XFCE4 review: After Over 10 Years with KDE, I'm Moving to XFCE, and Xubuntu!

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking.  I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day!  Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important.  This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

First, a little known fact about me.  I have not used Windows as my main desktop operating system since 1998.  I have found Linux to be worth the extra effort in configuration and learning.  Every other environment I've tried has felt like a "toy" in comparison.

So it seems natural that KDE was my desktop of choice from the beginning, as it fit most of my requirements.  KDE and I have had a long and mostly rewarding relationship over the years, but after using Xubuntu for about a month now I can't possibly imagine going back.

The major reason for this is not any particular defect in KDE 4.x.  The 4th major version of KDE is very nice, it seems to be more lightweight than 3.x, and has made strides in imitating Microsoft Windows desktop.  The eye candy is good too.

I suppose I have grown away from the new Microsoft-imitative features.  I don't like the more complicated "start menu."  I don't need widgets all over my desktop.  I don't like how easy it is to goof up your menus.  I like my desktop to load within 3 seconds after login.  I don't need a special sound server, or tons of application interconnections spawned so my this can talk to my that.

I've also grown away from KDE applications.  I stopped using Kmail because of stability problems.  I quit using Kdevelop as soon as I discovered the magnificence of Eclipse.  I use Konqueror from time to time but only for testing.  Now Thunderbird, Eclipse and Firefox are the applications I'm likely to have open, and they're all GTK apps which means there's really no need to clutter my memory with QT.

However, XFCE had never impressed me in the past.  It never looked that professional or full featured to me.  With the recent versions, that has changed spectacularly.  Between the usability improvements made by the XFCE team and the folks designing and decorating the Xubuntu distribution, it is now nothing short of stunning.  From the cute XFCE mouse spash screen as the kernel boots, to the sparkling icon on login, everything about it is truly beautiful.

I also have had a strange urge to have borderless transparent terminals for a long time.  With the xfce4-terminal, this perhaps trite, but certainly snazzy feature was easily added.

The speed of Xubuntu is magnificent as well. On my quad core xeon system with 4gb of zippy ram and a mediocre hard drive, it takes no time at all to get from POST to login screen.  Under 25 seconds.

Xubuntu is designed to run on low-end hardware though, not the monster of computational power that I do my development on.  On a cheap laptop it can be expected to have similar performance.  Its current memory footprint as I type this with xfce4 and firefox open is about 603MB.  I'm sure it would perform about as well with half that much memory.

So if you're looking for a mimalist, but beautiful desktop that isn't excessively gimmicked up, Xubuntu 9.10 may be worth a try.