Ok, so, in my channel I tried a lot of different desktop environments, but I actually don’t remember ever trying out xfce; which is terrible, considering that I think it’s one of the most commonly used desktops, but also one of the most interesting ones. What am I looking forward, in particular, when trying xfce? Well, I do know that it’s quite customizable (e.g. in the concept of panels and widgets) and I’d like to compare that kind of functionalities with what KDE offers, to see if there’s anything to learn.

So, I booted up Xubuntu with the latest xfce, version something dot 18. As I usually do, let me start with the completely useless remarks: the default wallpaper looks pretty damn nice. No idea if it’s a wallpaper from the xfce project itself itself or xfce, but actually I do think that they’re an important part of making something feel more modern; and this stylish, minimalistic wallpaper does the trick.

I also see, by default, icons on the desktop. To be fully honest, I really love KDE’s approach on the whole “icons on the desktop thing”: we do not disallow them by default like GNOME does, however we don’t really include any by default to keep things simply by default, yet powerful when needed. Personally, I would take off the (few) default icons that xfce includes. So, how easy are them to remove? Ok, fair enough, that wasn’t too hard, and it’s nice that you can just tick checkboxes to customize which icons you’d like to see.

Let’s keep looking at the desktop settings for a bit more, maybe there’s something interesting. Wallpaper-selection wise this window looks very similar to KDE’s, though I will say that I’m proud that KDE displays also the name of the author, along the name of the wallpaper (both are missing on XFCE). You can do solid color, a slideshow, but that’s about it; it seems like XFCE is lacking any kind of third party plugin for more complex wallpaper types, like “picture of the day”. However, there is a function KDE does not have, and that is often requested: the ability to only apply the change to the current wallpaper.

And, now that I finally stopped bashing XFCE to praise KDE, let me also say that the “Window List Menu”, that XFCE exposes on middle click, is pretty darn cool. It’s quite customizable from the “Menus” section, and it shows the various workspaces and the windows open in all of them; this makes it a bit easier to switch between open windows and – though I would probably never use it – I appreciate the feature.

Let’s get looking at the default application launcher. I’m actually easily pleased here: whatever app launcher allows me to just press “meta” and start typing for an app name, I’m happy with it. And I’m happy with XFCE’s. Putting that aside, it looks like a completely normal application launcher with no particular additional functionality; though it does l