cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/64896415
For additional context, here’s Brian’s previous blog post about the first preview release of Xfwl4, where he describes his history with Xfce and the sponsorship.
https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/06/xfwl4s-first-preview-release
Despite still not getting why XFCE still haven’t moved on from GTK and the GNOME shenanigans on it - to the E libraries so XFCE and Enlightenment do a Dragon Ball Z type of fusion and become the one DE to rule them all, and thinking that the XFCE ui is a bit ass at some places for reasons I can’t understand (like having to scroll at some pages on their settings and the misaligned randomly placed stuff in there), I still have respect for their long-time devs and the work they’ve poured on their project over the years. Pretty sure the common sense will prevail in this case.
Because enlightenment libraries are pure running diarrhea level of utterly horrendous, actually horrifyingly bad code.
There is a super famous “Daily WTF” post from a Samsung employee literally forced to work with Enlightenment libraries (back when Samsung was doing TizenOS) that would be an awesome read, although it’s behind a login gate nowadays.
GNOME’s stuff are actually pretty easy to work with
The internet archive comes to the rescue, here’s a link to the rant.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230317214426/https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/15001/enlightened
The only reason people still use XFCE is because of the chicago95 theme.
I’m pulling this out of my ass but there’s some good shit in there so I might be right.
XFCE is lightweight (low system requirements and resource usage) and stable (in the sense it does not do crazy changes, it stays relatively calm). And the modular approach by design also speaks to a lot of people. And also its from usability standpoint easy to use without getting in your way, but still customizable; kind of like KDE meets old GNOME. Its definitely more reasons to use XFCE than just a theme.
It’s all about DesktopPal 97 for me!
(Unironically do love that theme, but more seriously, I use Xfce on a particularly weak laptop with only 4gb of RAM, where it works as a good compromise between being lightweight yet not needing the configuration that Window Managers need if they don’t come pre setup from the distro itself)