XFCE 4.4

Site Admin Joined: 22 Jul 2006 Posts: 25

Any XFCE users might be interested in XFCE 4.4 Beta 2. I've been running it for a little over a week and it's been fast and stable. Best of all, using the composite manager has little or no impact on performance; 3ddesk runs just as smoothly with it as without, as does xscreensaver. Get it at XFCE.

What's XFCE, you ask? It's a lightweight desktop for the GNU/Linux operating system. What's GNU/Linux? It's an operating system that is relatively immune to viruses, spyware, malware, and blue screens of death, unlike some other operating systems we could mention. *COUGH*Windows*COUGH*

Find out more about Linux at DistroWatch. I run the Mandriva distribution, but there are many, many others. (Mandriva used to be called Mandrake, but the Hearst Corporation sued, evidently concerned that people would confuse a computer operating system with a passe comic strip character.)

Site Admin Joined: 22 Jul 2006 Posts: 25

If you read the previous post, you will see that it says I run the Mandriva distribution. Well, that's no longer true, and hasn't been for months -- now I run Ubuntu. I had various minor issues with Mandriva, not least that they tended to be behind on their packages (i.e., the software was out of date). Plus I hated the name.

Also, I'm back running my old favorite window manager, Fluxbox. (The developers now want you to call it FluxBox but I like it without the capital "B", and Linux is all about choice, is it not?) Although I still think XFCE 4.4 is very cool and very fast, there's just something about Fluxbox that keeps me coming back. It's either the DockApps or the fact that there's no session management, so the only things that run when I log in are what I want to run, every time. So there!

Here's a nice screenshot of Fluxbox running on my computer. My installation actually looks nothing like this anymore, but I'm too lazy to make a new screenshot right now.