Xfce Forum

phrac

Member

Registered: 2011-03-24

Posts: 19

Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Hi everyone

Following on from the thread "Interview with Nick? [Question Research]". Here are the questions and I can't wait to read some of the answers! A big thanks to people who submitted questions and especially to the developers for taking the time out.

I've quoted some of the answers Jérôme added to the previous thread to keep everything together. I hope that's OK.

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Are any of the Xfce devs paid to work on Xfce? [stqn]

Do you envision donations to the foundation to pay maybe one developer full-time? [stqn]

What do you think of the basic income? [stqn]

Is the bright blue fade colour of xfce4-session something that won't ever change?
(I'm running a patched version that fades to black instead, to spare my eyes when I shut my computer down at night.) [stqn]

Is any of the Xfce devs running a dark theme (bright text on dark background)? [stqn]

Is any of the Xfce devs using the option to *not* raise windows when they receive focus? [stqn]

Do you have automated tests in place to check for regressions in RAM and CPU usage? [stqn]

There are no such tests. The only automated tests we have are build tests using http://buildbot.xfce.org/ which allows us to make sure our code builds fine on several platforms and architecture. For RAM and CPU usage, we rely on our own testing and bug reports.

When 4.8 was released (on Arch Linux), some panel plugins weren't working anymore. I'm thinking about the mail plugin and the sensors plugin. Currently the sensors plugin is crashing at startup. If you were aware of these problems, what motivated you to release 4.8 anyway? If you weren't, does it mean you need (more) dedicated testers? [stqn]

We were aware of those problems but thought it was not worth delaying the release for this: plugins are not part of the Xfce core and have their own release schedule. We have a limited development team and you can't expect us to maintain all Xfce goodies which are supposed to have their own maintainers. For me, it means that we need more contributors willing to help fixing the issues and to get involved with maintenance, our testing community is already doing a wonderful job and we generally have very good bug reports.

Do Xfce devs generally test each others' changes before official release? [stqn]

Of course! We all run the development branch of Xfce and report bugs for the modules we don't maintain ourselves. Hey, what did you expect?

Which IDE or text editor do you use? (I'm using Code::Blocks, but it kills clipman every time I copy something...) [stqn]

Do you have statistics about what Xfce users... use? (Their settings and the Xfce programs they run.) [stqn]

Why aren't devs using this forum? It seems that discussions about Xfce development are hidden (there is no link that I can see on this web site to any mailing list or forum about Xfce development, even on the Get Involved page.) [stqn]

The forum is intended to be used for support, we already have our channels for development and multiplying channels brings no benefit.

For development we have two main channels:
- mailing lists, listed on http://www.xfce.org/community: the main one is xfce4-dev. Just subscribe if you want to follow the discussions and feel free to take part.
- IRC channel: #xfce-dev on freenode where all developers hang, mostly at the end of day (European time).

So no discussion is hidden, it's just that the forum is not (and should not) be used for discussing development and bug reports as we don't want to have to keep track of 45 different places.

It has been suggested that recent changes to the desktop environment neighborhood have forced Xfce to evolve beyond its original ideals.  Comments such as "LXDE is the new Xfce" and "Xfce is the new Gnome 2" are enough to stir up conversation amongst users, but how do (Xfce's) developers feel about these comparisons? [desktorp]

There's a funny joke on the Wiki about hiring the Xfce team! Smart phones are getting a lot of attention nowadays so if you were approached by a company what kind of things would you want to see in mobile Xfce? [phrac]

How are things going with the Xfce Foundation? What developments are you looking forward to in the future? [phrac]

I'm not a user of Macs although I like some of the features. One of the things I have seen banded about is their color labels system and some of the frustration converts to Linux experience with not having similar functionality or the ability to retain the labels when importing data. As developers how do you balance time between working on shiny new features, awareness of cross platform compatibility and the latest DE trends? [phrac]

Last edited by phrac (2011-06-16 16:03:05)

jannis

Member

Registered: 2011-06-09

Posts: 19

Website

Re: Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Here are my answers to the questions:

Are any of the Xfce devs paid to work on Xfce? [stqn]

Not at the moment. I only recall two occasions where people were paid to work on Xfce. One was when Benedikt Meurer worked for os-cillation where he developed Terminal among other things. The other was a one week agreement with PingWin Software that made it possible for me to port thunar-volman to GIO/gudev for money in 2010.

Other than that, I don't remember any attempts by companies to hire one of us to work on Xfce. There is a chance of this changing if we manage to establish Xfce as the most stable and complete "classic" desktop but historically, Xfce has been a niche product that companies are not interested in investing in too much. We'll see.

Do you envision donations to the foundation to pay maybe one developer full-time? [stqn]

As a non-profit organization, our interest is to collect money and gather people to support the development and distribution of open source software and Xfce in particular. The main purpose of donations is to provide the financials to make this possible.
 
The purpose of the foundation is not to satisfy the personal needs of Xfce developers. I guess that legally, paying individual developers would be possible, but we have no plans to do this. All incoming donations will be used to pay Xfce bills as well as organizing and participating in conferences and hackfests and stuff like that.

