Xfce has been my primary desktop environment (DE) since the mid-2000s, for both personal and professional use. Even though hazy, I have recollections of life without Thunar, migration to GTK 3, and other age-disclosing historical milestones. I even used Xfce on a MacBook Pro (2015) for several years. Contrary to my earlier flirts (WindowMaker, Blackbox, which was later succeeded by Fluxbox), I haven’t really configured Xfce much either—the defaults were mostly satisfactory.
After more than two decades of usage, I can confidently say Xfce has been the most boring desktop environment I have ever used. It has been through several heart surgeries, ranging from rewrites to GTK major version upgrades, yet I haven’t noticed a single bump. New DEs flourished, and primary players (GNOME & KDE) got substantial financial and development-resource reinforcements. The harvest was a frenzy of mind-blowing, fancy new user-visible DE features: tiling windows, 3D cube/zoomed workspace transitions, animations, macOS-like looks, etc. In the meantime, Xfce had hardly any new user-visible changes. It is as boring as it was at its inception; a panel at the top, and… and… yeah, pretty much nothing else — and I love it.
I myself work on some, mostly open-source, decades-old, massively used software (OpenJDK, Log4j, etc.) on a daily basis. A mind-blowing effort goes into keeping such systems stable (i.e., backward compatibility), evaluating and integrating new features, and striking a good balance between the two. Looking at things from this angle, I cannot express my gratitude enough to the Xfce developers for enabling me to carry out my daily routines with a well-thought-out, small set of basic features, and for keeping them running and up-to-date under the hood with almost no user-visible changes. I want to thank all its maintainers, people who mostly do the dirty plumbing work instead of running after every new shiny thing in the market. I want them to know they have users who are not distro-hoppers, toy-project developers, home-automation enthusiasts, or retro-computer lovers, but who deliver serious work using Xfce in their day-to-day jobs.
I’ve never worked at an employer where Linux was officially recognized as a developer-laptop OS. I always needed to roll up my sleeves and walk the unbeaten path: learn how things (VPN, OTP, etc.) work on macOS/Windows and try to reproduce them on Linux. This initial setup has mostly been, even though rewarding, time-consuming. But I got pretty good at it over the years, and I hardly get surprised anymore.
I had the opportunity to observe macOS/Windows developers, and the sheer extent of effort they put into problems that have been solved by Linux decades ago. They need to install a package manager, a third-party application to define key bindings, and they need to stare at a screen for several minutes during a system upgrade that happens once a month or so, and so on. These observations just strengthened my respect and love for the Linux & Xfce setup.
What does all this have to do with Xfce? Well, Xfce has just always worked for me. VPN clients, IDEs, and everything I use to carry out my daily tasks worked out of the box. Xfce simply never stood in the way, and I think that is pretty awesome. In contrast, applications with dialog windows or taskbar interactions have always been problematic for me with other window managers.
I would like to take this opportunity to brag about share details of my personal setup.
My goal in doing so is to provide a perspective to maintainers on what users matching my profile care about.
xfce4-terminalxfce4-appfinderxfce4-display-settingsxfce4-clipmanSuper combination):