Xfce Forum

TuxLyn

Guest

Did XFCE Environment Die ?

Is XFCE no longer developed ? Because it missed it release date for 4.12 on 2013-03-10 Very said because I might have to switch to KDE or other environment now.

Magnus

Member

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 51

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

Nope, it's still being developed.

eric_the_idiot

Member

Registered: 2011-12-23

Posts: 58

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

There's a couple of indicators for the health and status of XFCE:
https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce-announce The announce mailing list is for stable and development releases. For example, http://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-ann … /date.html shows that parole, xfce4-mailwatch-plugin, and xfce4-equake-plugin had releases in October.
Next, there's http://git.xfce.org/ which can quickly show you the last time a component had an update somewhere in it's code; be it a push to the master branch for the next release, a maintenance push to one of the stable branches, a push to a feature branch that may be included in the future, or translators improving and updating their stuff.
Finally there's https://www.ohloh.net/orgs/xfce which should be a decent dashboard for some of the XFCE components, it doesn't appear to have everything on there, but it does have the main components.

Hope this helps.

MountainDewManiac

Member

From: Where Mr. Bankruptcy is Prez

Registered: 2013-03-24

Posts: 1,115

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

Is XFCE no longer developed ? Because it missed it release date for 4.12 on 2013-03-10 Very said because I might have to switch to KDE or other environment now.

Why? Is XFCE not working adequately for you at present? Waiting for a fix to a bug that you are experiencing and afraid that the fix will not appear at some point in the future?

Things are working pretty good here, BtW....

Regards,
MDM

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Mountain Dew Maniac

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TuxLyn

Guest

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

@MountainDewManiac, yes default install is broken. I have to do a lot of hacks to make it work properly. XFCE 4.12 is no where to be seen or any hint even on its news and progress. I may have to switch to new GNOME 3.12 (looks very interesting with new features) not to mantion they started switching to wayland which makes it one of the fastest desktop environments. It's said because I really liked XFCE but at this point in time its dead in the watter. Any one knows if XFCE has any plans to support wayland at least ?

vrkalak

Member

From: Santa Fe, NM, USA

Registered: 2010-03-05

Posts: 63

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

I currently use Xfce-4.11.3 for Arch/Linux (testing) ... not the default Xfce-4.10

TuxLyn

Guest

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

@vrkalak, How did you manage to install that ? I've enabled testing repos and tried upgrading, but it did not upgrade XFCE. I would like to try testing packages and see if it works any better.

Last edited by TuxLyn (2014-03-27 06:17:15)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

@MountainDewManiac, yes default install is broken.

How is the default install broken? What is not working properly? It seems that you are using Arch, which I have on this computer as well (4.10), and I wouldn't say its broken.

I have to do a lot of hacks to make it work properly.

What kind of hacks? Can you give examples?

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TuxLyn

Guest

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

@vrkalak, I've manually compiled and installed xfce/4.11 packages from source; http://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/ Only to find out that many of the old xfce/4.10 widgets don't work in xfce-panel/4.11 like xfce4-mail-watch-plugin or xfce4-weather-plugin So I had to go back to xfce/4.10 again for now

@ToZ, Well first of all because I use 2 seperate nvidia (video cards) and 3 diferent LCD monitors, simply calling "exec startxfce4" inside ".xinitrc" will not work for me. I have no borders, no desktop (background/icons/right-click-menu) and even panels. As for your second question, I've added this following bash commands to my ".bashrc" to help restart xfdesktop and xfwm4

if ! pgrep xfdesktop >/dev/null 2>&1
then
	xfdesktop &
fi

if ! pgrep xfwm4 >/dev/null 2>&1
then
	xfwm4 &
fi

Now it starts normally, after I also configure my monitors settings using nvidia-settings.

I still have some weird bugs like for example "kernel-dumps" and even "tumbler aka tumblerd" needs to be disabled because I have 100% cpu usage. Then there is some issues with apps some time crash or hang like "firefox" browser. This is just from top of my head :-)

Just to be fair, this is not extremely bad problems at least not for programmer like me. But it is anoying when you do fresh install of Arch/XFCE and have to do this all over again.

Also, away from this subject. I would like to see few improvements to Thuner. Like have seperator option in "Edit" => "Custom Actions" and also ability to have sub-menu instead of it all inside one main menu. This will allow for much better right-click customization inside Thuner.

Last edited by TuxLyn (2014-03-28 00:43:09)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

I've manually compiled and installed xfce/4.11 packages from source; http://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/ Only to find out that many of the old xfce/4.10 widgets don't work in xfce-panel/4.11 like xfce4-mail-watch-plugin or xfce4-weather-plugin So I had to go back to xfce/4.10 again for now

I believe you need to re-compile the plugins as well. The Xfce git tree is here with instructions here. However, since you are using Arch, you might save yourself sometime by running the git packages from the AUR (here). I've built successfully from git, but it took a while to figure it out. I've never tried the AUR packages.

Well first of all because I use 2 seperate nvidia (video cards) and 3 diferent LCD monitors.....

Unfortunately I don't have such a set up to be able to assist with or comment about Xfce's stability under such a configuration.

Also, away from this subject. I would like to see few improvements to Thuner. Like have seperator option in "Edit" => "Custom Actions" and also ability to have sub-menu instead of it all inside one main menu. This will allow for much better right-click customization inside Thuner.

Agreed. Perhaps filing an enhancement request would get it moving along (assuming there is sufficient interest).

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TuxLyn

Guest

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

Thanks for the tips, will try.

vrkalak

Member

From: Santa Fe, NM, USA

Registered: 2010-03-05

Posts: 63

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

I am an 'official' Tester for Xfce DE and a Debian-Maintainer.

I also, use Arch/Linux OS for this. 

Last edited by vrkalak (2014-04-02 21:59:20)

skiwi

Member

Registered: 2014-04-11

Posts: 1

Re: Did XFCE Environment Die ?

Hi, I've been frequenting the xfce site for over a year now in the hope of some news or update but nothing has happened.
I would tend to agree with the OP that xfce appears to be quite dead from the look of it.
One specific features I was waiting for is the more extended display manager so that I can avoid giving xrandr commands in the terminal.
Not a big issue but an update or some idea of whether something's going to happen would be nice.

From what I can gather from the links posted earlier in this thread (especially the GIT archive) there is still plenty of work being done.
However the activity is a bit deceiving since the majority of it seems to be translations, I'm not sure how much work is still being done on the actual source code.

The mailing list archives are down, and have been for a while now I think.

Does anyone what's the status?

---  update

I guess it's mostly about hearing a developer say "STFU we're working on it"

Last edited by skiwi (2014-04-13 00:27:10)