The GNOME and KDE desktop environments dominate the Linux
landscape. Both have made the traditionally yucky Linux desktop a thing
of beauty. Both provide integrated suites of applications and lots of
user interface glitz, or eye candy. But both face increasing complaints.
Users complain these desktop environments are too large, use up too much
RAM and processing power, Furthermore, users complain these desktop
environments are simply too complicated to use.
That's not to say
that the GNOME and KDE desktops are fading away. Far from it. Both GNOME and KDE recently announced
new releases.
But still, many users are looking for alternatives.
Many of these users are now moving to the Xfce desktop environment, one
of the first real alternatives to the GNOME and KDE desktops. Xfce aims
to provide a fast, lightweight desktop environment.
The Xfce
desktop looks somewhat like the old Common Desktop Environment, or CDE,
only with a much better looking interface than CDE. You can also see
some Mac OS X influences in Xfce. Like Mac OS X, Xfce displays a panel
by default on the bottom of the screen. This panel looks similar to the
Mac OS X dock. Like Mac OS X, the Xfce panel sports large, very
good-looking icons. In addition, the default screen background is a
abstract blue image with swooping curves, just like that for Mac OS X
10.3. Xfce uses the X Composite extension to create transparent effects
like those available in the Macintosh user interface.
But, unlike
the Macintosh, Xfce by default supports four virtual screens. Virtual
screens make it a whole lot easier to manage a large number of open
applications. Neither Mac OS X nor Windows support this feature out of
the box, but Linux has supported virtual screens for a number of years
under a variety of desktop environments.
Xfce includes a window
manager, which draws the window title bars, as well as a file manager
and an application to control settings. Together these applications are
a lot smaller and use a lot less resources than the corresponding GNOME
or KDE applications. Furthermore, you can place a number of small
applications, called applets, on the Xfce panel or on the desktop screen
background. These applets allow you to further customize the Xfce
display.
Until Xfce
came along, there was no real competition to the GNOME or KDE
desktops. Your choice was to run GNOME or KDE, or run a number of
applications manually without an integrated desktop environment. A
number of Linux distributions, including Fedora Core 3
already include Xfce, so you may already have this new desktop
environment.
In other news, Adobe released the GM, or Golden
Master, version of Adobe
Reader 7.0 for viewing
PDF files.
Most Linux distributions already include one or more
programs to view PDF files, but it is nice to have a vendor-supplied
application from Adobe, an application that brings Linux PDF support up
to the most recent revision.
Also, the recent Linspire 5.0
release improves support for Linux-based laptops. Laptops, typically
packed with proprietary hardware, have been the most difficult systems
on which to install Linux. Linspire 5.0 supports 802.11g wireless
networking and more laptop models. Linspire's primary focus remains
making Linux easier to use, especially for users switching from
Windows.
Linspire ,
the company, is making a big splash with its 5.0 release, listing a
large number of improvements for end users, especially those new to
Linux. --Eric Foster-Johnson
