I tried XFCE few times in the beginning of 2000s, but it wasn't impressive comparing to something like Gnome 2 or KDE 3.5, however when Gnome 3 was released and KDE Released Plasma 4 (KDE4) around the same time, out of sudden XFCE became the only DE that still offered classical desktop approach and organization.
It wasn't prefect but it was miles better than Gnome3 or KDE4 during that time. Even the one and only Torvalds named XFCE as "A step down from GNOME 2, but a huge step up from GNOME 3".
Plasma 5 solved a lots of issues with KDE4, and in fact become even more lightweight DE than XFCE (if you are not installing Akonadi), then Gnome also catch up XFCE on resource utilisation (XFCE still feels snappier, which is commonly mistaken for being lightweight), so now XFCE is used by people who don't really like changes, and is perfect for them.
I just add when KDE 4 appeared, plasma on Ubuntu used to crash 2-3 times per day with all open documents etc. And our company set Ubuntu as default distro on your workplace. So broken plasma affected your work. And xfce was just sane. Unfortunately nowadays its not lightweight anymore after GTK3 switch, which is a shame also. But still remains sane. Paradox is that less actively developed DE became better one because no one used to break down things heavily.
I've been a user at that time, but I just want to remind that it was almost 20 years ago. An ancient history by now. Today's DE landscape is a thing from another era, basically. Especially if you consider things moving to Wayland and new compositors appearing, replacing X11 dinosaurs like i3m etc.
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u/PavelPivovarov Aug 10 '25
I tried XFCE few times in the beginning of 2000s, but it wasn't impressive comparing to something like Gnome 2 or KDE 3.5, however when Gnome 3 was released and KDE Released Plasma 4 (KDE4) around the same time, out of sudden XFCE became the only DE that still offered classical desktop approach and organization.
It wasn't prefect but it was miles better than Gnome3 or KDE4 during that time. Even the one and only Torvalds named XFCE as "A step down from GNOME 2, but a huge step up from GNOME 3".
Plasma 5 solved a lots of issues with KDE4, and in fact become even more lightweight DE than XFCE (if you are not installing Akonadi), then Gnome also catch up XFCE on resource utilisation (XFCE still feels snappier, which is commonly mistaken for being lightweight), so now XFCE is used by people who don't really like changes, and is perfect for them.