello
There is too an nice article on the Pcinpact french website
http://www.pcinpact.com/actu/news/4...
Sorry, i'im really not able to translate il in english
What do we think about it? We think, it's great!
Czech review: http://www.linuxexpres.cz/software/...
Hey! Thanks for linking my translation :D I don't understand English really really well, but with the help of Google Dictionary for some words finally made it xD.
Thanks one more time. I'm waiting for Xfce 4.6 in Debian Unstable to install it on my Testing and do a real review of it xD
Thank you all! I just updated the post to add your links.
Thanks to all Xfce developers! Keep up the good work!
Béranger complaints about icon labels transparency, but in fact it's possible to change it...
you just have to add the following text in \home\youruserfolder\.gtkrc-2.0
style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {
XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 0
# between 0 (transparent) and 255 (opaque)
XfdesktopIconView::selected-label-alpha = 100
# between 0 (transparent) and 255 (opaque)
XfdesktopIconView::ellipsize-icon-labels = 0
# unselected icons get their labels truncated (1) or not (0)
XfdesktopIconView::shadow-x-offset = 2
# in pixels, 0 disables shadow, it can be negative
XfdesktopIconView::shadow-y-offset = 2
# in pixels, 0 disables shadow, it can be negative
XfdesktopIconView::shadow-color = "#000000"
XfdesktopIconView::selected-shadow-x-offset = 2
# in pixels, 0 disables shadow, it can be negative
XfdesktopIconView::selected-shadow-y-offset = 2
# in pixels, 0 disables shadow, it can be negative
XfdesktopIconView::selected-shadow-color = "#000000"
XfdesktopIconVIew::cell-spacing = 0
# spacing between each 'cell' in the grid of icons
XfdesktopIconView::cell-padding = 0
# sets extra padding placed around each icon+text
XfdesktopIconView::cell-text-width-proportion = 2.05
# the units are in width (so for 30px icons, '2.5' would leave a 75px wide area underneath for the text)
}
widget_class "*XfdesktopIconView*" style "xfdesktop-icon-view"
It's not a very user friendly way to do it, but it works. I hope someone found this useful.
source:
http://www.mail-archive.com/xfce4-c...
http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.c...
http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.c...
Its the worst. Sluggy, slow, fat. Worst ever. Sorry , it was promising but this is.. just.. not a lightweight desktop environment. More likely a gnome-light or something. Anyway, thanks to you, I had to change to another DE on low-end machines. I aldy had to change when KDE4 came out...and now you too.. really..thanks.
The upgrade is a bit of a pain in the rear because of the usual dependency rat's nest, but this is par for the course with anything GNOME. Not too slow on my fairly new laptop with FreeBSD7-Stable, but if I were you guys, I'd focus less on lots more graphics (anti-aliasing rocks, compositing is nifty but less useful), changes that break the plugins from one release to the next, and more on interoperability with non XFCE-specific programs, and speed of startup (KISS...as in find out what Microsoft does with explorer and do the opposite). The app menu isn't as useful as it should be because I can't customize it or manually add programs to it via settings as far as I can tell. It isn't readily apparent how you use a custom background picture either (don't want to brute-force a change). Thank you for not adding windows animation, sound effects and other such non-features. If you got rid of the splash screen (first thing I'll disable), I certainly wouldn't miss it. Thanks also for avoiding excessive pop-up windows.
That's really great news!
I'm an Ubuntu user, but after trying XUbuntu in a 256MB virtual machine (in a Mac), I must say I'm very inclined to adopt Xfce as my next desktop.
Here's a small video I made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z39n...
BTW, how the memory footprint have evolved since the previous version?
HSU, foo: xfce 4.6 uses the same amount of ressources as xfce 4.4 here. It even starts a lot faster.
Lankford: here upgrading did not broke any plugin, all my preferences were migrated. The menu configuration issue is a known one, it should be fixed it 4.8 as I said in a previous post.
Jeromeg: Great for you. At least its faster for you.. but not for anyone who I know. Well, since its linux, there are a lot of alternatives. I didnt want to flame or anything.. anyway, this whole new release is just saddening (for me).
Followed all the steps and successfully compiled and installed GM http://file.sh/gnome+torrent.html , but while adding it to a panel I get the hit to enable it via preferences. So I click preferences which show me a minimal dialog, resizing this the dialog doesn't contain any widgets (settings). Help...
peed of startup (KISS...as in find out what Microsoft does with explorer and do the opposite). The app menu isn't as useful as it should be because I can't customize it or manually add programs to it via settings as far as I can tell. It isn't readily apparent how you use a custom background picture either (don't want to brute-force a change). Thank you for not adding windows animation, sound effects and other such non-features. If you got rid of the splash screen (first thing I'll disable)