Xfce

Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters) is a free and open-source desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD.

Xfce aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use. Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of separately packaged parts that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment, but can be selected in subsets to suit user needs and preference. Another priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org.

Features

Like GNOME 2, Xfce is based on the GTK+ 2 toolkit. It uses the Xfwm window manager, described below. Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven, with the configuration files hidden from the casual user. Xfce does not feature any desktop animations, but Xfwm supports compositing.

History

Olivier Fourdan started the project in 1996, as a Linux version of CDE (Common Desktop Environment), initially a proprietary software and later released as free software. However, after a dozen years of development and several major versions, Xfce has diverged from CDE and stands on its own. The name "Xfce" originally stood for "XForms Common Environment", but since that time Xfce has been rewritten twice and no longer uses the XForms toolkit. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as "XFCE", but rather as "Xfce". The developers' current stance is that the initialism no longer stands for anything specific. It has been nicknamed "Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment", even in some of its man pages. Another possibility X Freakin' Cool Environment is suggested at Xfce Wiki. As a result, Xfce is currently an acronym that doesn't stand for anything.