Yup. That’s what I use it for.

Have you tried a tiling window manager? All I want is an empty black screen and an app launcher.

xrandr ?

I use thunar with niri and some of the taskbar applets for bluetooth etc in waybar

Try this one: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330

As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need.

(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.)

I understand what you are saying about efficiency in theory.

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?

XFCE is X11-only, isn't it? Wayland support is still in development/experimental. I personally use XFCE with X11 to this day.

Fvwm ran exactly that way on my Pentium-60 and I do not recall ever experiencing performance or latency issues; matter of fact, my Linux desktop of the time was more efficient than Windows. The FvwmPager, FvwmButtons, and FvwmTaskBar modules are separate programs launched by fvwm and communicate with it via IPC. Sacrificing modularity to avoid performance issues that were hard to see even on machines from 30 years ago—let alone on today's hardware—is a bit penny-wise and pound-foolish.

> In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context)

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.

Xfce runs decently on my 10 year old 2-core Atom laptop with 2GB of RAM. It might use some inefficient patterns, not sure about that. But all the modern bloat software has brought basically little added value while eating much more resources, despite the claimed efficiency improvements.

What? The window manger and the panel (plasmashell) are separate processes in a Plasma desktop. In Sway, users typically choose from a range of totally separate applications like swaybar or quickshell for the panel. There’s absolutely no reason the panel has to be coupled with the compositor under Wayland and nobody actually does it that way that I’ve seen.

Can you quantify those performance problems? Would I notice them on a 2018 vintage laptop?

I do not know what xfce really has to do with X11 vs Wayland, but you could - if one wanted - build an X server that integrates a compositer and window manager. I do not think this has any real technical advantage and I think a modular design is stronger from an engineering point of view.

Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default

What are you talking about? Author is talking about user experience, they way changes (as far as user is concerned) Do Not Happen (much), how they don't try to invent new UI paradigm (cough Gnome cough) and are Not Fucking It Up (cough KDE4 cough).

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!

I’d say optimizing a WM like this makes sense. Why would I want to optimize a panel or desktop?

True. And Fluxbox maybe uses less than 10 MB ram. Context is important - when compared to GNOME and KDE, XFCE does use less resources and is indeed snappier, with near feature parity.