OStatic

Xfce is one of the hidden gems of the free desktop. It has managed -- quite successfully -- to capture the familiar feel of a desktop environment while maintaining the speed and responsiveness of the pure window manager. Its small footprint and minimalist approach makes it great for older, less powerful hardware -- but it is full-bodied and functional enough that many choose to use it on machines that can easily handle other desktop environments. The desktop aims to be functional, attractive, light on system resources, and adhere to the specifications proposed by Freedesktop participants to maximize interoperability.

Today, after two years of development, Xfce has officially released the 4.6.0 version of the desktop environment. Some notable new features include out of the box hibernate and suspend functions, a newly re-written sound mixer that leverages gstreamer to support multiple sound cards and configurations, and improvements and enhancements to the Thunar file manager.

I tend to change desktop environments almost as often as I switch distributions. My newly acquired laptop came with the GNOME desktop environment, configured in a pretty generic manner. It's functional, sure, and its appearance can be altered easily.

Late last weekend, the Avant Window Navigator (Awn) and Avant Extras teams released Avant Window Navigator 0.3.2. I've used other dock applications in Linux, and while I've always liked the idea (and look), they were too rough around the edges for day to day use.

I've been running AWN in lieu of the lower GNOME panel for several days, and I'm really pleased. It's stable in my 64-bit Ubuntu install, and configuring the dock to behave (and look) as desired is simple. That's not to say there aren't quirks, but none have been deal-breakers.