XFCE is when my backup when I break xmonad.
Only one thing I wish I could set, allow windows to cover the 'bar'. Yes, I can make the bar auto-hide, but I cannot have a portion of it covered by a window.
The same is true for GNOME, but KDE it is allowed. I expect this is a gtk thing.
I've been doing a couple of these over the years, and the great thing about XFCE is that it doesn't change, while at the same time being fairly intuitive and discoverable to the tech-unsavvy people.
So, with XFCE, I explain things once and I don't have to explain things to that person ever again. It stays as is over the years!
One only have to make sure to disable the virtual desktop (4 screens by default) thing and be sure to only keep one. That's the most confusing thing to non-tech-savvy that ever was. "Where have all my windows gone?! I moved the mouse and poof! they were gone"
Also, it runs great on old hardware. It's mostly what I've been doing. Family and friends tell me how they'll need to buy a new computer because theirs can't go on the internet anymore. I tell them "no you won't!". And then their computer becomes super fast again. Make my Computer Great Again.
If I was more purely looking for something lightweight I think I’d end up with some other choice with a more modern design language.
Even thinking about this subject still makes me a little miffed about the “need” to constantly evolve look and feel of the UI.
Liquid Glass changed looks without innovating on functionality. It added bloat and confusion without providing any innovation to justify it. The whole system is so bad that I followed through on selling my Mac to go with a Linux laptop.
At least with modern KDE/Gnome you can make a user experience argument over XFCE for why you’d upgrade. Okay, it’s not as snappy and lightweight, but you get a lot of functionality out of it.
But these commercial operating systems are changing the UI to satisfy a marketing department rather than users. It has to look different or else there’s nothing new to sell.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
(Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive FPS where a single extra frame of latency lowers your chance of being productive.)
It would be embarrassing for gnome to be more performant there than XFCE.
Also with x11 if you go through the steps to get Variable Refresh Rate going and you are dual monitor, it will max the refresh of both to the slowest monitor. :(
Wayland doesn't have that issue.
If I were into hardcore gaming, and used the same machine for daily work, I would likely just end the X session, and switched to a minimalist Wayland session with a menu of games for the entire desktop.
Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
We call this evolution.
It works but keyboard-driven window management is broken: LabWC doesn't understand the standard (i.e. Windows) keystrokes.
Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
But that's not where we are, a lot of people still haven't moved and XFCE only has premliminary support for wayland at this time.
But it doesn't matter, xfce on X is still great.
This enforces a path where window contents often round-trip through the X server before composition. Quantitatively, this typically adds at least one frame of input lag compared to the zero-copy direct scanout path available to monolithic wayland compositors. You likely won't notice this while editing text. However, the architecture doesn't perform well when you attach an external monitor. Since X11 shares a single virtual coordinate space, it cannot synchronize VBLANK across two outputs with different refresh rates or clock domains.
ps: and please don't call your 2018 machine vintage, it makes my secondary thinkpads feel prehistoric :D
I have no doubt the issues you speak of exist in theory but they do not seem to matter in practice.
To my eye most Linux de’s are much lighter or responsive than windows or Mac
Vintage would be my MBP Air from 2011 that also run Arch and XFCE on a 4GiB RAM.
ROTFL. Moksha, the lightweight desktop for Bodhi Linux, has very low RAM requirements, with a default install using under 100MB of RAM