There is a place for graphically gorgeous distro’s, but when it comes to ease and speed, Xfce is just the best for me.
I started using Xfce when Xubuntu first came out and I switched to Linux Mint Xfce when that started. I did try other distro’s when others recommended them, but always switched back to Xfce.
I have an old Eeepc that runs so smoothly on the latest Mint Xfce despite being a senior in computer years.
And that’s why it was about time I gushed about Xfce on here 😀
I just tried EndeavourOS with XFCE on a really old laptop and it works quite well. Xfce lacks some niceties that Gnome or KDE would provide, but its stability and reliability are unquestionable.
If you ever run a “mostly server”, where you are mostly in the command line but sometimes want to pop into a GUI for whatever reason, XFCE. I have a computer from 2000 with Ubuntu server plus XFCE after the fact, and it runs great. Still.
As a poor person with low-end, old hardware, I love XFCE. It has extended my laptop’s practical use-life by at least 8 years now, and counting.
There is a place for graphically gorgeous distro’s
As a current KDE user but extensive user of XFCE in the past, it may not come “pretty” out-of-the-box but XFCE can be a very aesthetically pleasing desktop environment. It can be configured just about every which way, and if I had to switch back to XFCE right now I could have things just about how I want them and be 100% as happy with my desktop as I am with KDE.
It’s got defaults that just make sense, doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel or the way we interact with our desktops, it’s light and fast and reliable. It’s associated default programs (Thunar, etc.) follow the same design paradigms and are a delight to use.
I Iove XFCE, and it will always have a special place in my heart.
“Simple” and “aesthetically pleasing” aren’t mutually exclusive!
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is it even lower demanding than i3?
Probably not. XFCE provides more than just a window manager; it’s a whole desktop environment. That said, it would be interesting to see quantitatively what the difference in system resource usage actually is.
i3 will have lower requirements, since it’s just a bare window manager. XFCE is about as lightweight as a fully featured desktop environment can get, whereas with i3 you have to bring your own tools.
Incidentally, you can use i3 as the window manager portion of XFCE if you want.
I adore XFCE, simple, functional, lightweight. What more do you need? I am currently running pop_os which defaults to Gnome and by comparison it just feels heavy and clunky. The other DE I had love for was enlightenment years ago. A purely keyboard driven DE. It was glorious.
Using gnome now, but have always enjoyed Xfce. Was going to use it for my current setup, but at the time it didn’t support Wayland. It looks like it’s getting close, but not quite there yet.
Maybe once Wayland is fully supported I’ll give it a shot again.
Xfce has been my main desktop for 15 years. I keep trying KDE and Gnome every now and then, but Xfce just delivers serious reliability and just enough configurability to make it great.
Xfce is such a great interface.
Xfce has been great at giving old PCs some extra life. I’ve got some people using a Pentium E2180/2GB Ram/Hard Drive machine for some browsing with Mint Xfce. It runs great and is quite reliable. I just hope that it does eventually gain support for Wayland.
my first foray with linux was Xubuntu. transferred to MX Linux since but stayed with xfce. looking into having a go with xfce Debian. so satisfied with this DE, am not even tempted to try others.
Eeepc… Dude, I miss the days of 300$ netbooks 😞 would still have my Dell Mini 9, but it got stolen.
I remember installing XFCE on an old Pentium 3 tower some office had stored under the stairs. It was like magic - the system just… worked again?! It was the first time I successfully installed Linux and it felt so fast. With Windows the thing barely worked.
That became my younger sister’s first computer. The tower and monitor etc. all just stayed on the ground and we played games on it together. Eventually I found an ethernet card and learned how to plug it in. I ran an ethernet cable from our modem through the house along the floor. Then we could go on Myspace and send email to each other.
Can’t believe my parents were ok with tripping over all that stuff, ha!
Perhaps your parents recognized the valuable skills you were developing!
XFCE is the distro for getting stuff done. I run it even on new PCs. I know that whatever device I’m using, because of XFCE, my desktop is gonna be blindingly fast. I try to switch to other desktops sometimes but I always go back to XFCE because the speed and reliability are off the charts. Windows wishes it could be this (it kind of was, in the XP or 7 era).
Windows was never as zippy and stable as XFCE. And I hate to be a know-it-all, but XFCE is a Desktop Environment, not a Distro.
I came across xfce very recently looking for something that ran well on a 10-year-old laptop. I started with ubuntu but you could feel the weight of it - tried mint, pop os, eventually found my way to Debian with xfce, which runs great.