What do you think of the basic income? [stqn]

If you refer to the same basic unconditional income for everyone independently of whether they do or do not work, then all I can say is: I think it's a fantastic concept and it would be really interesting to see it implemented in our society.

I think many people fear that with basic income nobody would want to work anymore but I think that is a wrong assumption. My (maybe naive) thinking about it is that basic income would (a) give people more freedom of choice with regards to what they want to spend their work time on (and thereby allow great ideas to flourish) and (b) improve the payment for jobs that are tough or that nobody wants to do (which is only fair).

What do you think about bitcoins? [stqn]

I wasn't aware of their existence before I read this question, so I can't really say anything about them.

Is the bright blue fade colour of xfce4-session something that won't ever change? (I'm running a patched version that fades to black instead, to spare my eyes when I shut my computer down at night.) [stqn]

We could make it themeable if it isn't already and if people are really annoyed by it. There's no rule or technical limitation that says we have to stick to it for all eternity.

Is any of the Xfce devs running a dark theme (bright text on dark background)? [stqn]

I can only speak for myself here, of course. I've tried dark themes repeatedly but something about them (I can't tell what exactly) has always bugged me. At the moment I prefer a mixed bright and dark themes like Shiki-Brave or Greybird.

Is any of the Xfce devs using the option to *not* raise windows when they receive focus? [stqn]

Yeah, me. I use focus follows mouse but I frequently type in windows that are in the background of others. In fact, I am answering these questions in GVIM, having the window manager settings dialog in the foreground to check if I have the raise-windows-on-focus option enabled.

Do you have automated tests in place to check for regressions in RAM and CPU usage? [stqn]

No, we don't. As far as I am concerned, being ultra-light on memory usage has never been the most important goal in Xfce. We are striving for a balance of functionality and simplicity and as a consequence, Xfce only includes desktop features and applications we consider more or less essential. Relatively low memory usage is only one of the consequences of this particular approach.

As software developers, we are confronted with the need to implement things efficient all the time, and of course we accept every challenge to design our algorithms and routines as good as we can. So we always think about the best way to implement our ideas with regards to runtime and memory requirements. But that's nothing Xfce developers focus on in particular. (Almost) everyone in software development does (or should do).

When 4.8 was released (on Arch Linux), some panel plugins weren't working anymore. I'm thinking about the mail plugin and the sensors plugin. Currently the sensors plugin is crashing at startup. If you were aware of these problems, what motivated you to release 4.8 anyway? If you weren't, does it mean you need (more) dedicated testers? [stqn]

Xfce is split up into core components (which consist of Xfce's main applications as well as special libraries to write Xfce applications) and additional applications and plugins for Xfce that are developed independently but are hosted on our infrastructure because they are closely related to Xfce.

The 4.8 release only includes the core components. We do our best to maintain these applications and libraries as they form the essential part of the desktop. We try to communicate with everyone else to keep their applications and plugins in sync with stable Xfce releases. However, the rate at which the maintainers of those components join and leave is quite high and with 2-5 core developers we simply don't have the resources to do all the work on them ourselves.

Testing and bug reporting is great but if there are no developers to work on the bugs, there is little we can do. So instead of (or in addition to) more testers we need more developers interested in maintaining Xfce extensions for a longer period of time.

Do Xfce devs generally test each others' changes before official release? [stqn]

Most of us, if not everyone, run Xfce entirely from our development repositories. This means that we are testing all the time and if there are any instabilities or bugs we often encounter them when spending time in front of the computer. This would be no fun if the development trees of Xfce were crashing all the time, so in general I guess you can say that even the versions from the repository run really, really well and are considerably stable long before a release.

Which IDE or text editor do you use? (I'm using Code::Blocks, but it kills clipman every time I copy something...) [stqn]

I've been using GVIM ever since I started working on Xfce. My favorite color schemes are 'native' and 'mod_tcsoft' (which I use sometimes when the light conditions are working against a dark theme). I wrote my own template expansion plugin for GVIM (called jptemplate) that helps me in writing the code for Xfce. I also use the devhelp GVIM plugin to show API documentation in small window whenever I move the cursor over function names and macros. Ah, yeah, and there is a script that adds GTK+/GLib syntax highlighting to VIM, that's very useful as well.

All in all, that's a good replacement for a full-fledged IDE for me.

Is anyone really using the annoying session-saving feature? [stqn]

I always have that feature enabled but I don't really care about it. Often when windows from a previous session are restored I close them to start from scratch anyway.

Do you have statistics about what Xfce users... use? (Their settings and the Xfce programs they run.) [stqn]

There are a few application recommendations on http://wiki.xfce.org/recommendedapps, generated by our users but we don't have any statistics about what other programs they really use, no.

Why aren't devs using this forum? It seems that discussions about Xfce development are hidden (there is no link that I can see on this web site to any mailing list or forum about Xfce development, even on the Get Involved page.) [stqn]

The community section on our website has links and descriptions to all Xfce-related mailing lists, including those used for development discussions: http://xfce.org/community.

