Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

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kc1di
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by kc1di »

MurphCID wrote: Fri Aug 28, 2020 9:05 am So what it seems is that XFCE can be customized more so than Cinnamon for each users personal desires? Also XFCE is updated slower than Cinnamon for the most part? I am very interested in trying it, and will see if I can get an older laptop to try it on. Thanks all, I am learning a great deal here in this thread. Oh a question, how does XFCE handle a seperate graphics card like the NVIDIA cards?
Same way other DE's do , You'll need to use nomodeset to get in and then install the correct driver from driver manager for your particular card.
See the release notes on how to do that.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by majpooper »

MurphCID wrote: Fri Aug 28, 2020 9:05 am So what it seems is that XFCE can be customized more so than Cinnamon for each users personal desires?
I have looked and played with both and to be fair I have plenty of of RAM and CPU power on both my PC (8 core AMD Bulldozer 16G RAM) and laptop (i7 8G RAM) that there was no difference in perceived performance that I could decern. I can't speak to customization of Xfce but Cinnamon is certainly customizable and if you are comfortable with editing .css and .js files the options are endless. So on rigs with a pretty decent CPU and plenty of RAM it seems to me it just boils down to personal appeal.

I have have been dealing with trying to set up "old" resource challenged laptops - dual core CPU 2 and 4 Gib RAM and not found Xfce particularly "light and snappy." I have found some other DE that are much lighter and faster but that is another topic.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by antikythera »

As alluded to previously XFCE is not lightweight any more. I'd go for LXQt or even KDE (no joke) instead these days for a low resource machine.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by kc1di »

I did some experiments today installed Cinnamon and XFCE4 on same hardware.
htop reports the following ram usage
XFCE Ram with just desktop no apps launched 940 MB Ram usage
Cinnamon with just desktop no apps launched 1.2 GB Ram usage
So XFCE has a little edge in ram usage for basic Desktop.

XFCE with FF running 2 tab open - 1.3 GB Ram.
Cinnamon with FF running 2 tabs open 1.5 ram

So in ram usage XFCE has a little edge but on my machine Lenovo thinkpad T450 There was little observable difference in running of programs.

Conclusion use the one that suits your personal taste the best. Your mileage may vary depending upon your Hardware and use factors.
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antikythera
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by antikythera »

Cinnamon with no programs open:

Code: Select all

top - 18:29:53 up  7:00,  1 user,  load average: 0.60, 1.05, 1.07
Tasks: 191 total,   1 running, 190 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  1.9 us,  0.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 97.5 id,  0.1 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15907.4 total,  13791.1 free,    742.0 used,   1374.3 buff/cache
MiB Swap:  15932.0 total,  15932.0 free,      0.0 used.  14799.7 avail Mem 
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by mr_raider »

MrEen wrote: Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:26 pm
mr_raider wrote: Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:34 am XFCE is however a very slowly evolving desktop
That's finally changing now: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.16/roadmap

I'm not suggesting it's for the better. :?
Does that mean Mint 20.x will eventually offer XFCE 4.16
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MrEen »

I would imagine it's more likely to be Mint 21/Ubuntu 22.04 but I was wrong about 4.14's arrival, so who knows?
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MurphCID »

Is 4.16 going to be THAT big an upgrade? And thank you all to the great replies here.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MurphCID »

I found hidden away in a closet an old laptop, and I think I might try XFCE on it.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by altair4 »

Well, I have a somewhat philological attitude to this question.

Five years from now when we are all fitted for Elon Musk's neuralink there will no longer be a need for any external desktop environment. I choose to spend the time between now and then with something that doesn't have a lot of drama ... XFCE
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by antikythera »

MurphCID wrote: Tue Sep 01, 2020 6:52 am Is 4.16 going to be THAT big an upgrade? And thank you all to the great replies here.
Hopefully it will have been to the gym and lost some of the code bloat it gained in the transition phase to GTK+3
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by Green man »

Hello. I know the threat hasn't been active in a little bit, but it's one of the more informative comparison threads so I thought I'd add this here.
antikythera wrote: Fri Sep 04, 2020 3:57 pm Hopefully it will have been to the gym and lost some of the code bloat it gained in the transition phase to GTK+3
I just manually upgraded to XFCE 4.16 in a Xubuntu 20.10 virtual machine with 8 GB of RAM, and a quick check of Htop after restarting leads me to believe it's leaner than 4.14. It clocked in at 460 MB of RAM once, and 425 MB of RAM on a second restart. That said, it's not on the mint base, so it's not a perfect comparison.

