First experience with XFCE - An Air of Nostalgia

We're going to take a look at the last major desktop environment that I have never really touched, and that's XFCE. This is the first video in a series that will cover the desktop, the default apps, and the customization options. I don't know much about it, I never used it more than a few minutes to record a few images, so I'm going in fresh.

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I decided to go for the Fedora XFCE spin, because it was the easiest to install out of the available options. It's pretty much vanilla apart from the theme, which I had to revert to the default "Greybird" from XFCE.

XFCE aims to be fast and use few resources.

## The desktop

Let's start with the desktop, then. You have a top bar, and a dock with some shortcuts.

The top bar has an applications menu, a task list with all your open windows, a virtual desktop switcher, with 4 virtual desktops by default, the notification tray, followed by the date and time, and a user/system menu.

The dock only has a "show desktop" icon, and launchers for a few apps.

Now, all these elements work fine: both the top bar and the dock are panels, that you can really tweak to your liking.

The applications menu is a simple list of categories, with drop down menus. You get some favorites on top, which I couldn't find a way to change, and then the categories, including the settings.

The task list is pretty simple: it only shows your currently open apps, and lets you minimize them by clicking on their title, or restore them by clicking again.

The virtual desktop switcher is really simple, showing an outline of the app windows opened on each desktop, and letting you switch in one click.

The notification tray works as you'd expect, showing indicators, and icons for apps that integrate there. The default indicators are for the network, audio, power manager, and notifications. They are all really basic and simple. The date and time applet just displays a calendar, and the user menu lets you log out, shut down, or switch users.

Now, the desktop itself hosts some default icons, and you can use it as you might be used to, to store some files, shortcuts, or mix both.

Right clicking on the desktop shows a little context menu, with some quick options: to change how things look, and sort your desktop icons, or create folders and documents. It also lets you quickly start any application you want.

XFCE also comes with a bunch of default keyboard shortcuts to make things a bit faster.

The "old school" feel permeates the whole desktop in general: the look of the menus, of the applets, how you use and interact with panels, it all screams GNOME 2 to me, and that's not necessarily a bad thing: personally, I prefer more modern looking stuff, but for people who want to use their linux desktop like it was back in the old days, it's definitely a great choice.

It also helps in terms of resource usage. Out of the box, on a clean launch, XFCE used less than 1 GB of RAM, out of 16, and CPU usage was constantly at 0%.

## Settings

The settings are exploded into small configuration panels that you can access through the "settings" category of the applications menu, or with a right click on the desktop. There is also a main hub that regroups all these settings.

I quite like that approach of not hiding everything behind one application, although I found the way GNOME 2 did it a bit better: having a dedicated settings menu in the panel made them easier to access, with one less sub menu to enter.

Out of the box, you can change the theme, the icons, and the fonts, and the cursor theme, which is nice, but XFCE can go a lot deeper than this: you have a host of options to tweak how your window manager will work, including options to handle transparency and shadows of the windows, their placement on screen, or the modifier key you want to use to move them.

You also have fractional scaling in the display settings, and tons of options to make your panels look and feel like what you want to use.

They even ship panel profiles that let you change between various default layouts, including a mac os-like one with a dock that serves as the task list as well, a GNOME 2 layout for the nostalgic ones, or a Windows 7 like layout with a bar on the bottom and nothing on the top edge of the screen.

[sagichdirdochnicht]

Yes, we've all paused to read.
And yes, it was absolutely worth it.

[sinpi]

"desktop icons killed my dad, mr. officer"

Love your sense of humor xD

[dovedozen]

"xfce doesn't have animations" I have never been more sold on a thing in my life. YES gimme a menu instead of "intuitive" controls, YES make the window blink out of existence instantly when I hide it!! these reviews are astoundingly helpful despite the fact that your aesthetic sense is fully 180 degrees opposite from mine, thank you!!!

[glowiak]

"XFCE has two panels"
Everyone seconds after installing it: *deletes Panel 2*

[David_Granger]

"xfce is very friendly to potatoes" 😂
I couldn't stop laughing. But to be serious, I used xfce on 32 GB of ram and as you can expect, I almost never came close to the resource limits. But I also really like xfce because you can use it on laptops from like 2005, at least if you can run some kind of recent Linux on it, like Debian.

[Blueeeeeee]

Btw, 800 MB of RAM is a *lot* for XFCE. Both Linux Mint and Manjaro run around 400 MB.

[winmac]

Me looking at my desktop icons... He's right. I am a monster 😔

[BlessedbFresh]

Xfce is what got me into restoring old laptops / desktop that were destined for the grave. I was even able to get my mother to use xubuntu a decade ago which brought her to the FOSS side

[shawan]

I remember his old videos where his face seemed to be so serious and without any expression 🤭

[RohithkannaDuraiswamy]

That LTT segway is just "Noice". xD

[JonathanSteadman]

Love the text that said, "desktop icons killed my dad, Mr officer". Lol.

[arkoprovo]

Xfce user here. We never use that menu ... Whisker Menu it is and Xfce is extremely customizable via the old school, put the things in the hidden folders way. Also, keyboard shortcuts are easily configured ... mine's a hydrid of windows + mac in the usage for instance.

To be honest, I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do. It is also used by many developers for its speed and simplicity.

[MyurrDurr]

Yes,
I did in fact, pause the video to read those :')

[Zualio]

I love my cluttered desktop icons and work files. It's creative chaos, just as my physical desk-top 😁

[Psychx_]

XFCE is GTK3 combined with some retro charm and actual usefulness.

[Blueeeeeee]

Yay ! XFCE is one of my favorites DEs, I wish they had more workforce to keep things moving forward !

Also, I dunno why they don't use the Whisker menu by default nowadays. I think the desktop could easily look more modern without sacrificing resource usage...

[NG-gjxb]

I use Xfce daily, and I've never even thought about the lack of animations because the first thing I do in every other DE as well as on Windows is disable them.

[lorenzo]

All "segue" to sponsors are copyrighted, trademarked, closed source and owned by LTT

[jackfitzgerald]

Great timing! I've been using it for 2 days, finally a great YouTube covering this DE.