The Long Road
Xfce 4.12 has been under development for almost three years and is now ready to take over for Xfce 4.10. This article looks at improvements found in version 4.12 and what the long release cycles mean for the user.
Xfce 4.12 after almost three years
scanrail, 123RF
When I first came into contact with Xfce [1] in 2001, it was still in version 3 and based on GT1. Olivier Fourdan began the project as an extension of the very sparse FVWM desktop and based it on XForms. In fact, the acronym Xfce still stands for XForms Common Environment. In the meantime, even if the acronym has lost its original meaning, it continues to be the name for the desktop.
Almost everything about Xfce but its name is different from how it was back then. Olivier Fourdan is still associated with the project but the one-man show operation of Xfce is over. In place of the original panel, Xfce has become a mature desktop environment.
The panel is still one of the units, but Xfce also has a Window manager by the name of Xfwm, a file manager by the name of Thunar, and a playback program for media files. It even has a web browser in the form of Midori, which uses WebKitGTK+. The biggest strengths and the unique characteristics have always been found in the area of resource consumption. Although modern environments like KDE and Gnome gladly take up several gigabytes of working storage to work properly, Xfce is made to be frugal.
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