Just briefly after GNOME released the much anticipated 2.8 release, XFCE team announced beta version of the next major release of XFCE-4. As a fan of both GNOME and it's lightweigt cousin XFCE, I immediately installed the beta version 4.1.90 to my home and work computers.

First Impressions

The general look and feel of XFCE has not changed much. The default window decoration theme is a bit more modern and pleasant. Another noticeable change is the icon theme. Icons in XFCE have never been done quite right, and the situation is now worse; Icon theming seems to be integrated to GNOME icons, but the panel icons aren't compatible.

The desktop environment has gone through some redesign, which shows immediately when you start customizing your desktop. Generally speaking, the redesign has gone in the right direction, and customizing settings is more straight-forward than before.

The Desktop

XFCE's developers have really made some improvements with the desktop. Unlike in previous versions, you now get a desktop menu full of items. The menu is actually usable out of the box. No longer is the user required to customize the menu file by hand to get more functionality out of it.

Session Management

First visible indication of a change in the session management is an animated fullscreen mouse image where there used to be a startup window with progress bar. I think this approach to session startup is much frienly than the technical "now loading this and that" windows which plague both GNOME and KDE.

The session manager is quite intelligent, and it can recall all applications which were left open on the desktop during your last session. Unfortunately this behaviour is not turned on by default.

Settings

The Settings dialog has been completely reworked and reorganized. The desktop margins dialog has been made a secondary item, which is good.

File manager preferences linger in the Settings display. The preferences are quite useless and full of environmental variable settings, which should not be part of a GUI preference dialog. All of those settings could be made within the application; there's no need to have a seperate graphical settings dialog for that. The same can be said aboug the settings for Xfcalendar. It feels like the developers had to have 4x4 items in the Settings window.

Then there are settings for an iconbox called "Lil' Star." Unfortunately there are no means to make the iconbox appear. The user has to manually start the iconbox from command line. Why make it so difficult? And why name it?

Under the hood XFCE has changed the place for config files. They're now stored under the centralized .config folder, and not on the home directory of the user. I'd like to see more applications move there and stop polluting my $HOME.

Panel

The panel looks a bit different now, but that's about it with appearances. Clicking on panel buttons now gives you visual feedback about the press by disabling the pressed button for a while.

Applets are now added through a dialog, not a submenu. This works similar to GNOME 2.8 panel applets. I can't yet say if this is a good thing, since I'm modifying my XFCE-4 panel more often than I customize my GNOME panel.

Panel launcher settings dialogs have been cleaned up, and they don't look so technical anymore.

Using XFCE 4.2 Beta

If you've used XFCE-4 before, then you'll be at home with the new version. There are a number of usability improvements, as well as improvements to the graphical appearance of the desktop. For novice users XFCE is still too difficult to get to know well. You can work with it, but that's about it. Thanks to the desktop menu, users can now access most of their installed applications without going to the terminal or creating a panel buttons for them.

Many of the changes the developers have made are invisible to the user in most parts. So there are no dramatic improvements in the new version. You get more eye-candy in places. And a new file chooser from GTK 2.4.

The beta-nature doesn't show it's ugly head much. The applications are quite stable. The panel has crashed once, which didn't happen at all in the 4.0 version.

Icon themes are not integrated as well as I'd like to see them. For example, the Settings dialog doesn't react to the icon theme at all; and panel does so only for certain themes.

What's Missing

We're short of in-place help in all dialogs. There's not much helpful information presented to the user. At some dialogs the user is bluntly told to leave the setting alone if he doesn't know what he's doing -- and how could he because it's not explained.

The email checker doesn't do IMAP accounts yet -- or it's not documented. There is a place for mail check command, but it's unclear if the return value of the command is used. I tried to run fetchmail in check mode to check my IMAP mail folder, but the mail checker didn't react to it in any way.

Despite these shortcomings, XFCE is still the best lightweight GNOME-compatible desktop environment. I can recommend it, and the new 4.2 release, to anyone in need of a fast desktop environment with support for GNOME and KDE applications.