alt Hacker NewsWhile I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the traditional desktop metaphor, this analysis conflates interface familiarity with architectural efficiency. It is a pleasant sentiment please don't get me wrong but technically a bit short sighted. The author praises xfce's modularity and unix-like separation of components (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop), failing to realize that this design pattern is actually a performance antipattern in the modern display server model.
In the X11 era, the server arbitrated these components. In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context), the compositor is the server. Forcing the panel and window manager to communicate via IPC rather than sharing a memory space in a monolithic compositor introduces unavoidable frame-latency and synchronization issues. Issues specifically regarding VBLANK handling and tear-free rendering that integrated environments like plasma or sway solved years ago.
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I understand what you are saying about efficiency in theory.
Though I must say, 20 years ago, I used X based desktop environments on hardware at the time and they were blazingly fast. Today's Gnome doesn't even come close. How can that be, if they were so ineffcient?
XFCE is X11-only, isn't it? Wayland support is still in development/experimental. I personally use XFCE with X11 to this day.
Xfce runs decently on my 10 year old 2-core Atom laptop with 2GB of RAM. It might use some inefficient patterns, not sure about that. But all the modern bloat software has brought basically little added value while eating much more resources, despite the claimed efficiency improvements.
What? The window manger and the panel (plasmashell) are separate processes in a Plasma desktop. In Sway, users typically choose from a range of totally separate applications like swaybar or quickshell for the panel. There’s absolutely no reason the panel has to be coupled with the compositor under Wayland and nobody actually does it that way that I’ve seen.
I do not know what xfce really has to do with X11 vs Wayland, but you could - if one wanted - build an X server that integrates a compositer and window manager. I do not think this has any real technical advantage and I think a modular design is stronger from an engineering point of view.
Tear-free is more a driver issue, I also do not see any Wayland advantages here. Probably xorg does not enable it by default
I’d say optimizing a WM like this makes sense. Why would I want to optimize a panel or desktop?
> In the Wayland era (which I must assume is the baseline context)
But that's not where we are, a lot of people still haven't moved and XFCE only has premliminary support for wayland at this time.
But it doesn't matter, xfce on X is still great.
What are you talking about? Author is talking about user experience, they way changes (as far as user is concerned) Do Not Happen (much), how they don't try to invent new UI paradigm (cough Gnome cough) and are Not Fucking It Up (cough KDE4 cough).
As a user I don't care about X11 / Wayland. I mean I do, from the security viewpoint, but not otherwise. Xfce could port itself to Wayland and (if done properly) I wouldn't even notice. It is nice to know that on any Linux machine I can install UI desktop environment which is usable, dependable and... complete.
I love Xfce and hope they never change. Kudos to everyone involved!
Fvwm ran exactly that way on my Pentium-60 and I do not recall ever experiencing performance or latency issues; matter of fact, my Linux desktop of the time was more efficient than Windows. The FvwmPager, FvwmButtons, and FvwmTaskBar modules are separate programs launched by fvwm and communicate with it via IPC. Sacrificing modularity to avoid performance issues that were hard to see even on machines from 30 years ago—let alone on today's hardware—is a bit penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Can you quantify those performance problems? Would I notice them on a 2018 vintage laptop?
As a decades-long Xfce user, I greatly value Xfce's modularity, and don't care the slightest bit about improving the display server performance. Xfce is already snappy well beyond my level of sensitivity, and I won't trade the flexibility I have and use for a sliver of extra performance I don't even think I might need.
(Yes, it's plenty snappy on an external 4K@60 monitor. A desktop environment is not a competitive FPS where a single extra frame of latency lowers your chance of being productive.)