Who needs silly eye candy and 3D desktops?

XFCE-4.4.0 : For the people who need speed and not silly eye candies for their cmputing need...

Xfce, the lightweight Linux desktop environment's latest version - xfce-4.4.0 is out. It has new, lightening fast file manager called Thunar, which has been re-written from scratch. Thunar has some amazing built in file preview thumbnailers that can be customize and extended at will. Thunar also uses Gnome's thumbnailing technique.

Thunar is claimed to be real fast, easy and capable to do most things a user wants in his file manager. Not only that, Thunar's interface is clean, intuitive and does not include any confusing or useless option by default (you can add them later if you wish :)). While testing, in the same machine, Thunar instantly started up whereas Konqueror takes ages to load initially.

Thunar is secured enough, it can execute applications, but, by default it runs only certain executables from certain locations only and not all, and has some nify built in functions such as bulk renamer that can further be extended at will - for example, you can add ‘Send to Flickr' context menu in Thunar. Thunar comes separately (though the part of xfce, but Thunar has separate installer) and runs independently, therefore, you can use it in Gnome / Kde as well if you do not want to use xfce only for Thunar.

However, when you download Xfce-4.4.0 graphical installer and try to install it in fedora core 6, you will face some backward-package-compatibility issues, and installations fails. It is therefore recommended to use web based installation of Xfce since it handles package dependability automatically. For web based installation, use start menu option > install - update application > desktop > xfce. Make sure your internet connection is up and running and has good speed (the installer is about 25 MB download)

And yes, the Xfce-4.4.0 has new look too. It has new set of icons, menu more intuitive with greater functionality. for example, settings contextual menu will show you almost all system setting related command - from keyboard to mouse to desktop view setting to choose from. Xfce is localized in many languages too.

Tag xfce,linux,thunar,desktop

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