XFCE Desktop Environment

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris and BSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use.It consists of separately packaged components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment, but which can be selected in subsets to create the user's preferred personal working environment. Xfce is mainly used for its ability to run a modern desktop environment on relatively modest hardware.It is based on the GTK+ 2 toolkit (as is GNOME). Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven, and the configuration files are hidden from the casual user.

Xfce applications

Xfce also provides a development framework for applications. Other than Xfce itself, there are third-party programs which use the Xfce libraries, most notably the Mousepad text editor, Xfmedia audio player, Orage Calendar and Terminal. One of the services provided to applications by the framework is a red banner across the top of the window when the application is running with root privileges warning the user that they could damage system files.

Other Xfce components include:

• Xfmedia, a xine-based media player for Xfce
• Xfprint, a print manager
• Xfburn, a CD/DVD burner

Xfwm

Starting with version 4.2, the window manager of Xfce, Xfwm, integrates its own compositing manager. Other compositing managers exist, but have been rather unstable, and Xfce was the first to integrate its own compositing manager into the window manager. At its inception, many users called it the most stable one available, though at the time, in late 2004, xcompmgr was the only other compositing manager available.

Orage

Thunar