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.
