Article on Xfce in LWN

[Biju Chacko]

On Thu, 11 May 2006, Oblio wrote:

> "While the 4.4 release will be a big step in that direction, the Xfce
> project will still face the challenge of achieving parity with Gnome
> and KDE on the efforts of a developer community a fraction of the
> size."
>
> Nice article. But I can't really say I agree with you. Xfce is doing
> the smart thing, partly because of the lack of developer: it is
> focusing on the desktop itself.
> Both Gnome and KDE have huge armies of devs, but those are working on
> those integrated apps, which are, for the most part, redundant apps.
> Few of them reach the level of independent projects (for example Krita
> vs Gimp, KOffice vs OpenOffice, Kvirc vs Xchat, ...).
>
> Xfce doesn't need as many developers, because it already has those
> apps - just think of all the good, independently developed GTK2
> applications. I can run Gimp as well in Xfce as I do in Gnome (and
> it's just an example).

You're mostly right. What I was trying to say is that Xfce is a victim of 
it's own success. The better we get, the more that is expected of us.

-- b