Episode: 96
Title: HPR0096: Xfce, Oh I how I love you
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0096/hpr0096.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 11:26:36

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Do you have money?
Yes!
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
This is Drupes and today I'm going to be telling you how much I love XFCE.
This is a presentation I've given for my local Louisiana Tech Linux users group and our
local Munro Linux users group.
And you can download the presentation if you would like to follow along on the slides
at tinyurl.com slash three Juliet three five Quebec golf.
And so I'm going to pretend that you've done that and let's open up the slides.
First we start with a toothpaste for dinner comic that's ha ha funny and I enjoy having
a little comic while everything's getting set up.
So while I marvel at this humorous comic, you could be downloading those slides right
now.
Now like a childhood memory that I have is a Star Wars book that when you had to turn
the page, it on the little they had a little audio tape with it and it would play a R2D2 sound.
So when you hear this sound, change the slide.
If you hear this sound, then Greedo just got shot.
Okay.
Oh, how I love you XFCE.
Let me count the ways.
First off XFCE is simple.
It's small and fast.
And it's easy.
Oh yeah.
Okay.
This is a screenshot of my laptop desktop.
It makes sense.
My laptop's desktop running XFCE, doing cool stuff.
We're going to get more into that later.
Now the philosophy of XFCE, it's a lightweight desktop environment designed for productivity.
It executes fast and it can serve system resources.
And it's modular.
It's reusable.
It's got full functionality of the desktop environment with all these little packages that
they put together.
You can pick and choose and make what's best for you.
I don't use all of XFCE's tools because I may think something else is better than what
comes with XFCE.
But as Linux users, we all know we can customize things to our own liking.
Okay, a quick history.
Started in 97.
It was a free Linux clone of CDE.
I'm sure you can read this page.
And it uses GTK2, so it's kind of dependent on Nome.
So it was NomeGrow, so does XFCE.
A example, this is what CDE on Solaris looked like.
Back when XFCE was started.
And if you look on the lower left, on the little panel down there at the bottom, or the
lower right, you can see the little arrows pointing up.
Like Apple just came out with that feature recently.
I forget what it's called, but anyway, it's something old.
This is what CDE looked like at the time, wow.
That was awesome.
And just for good measure, Nome, remember when you could slide the bottom panel over,
you're like, I don't want to see the panel anymore, and it would whoosh to the left or
whoosh to the right.
Awesome.
Like any good desktop environment, it's, you know, got window managers, panels, and
desktop managers, and you can handle your printing and things like that.
This is the settings manager.
All your settings for XFCE are one convenient little spot, boom, right there.
Everything is arranged very simple, but you can get more into more in depth with each
little tool.
And they get better and better as times go by.
Here's window manager with a different theme and stuff you can change.
Okay, here's the panel manager.
We've got it down there.
You can put the panel wherever you want.
I actually have two panels, one running at the top, one running at the bottom.
The fancy one down there on the bottom holds all my applications that I'm planning on
using, or I use frequently.
It shows, you know, the CPU and the memory and things like that, how much battery life
I have in the time.
This is mousepad.
I don't particularly use it.
I use GVib, but it's pretty much notepad.
No syntax highlighting, no fancy stuff, and that's actually notepad running in wine.
So I didn't stoop to the dark side to get that screenshot too badly.
This is the XFCE4 terminal.
It's very full featured.
It's got tabs and you can switch between them with your keyboard and make things go
quickly.
I'm an HRM user, but when I really need nice cut and paste, I can use the XFCE terminal.
Here's the settings for it, again, really, really simple, really, really easy.
It's very in depth.
This is Thuner.
It's obviously a file manager.
It's a really, really fast.
It's also really simple.
You can't burn CDs from it, and you know, it doesn't play the videos as thumbnails,
but really, do you need that stuff?
I like things fast.
This is a fancy feature of Thuner, Thuner, Thuner, however you pronounce it, that I enjoy.
If I'm going to be going to a directory a lot, and I want to make a little shortcut
to it, I just drag that directory over there to the left.
And then it's there until I get rid of it.
So when I'm working, I can make things a lot easier for myself.
This is XFBern.
Obviously it's BernCDs.
I use, oh, what's it called, it's Bersero instead of this.
I don't know why I haven't used XFBern in a really long time, and I need to go back to
this.
Pretty nice.
This is an orage, a rage.
I don't know how to pronounce things.
There should be some sort of website like sayoss.org or something to help us pronounce things,
but it's your clock calendar, reminder, date keep tracking, kind of tool, Restredo.
It's an image viewer, really quick and dirty.
It shows images on the right, and then it, you know, the thumbnails, and then it shows
the image very fast.
Now again, this is my desktop.
There's no icons, there's no right click, there's no clutter.
If you want icons on the desktop, you could have them.
If you want the right click to do stuff, you can make it do that.
Awesome.
Okay, this is my top panel.
I've got a radio listener that I wrote.
It's pretty slick, so I've been to listen to NPR, to show desktop button, weather update,
volume control, task lists, shows the tasks in that particular desktop, the pages so I
can switch between desktops, system tray, my network, or pigeon, or whatever else, XFC,
or XChat, and then of course my logout button.
This is the weather update.
Pretty easy, pretty quick, you just click on it, and you have two tabs, summary or forecast.
You have a right click on the icon to set your zip code.
This is my radio listener.
Really simple.
Open up the web page to see what's going to be coming on, play, stop, and close.
I actually wrote this in GTK dialog, so that whole little thing is just a bash script with
some XML, actually, mostly XML.
This is my bottom panel, the XFC menu icon at the start button in Windows, or the K button
in KDE, launchers for my applications, we went over that kind of stuff.
To get to the orage calendar stuff, you just click on the clock.
So now, like I said, it's based on GTK, so the larger gnome grows, the bigger XFCE will
be.
There's only a handful of developers, which means it's not really good for a corporate
environment, where you don't want to train everybody, and then these guys all the
side, they're going to do something else, maybe, but it's really good in the fact that
you can get in touch with these people and convince them to add in features.
It's a very helpful and active community, easy to customize, and it's fast, fast, fast.
Another excellent comic, if you have not downloaded the slides, you probably should.
And of course, here's the, I didn't take this screenshot, but it's got all the transparency
is in everything, so it's not just plain j like mine looks, you can make it kind of cool,
and you can do the cube, if you really have to, and you can rotate your windows and change
them all up, so it's harder to read, you know, because that makes you more productive.
Okay, contact links, xfc.org, you can go to freedesktop.org slash wiki read all about
it, Wikipedia article, I have a link, users group, and there's xfc-look.org to change
things around.
My name is Drupes, you can contact me on the hpr site or Drupes at G-Bail, and that's
some stuff about xfce, and I love it.
Thank you for listening to HACRIP of a Gradio, HPR is sponsored by Pharaoh.net, so head on
to C-A-R-O dot-E-T for all of us in the world.
Thank you very much for listening to H-A-R-O dot-E-T.
