Xfce

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Xfce

Xfce 4.2 showing Settings Manager and compositing effects (drop shadows behind windows and semi-transparent panel)
Developer:	Multiple developers, enumerated here
Latest release:	4.2.3.2 / November 15, 2005
Preview release:	4.3.99.2 / November 5, 2006
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Desktop environment
License:	GPL and LGPL
Website:	www.xfce.org

Xfce is a desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris or BSD. Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven; the configuration files are hidden from the casual user. "Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications fast, while conserving system resources." (Olivier Fourdan, creator)

Xfce also provides development framework for applications. Other than Xfce itself, there are third-party programs which use the Xfce libraries, most notably the Mousepad text editor, Xfmedia audio player and Terminal.

Xfce is based on the GTK+ 2.x toolkit (like GNOME). It uses the Xfwm window manager. Xfce is somewhat similar to the commercial CDE, but has been getting a little farther away from that comparison with each new version (it was completely re-written twice, between versions 2 and 3, and then again for version 4).

Xfwm is unique in that, starting with version 4.2, it integrates its own compositing manager. Other compositing managers exist, but have been rather unstable, and Xfce was the first to integrate its own compositing manager into the window manager. At its inception, many users called it the most stable one available, though at the time, in late 2004, xcompmgr was the only other compositing manager available.

The name "Xfce" originally stood for "XForms Common Environment", but since that time Xfce has been rewritten twice and does not use the XForms toolkit any more. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as "XFce", but "Xfce". The developers' current stance is that the acronym does not stand for anything any more. The installer for the Xfce and Slackware-based distro Zenwalk labels the description for Xfce as the "Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment" as Slackware has done in the past.

Thunar is the default file manager for Xfce. It resembles Nautilus and is designed for speed and a low memory footprint. [1] Xfce also has a lightweight archive manager called Xarchiver.

1 Xfce distributions
2 Xfce Components
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Xfce distributions

Xfce is not as common in Linux distributions as KDE and GNOME. Few distributions include Xfce as their default desktop environment, though most include it as an optional component.