Returning to the OP's original question, the other big difference between the two desktops that hasn't been mentioned here, is that with cinnamon, my understanding is that your obligated to stick with the muffin window manager (which is quite nice). Whereas on my XFCE box, thanks to the excellent little mint-desktop utility, I can seamlessly switch between xfwm, openbox and Compiz. Additionally, for xfwm and openbox, there are a couple of different compositing options.
Hope this is helpful.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by Hoser Rob »

antikythera wrote: Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:37 am XFCE isn't that light these days, it's on par with MATE now. ...
That's the truth. I have KDE running on a laptop that had Xfce before and after the common KDE tweaks, it barely uses more resources at all. And KDE is the mopst powerful DE I've used.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by Welcome »

Green man wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 12:35 am Whereas on my XFCE box, thanks to the excellent little mint-desktop utility, I can seamlessly switch between xfwm, openbox and Compiz. Additionally, for xfwm and openbox, there are a couple of different compositing options.
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks! I could never make up my mind between Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE, so I have systems running each. But, I didn't know about switching to openbox or Compiz. I had to do some quick research on these and found some links showing a comparison:

XFWM vs Openbox
https://www.slant.co/versus/1302/1304/~xfwm_vs_openbox

XFWM vs Compiz
https://www.slant.co/versus/1302/1310/~xfwm_vs_compiz

Those interested in openbox and compiz may want to check out the comparisons, pros, and cons listing in the above links.

Finally, that same site has a number of comparisons between xfce and cinnamon. In some cases xfce is rated higher, and in some cinnamon is rated higher. Opinions, of course, but interesting to see. Try this link to see a summary of the comparisons: https://www.slant.co/search?query=xfce%20vs%20cinnamon
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MurphCID »

I loaded Mint XFCE on the Darter Pro, and played with it for a while, but I could not get over the really, really huge, ugly system tray icons. I decided that XFCE is in need of a LOT of work, and I re-installed Cinnamon on the Darter Pro (which is becoming my experiment machine). I guess I am spoiled by the clean, modern look of Cinnamon. The menus were fine, I just did not like the look and feel of XFCE, despite wanting to really like it.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MrEen »

MurphCID wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:11 pmbut I could not get over the really, really huge, ugly system tray icons
There have been a number of complaints about that. Not everyone is seeing huge icons. Ugly maybe, but not huge. I know it's too late for you, but the next person that sees the same thing try reducing the height of the panel just a smidge. I'm thinking some of the size folders are missing the appropriate icons so at a certain height they are jumping tremendously in size. For example, the change from a panel height of 22px to 24px might be where this occurs. Just guessing at random numbers there.

For those that don't know how to change the height, right click on the panel and navigate to Panel > Panel Preferences > Display tab.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MurphCID »

MrEen wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:27 pm
MurphCID wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 2:11 pmbut I could not get over the really, really huge, ugly system tray icons
There have been a number of complaints about that. Not everyone is seeing huge icons. Ugly maybe, but not huge. I know it's too late for you, but the next person that sees the same thing try reducing the height of the panel just a smidge. I'm thinking some of the size folders are missing the appropriate icons so at a certain height they are jumping tremendously in size. For example, the change from a panel height of 22px to 24px might be where this occurs. Just guessing at random numbers there.

For those that don't know how to change the height, right click on the panel and navigate to Panel > Panel Preferences > Display tab.
Good point. I might try it again in the future, I *really* WANT to like XFCE, and it is probably just me being spoiled.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MrEen »

MurphCID wrote: Sat Jan 02, 2021 4:43 pm Good point. I might try it again in the future, I *really* WANT to like XFCE, and it is probably just me being spoiled.
To be honest, if those icons were bothering you, you might like Xfce even less when we get the 4.16 version. They've moved to Client Side Decoration (CSD) for all the Xfce settings windows so making them look similar to other windows of the apps you've installed will be very difficult. In other words, the Xfce Window Manager theme won't affect the windows of Xfce-specific apps. You'll be able to close-ish, but it's going to take work. This is probably going to arrive in Mint 20.2 in about 6 months.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by Schultz »

MrEen wrote: Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:26 pm
mr_raider wrote: Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:34 am XFCE is however a very slowly evolving desktop
That's finally changing now: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.16/roadmap

I'm not suggesting it's for the better. :?
Is there anything in particular that makes you say that? I'm curious because I'm contemplating switching over from Mate to Xfce sometime in the future.
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Re: Opinion XFCE vs Cinnamon

Post by MrEen »

My previous post right above yours is exactly why I said it that way. It's pissing off a lot of Xfce users already.

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=14574

https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=13689
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