Lightweight desktop environment XFCE and it’s features

There are a lot of Desktop Environments in the world of Linux Distributions. Most of the Desktop Environments are usually maintained by their respective Distribution maintainers like Cinnamon and Mate is maintained by Linux Mint Developers, but Xfce is also one of the most awesome and famous Desktop Environments of a Linux Distribution. Xfce also gets ported to other distributions for better performance in those Linux variants. Most of the major Linux Distributions maintain Xfce as per their own taste. It's a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like OS. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user-friendly. It's based on GTK +2 which is all time favorite desktop environment which is amazingly fast with a set of cool features. Xfce 4.12 is still based on GTK+2 for but there is partial support for GTK+3 with Xf* programs being optionally allowed to support GTK3 in parallel.

Here is the list of some awesome features of Xfce

User Interface

When you first log in, you will find a plain desktop with a single top panel and an oddly-placed calendar widget. There is no start menu, but you will see a “user” button. To the right, there is a clock, and the so-called “system dashboard,” from which a volume controller, a battery status indicator, a workspace switcher, a locale switcher and a logout button are visible. If the calendar placement disturbs you, it can be moved by first unlocking the desktop (right-click on the desktop anywhere and select unlock). which will make the calendar grow a title bar, then moving it wherever you like or getting rid of it entirely. Once you find the preferred location, the desktop can be locked again.

Xfce Terminal

Any productive Linux user will need the terminal for making things faster, the Xfce Terminal will prove a good replacement for applications like xterm, Konsole or GNOME Terminal, especially if you strive for simplicity. The Xfce Terminal allows you to configure its appearance, background image, font, colors, shortcuts. It even supports tabs, which is very useful when you need more than one instance opened.

Midori web browser

Midori uses the powerful WebKit rendering engine, so it will successfully support any web page out there that WebKit supports. It features the usual interface of the simple browser, offering enough options to make it a simple, yet useful web browser.  Midori comes with extension support, bookmarks, history, encodings, zooming web pages in or out, source viewer and fullscreen mode. It also supports tabs (a must have) and it includes a speed dial page by default when opening a new tab for fast access to your favorite web pages. Midori is pretty rich in options such as allows for spell-checking, enabling/disabling showing images, scripts, interface, external applications, proxy, privacy and even appearance settings.

Menu

When you click the user button, you will find that the menu is empty. This is, of course, not the case. It is only that you are in the “favorites” view which has nothing in it yet. You can have favorite places, applications, and files stored which shows immediate usage potential. Clicking the Applications button on the left, your menu will be populated. By default, you see all your installed applications in alphabetical order without any grouping.

Home Directory

Choosing the “Home Directory” icon on the left brings up folder views. You can open any current directory in the default file manager by clicking the top-left corner icon. The Home Directory also offers a search functionality by clicking on the binocular icon at the top-right corner to launch the search application.

Thunar file manager

Thunar is the default file manager in Xfce. It comes with a simple interface like any other Xfce application, side panel, configurable location selector, possibility to sort items, zoom in/out, three view modes such as icons, detailed list, compact list, and image previews. Thunar is simpler than Nautilus, but in turn, it will consume fewer resources. It offers basic configuration options but it will get the job done, especially if you only need to do basic file browsing and management.

Xfburn CD/DVD burner

The burning application in Xfce offers quite the usual features. It provides a drag and drops interface using a tree file viewer and a file browser, it supports burning CDs, DVDs, ISO images, creation of audio CDs and that's all there is to it. Very simple and easy-to-use, without any additional options. Xfburn is very well suited if you're looking for a minimal, less resource-hungry application for burning discs.

Ristretto image viewer

Ristretto comes with one of the most simple interfaces an image viewer could have, dividing the interface into two places - one is widget showing the image in full size or zoomed in or out, and another one is thumbnail preview bar, which can be relocated or hidden on demand via the View > Thumbnail Viewer menu entry. Preferences window allows the user to customise the slideshow options, image cache size, background colour and scaling. Fullscreen mode and rotating images are also available.

System Reports

A new tool called "System Reports" was developed for Linux. Its goal is to generate reports when software crashes occur, and to show information relevant to your computer and your environment. When a crash occurs, information is now gathered and a crash report is generated. The "System Reports" tool lists the crashes and is able to generate stack traces for them. When developers aren't able to reproduce a bug, that information is very useful. It's always been very difficult for non-experienced users to produce core dumps or stack traces. This tool helps a lot with that. The tool is also able to show information reports.

Xfmedia audio & video player

Xfmedia is the default media player which comes with Xfce, based on the Xine engine and capable of playing any audio or video format that Xine supports. Xfmedia offers a basic interface which is best fit for playing audio files, but Xine makes it possible to play videos and movies too.

Mousepad text editor

Mousepad offers a basic text editor, stripped from advanced features like syntax highlighting, spell-checking or any of the features advanced text editors have. Mousepad, as the name suggests, is just a simple text editor, fast to edit configuration files or any other text file. The features it provides are font selection, line number, auto-indent and word wrap.

XApps

Xed, the text editor, now features a minimap. The toolbar of the PDF reader, Xreader, was improved. The history buttons were replaced with navigation buttons (history can still be browsed via the menu bar). The two zoom buttons were switched and a zoom reset button was added to make Xreader consistent with other Xapps.

Login Screen

The login screen is more configurable than before. Options were added for automatic login, so if you're the only one around, you can now set up your computer to log you in without a password. LDAP users will appreciate the ability to hide the user list and enter usernames manually. Various user interface elements such as the panel indicators now show tooltips and can be enabled/disabled in the preferences. Support for numlockx which purpose it to turn ON the numlock key at startup was also added.

PIA manager

The PIA Manager, a setup tool for PIA VPN connections (available in the repositories), now runs in user mode and no longer requires a root password to be launched.

Xfwm

Xfwm integrates its own compositing manager which is a window manager that provides applications with an off-screen buffer for each window and it perform additional processing on buffered windows, applying 2D and 3D animated effects such as blending, fading, scaling, rotation, duplication, bending and contortion, shuffling, blurring, redirecting applications, and translating windows into one of a number of displays and virtual desktops.

Orage

Xfcalendar was renamed to Orage and several features were added. Orage has alarms and uses the iCalendar format, making it compatible with many other calendar applications, e.g. vdirsyncer to sync via CalDAV. It also includes a panel clock plugin and an international clock application capable of simultaneously showing clocks from several different time zones.

Parole

A front-end for the GStreamer framework. It is developed by Ali Abdallah and is part of the Xfce Goodies. Originally only playlist-based, it now includes an option to replace the entire playlist when opening a file for playing.

 

Xfce has always wanted to be one of the leaner desktop environments, but it’s ever wanted to be the leanest. In this case, the interface feels a bit more polished, and a bit less bare-bones. Xfce still touts itself as a lighter alternative to the other most popular desktop environments like - KDE, GNOME, and Unity. Thank you!