Where are the goals of XFCE.

[Grant McWilliams]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 2:25 AM, Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 2008/7/14 Mark Trompell <mark at foresightlinux.org>:
> > Where would I search for such a patch?
>
> http://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2034
>
> Greetings,
> Nick
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>

This whole thread is a great example of proud parents having the neighbors
tell them their kid is ugly!  I don't think the original poster was bitching
and was taken way to seriously. I also think the core point was legitimate.
Efficiency is important. We in America (and Europe) assume that the rest of
the world has what we have but I can tell you that this isn't the case. I
spend 3 months a year in foreign countries and my daughters 6 year old beige
box PC is more powerful than just about anything I've come in contact with.

Efficiency is important in another matter. I consult for one of the largest
corporations in the world and I chose XFCE 4.2 for all media duplication
servers and aircraft maintenance boxes. We have over 100 machines in 25
countries world wide. I chose XFCE because CentOS with XFCE used 64 MB of
ram. The machines are 3.0 Ghz P4s with 1 GB of ram. They're not 486s
struggling to open a window. Gnome and KDE used 150 MB more ram leaving our
application with 150 MB less ram to work with and we need every MB we can
get.

When we upgraded all machines to CentOS 5 we upgraded the XFCE to 4.4. We
welcomed the changes because now we get less flack from the field. With 4.2
people were trying to get into Gnome because they couldn't deal with not
having desk icons! Weird I know. Anyway we've lost some of our advantage
because it seems that 4.4 is more resource heavy but because we have an
investment in dev time and training we're staying with XFCE for now. I guess
the moral of the story was we chose XFCE because it gave us the most
complete desktop with the smallest footprint. I still believe there's a
market for such a thing.

I think that the original posters main beef was that there was no page
telling the philosophy or goals of XFCE. I think in the years I've been
using XFCE that those goals have changed. When it started out it was
supposed to be a really lightweight desktop that you would use in low memory
situations. Now XFCE is posing itself as more of an alternative to the two
big boys and since 4.4 has come out the percentage of user share has gone
up. Maybe this will leave a void where XFCE once was and someone else will
fill it. You have to admit that being able to say you're one of the big
three desktops is better than saying you develop for the one that people use
when they can't use the other two. :-)


As far as the comment about power consumption, my Core2 Duo uses 8x the
power of a Pentium 75.  I couldn't find specs on the 486. :-) I'm sure
overall computers are more efficient power wise but CPUs use substantially
more powere when operating than they used to.

Grant

-- 
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use
Windows."
Now they have two problems.
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