Mint Droid

PCWorld.com published a great review of Xfce in February. I’m just posting the article now for two reasons: this blog didn’t exist when the article was published, and I wasn’t using Xfce then.

I actually just switched over this weekend. (One has a surprising amount of free time when one has a combination of flu and sinus infection.) After doing a

apt-get install xfce4 xfce4-goodies xfce4-utils

I fired up an Xfce session and started playing around with the interface. I was impressed with the speed right off the bat. My Debian system isn’t exactly a speed demon (Athlon 700MHz with 512mb ram), but it sure felt like it under Xfce. Xfce runs faster than anything I’ve tried – with the notable exception of fluxbox. I was also impressed with the aesthetics. The default Xfce desktop is very pleasant to look at.

And then I started tinkering under the covers. Xfce is nicely configurable. I was able to tweak the panel, add a bunch of panel applets, set up new color, icon and widget themes, and set a pleasing default font. Oh, and set Konqueror to be my default browser, of course. All in all, I am pleasantly surprised. I think I’ll be sticking with Xfce, for at least a little while.

Oh, here’s what PCWorld had to say: “Xfce. This interface has been in active development for many years; it’s now up to version 4.2; and it’s both attractive and lightweight, making it ideal for older machines. It also sports some extremely geeky features that power users will definitely enjoy.”

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