[pwdisswordfish4]

XFCE is barely maintained, unfortunately. The recent port to Gtk3 lost some functionality as a result of regressions in the toolkit: keybindings in menus are no longer hover-rebindable, and the themes have not been properly ported, leaving me only with bloated Adwaita. For some reason, the package with window manager themes has not been released for 4.12 (the package from 4.10 works fine, though). There’s no path for migration to Wayland. Integration with display managers (i.e. screen locking) and systemd’s power management is flaky.

And I am saying all this with regret, as a long time user; I consider it the best desktop environment I have used.

I almost wish they had forked Gtk2 instead of porting to Gtk3 (or even more crazily, ported Gtk2 to Gdk3 to take advantage of ‘plumbing’ improvements in the latter, like Wayland support), but I do realise they just don’t have the manpower.

[alexhutcheson]

Cinnamon is a decent alternative.

[cout]

I haven't used Cinnamon in a few years, but when I did, I loved it. It felt like the true spiritual successor to the GNOME 2 shell.

[aninteger]

I guess by being on Debian I haven't noticed yet how bad its gotten. I do agree with you. Maybe it's time to migrate to IceWM 2.0.

[still_grokking]

Why migrate form a project that decays because of lack of manpower to another tiny one which could end the same?

Did you give Plasma a try recently? It's featureful, configurable, maintained, and lightweight (even more than the newest XFCE to the surprise of many).

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I tiny codebase means there's less to maintain.

[curlypaul924]

I disagree that Plasma is lightweight.

I've been running KDE since I set up my computer to work from home back in February. I don't have the latest hardware, since I mostly built it from parts I had lying around, but it's not bottom of the barrel. 8-core AMD FX-8350, 20GB of DDR3, GeForce GT 720.

One problem I've had with KDE is that after running it for a few hours, it would get really really slow. It was so slow that I could actually watch the title bar redraw when I would switch windows. Turns out that a 1GB graphics card isn't enough to do compositing at 4K when you have more than a few windows on the screen. Fair enough.

So I turn off hardware compositing in firefox, chrome, and plasma. I boot the computer, and check memory usage in nvidia-settings. With just plasma running and a few docked widgets, I've already used 342/978MB. Perhaps the widgets are at fault, but I'm pretty I was able to run fvwm and gkrellm on my S3 Virge back in the day, and it had far less than 1GB of video memory.

I also notice that sometimes I lock my computer for the night, then I come back in the morning to login, and the hard disk churns for minutes before I can type my password. I never had this problem with xscreensaver. There's plenty of RAM available. I know my 5400rpm RAID 1 setup isn't the fastest, but this is absurd.

Then there's the K gear menu. Why is it so slow? I click the icon, go to Applications, then go to Utilities. Then I wait a few seconds. Eventually they all show up. Then I go back to All Applications. The menu stalls for a few seconds. What is it doing? I don't know. The fluxbox menu never stalled like this.

The default picture viewer seems to be gwenview. I've imported a bunch of pictures from my phone and they are stored on my HDD. I double-click on an image, and then I want. And I wait. And I wait. No indication that it's doing anything; maybe my double-click didn't register. So I double-click again. I wait some more, and suddenly I see two gwenview windows. After a few seconds neither one has fully initialized the UI or loaded the image. I close one of them, wait some more, and eventually the image shows up. Why is it so slow? I don't remember images loading this slow in xv or eog. Should I be using digikam? I just used the default.

The apps in the system tray are terribly slow. Let's say I want to change my volume while a video is playing. That should be simple enough. So I click on the volume control. I wait for it to show up. Then I drag the volume slider. It is slow enough to respond that I overshoot. Oops, too low. Bring it back up again. Overshoot again. I really need to set up some volume up/down key bindings so I don't have to mess with that thing. Oh, and my headphone volume always starts out muted after I boot the computer. No idea why. The slider doesn't show up in KDE, but I can adjust it just fine in alsamixer. I blame pulseaudio. If I were young and without kids I might have time to figure out how to go back to OSS. I remember when sound was as simple as running sndconfig and then listening to that wonderful voice say, "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, 'Linux'". The good old days. Life was simple.