The reason most of us are not active in the forum is that we can't be everywhere. We're active on mailing lists, on IRC, on blogs and in our bug tracker, that has to be sufficient.

Personally, I've always thought about the forum of being a place where users help users, much like on the xfce@xfce.org mailing list.

It has been suggested that recent changes to the desktop environment neighborhood have forced Xfce to evolve beyond its original ideals. Comments such as "LXDE is the new Xfce" and "Xfce is the new Gnome 2" are enough to stir up conversation amongst users, but how do (Xfce's) developers feel about these comparisons? [desktorp]

As long as the frameworks and tools we built upon remain compatible with our idea of a classic desktop, our ideals are not going to change. Xfce might become the "new GNOME 2" as GNOME 2 fades out but this is not because it becomes bloated but because it is one of the most complete classic desktop environments.

There are technologies in GNOME that have an impact on us though, like GIO/GVfs, (g)udev or systemd. Some of those we can avoid or work around but others are more or less forced on us. But, again, that does not imply a change of the concept and direction of Xfce.

As for the emotions involved when reading comparisons like "Xfce is the new GNOME"... I don't feel strongly about those. People are free to say whatever they want. I like Xfce and, apparently, so do many others. That's enough for me to not get angry or upset about negative feedback or criticism.

There's a funny joke on the Wiki about hiring the Xfce team! Smart phones are getting a lot of attention nowadays so if you were approached by a company what kind of things would you want to see in mobile Xfce? [phrac]

The user interface of Xfce is geared to regular PCs and netbooks. I don't think it would perform well on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. (Small) touchscreens require different paradigms to be used instead of the classic windows and menus approach.

Thanks to the lower memory footprint, Xfce can be used well on netbooks. UI-wise we could do a lot better though. Ubuntu and others have put significant efforts into increasing the screen real estate and maybe we can pick up some of those ideas.

How are things going with the Xfce Foundation? What developments are you looking forward to in the future? [phrac]

Progress on the paperwork and legal aspects has stalled due to personal reasons lately. However, I have the papers right in front of me at this very moment and we'll soon get back to finishing the official registration as a non-profit organization (which is beneficial and sometimes necessary for a lot of things). 

I am not sure what of the cool things I look forward to the most. It remains to be seen how much we can do once the Foundation is 100% ready for operation.  Whether we can organize hackfests (which I suppose would be incredibly motivating for everyone), conference appearances and so on largely depends on the amount of incoming donations. And I have no idea what dimensions we are to expect here to be honest.

What is great though is that having the Foundation means having a central place for people to organize things around Xfce. With the help of our future members we can launch every kind of public initiative under a common banner which I hope will help representing Xfce and spreading the word about a desktop that many people have learned to love in all those years.

I'm not a user of Macs although I like some of the features. One of the things I have seen banded about is their color labels system and some of the frustration converts to Linux experience with not having similar functionality or the ability to retain the labels when importing data. As developers how do you balance time between working on shiny new features, awareness of cross platform compatibility and the latest DE trends? [phrac]

Most of it is intuition, some of it is reaction to changes in the underlying system and a bit of it is rules.

We have no fixed roadmap for Xfce, so for future development of Xfce we rely on our own intuition with regards to what makes sense and what doesn't. It is sort of important to exchange our ideas and get everyone on the same page so that we share a common "feeling". 

Of course, some changes made to the underlying system architecture (like GIO or systemd) can have an influence on our decisions and the general direction of Xfce. Take platform compatibility for instance which was much discussed after the 4.8 release due to our use of GVfs and gudev in thunar and thunar-volman. Systemd will probably have an impact on the portability of Xfce as well, and despite our efforts to keep Xfce portable, there is no way we sacrifice everything for this goal.

Some decisions and developments are subject to self-imposed rules such as our release model. Some of these rules are unwritten like our rather conservative dependency strategy. We rarely depend on releases that have't been around for at least a year which has implications on what modern desktop features we can use in our own releases. 

Latest desktop trends are a topic on their own. I guess there would be much more experiments if we were 20 developers instead of 5. So in a weird (and sometimes painful) way, having a very small team of developers helps in avoid the all-crazy way of redesigning the entire user experience from one release to the next.

phrac

Member

Registered: 2011-03-24

Posts: 19

Re: Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Brilliant! Really appreciate the in depth responses to my own questions and I feel I've learned a lot reading all your answers, thanks Jannis.

Last edited by phrac (2011-06-20 05:46:55)

wkr

Member

Registered: 2011-01-01

Posts: 88

Re: Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Very instructive replies

Nick

Dev

From: ~

Registered: 2005-02-17

Posts: 1,144

Website

Re: Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Missed the creation of this topic, but will give my answers as well this week (not that they will vary a lot from Jannis').

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stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-10-11

Posts: 174

Re: Questions And Answers With The Xfce Developers

Thanks a lot for the detailed answers, Jannis! Glad to see that you're in favor of the basic unconditional income too.