Questions after the 4.10 release
A short post to answerer some questions I’ve ready in comments on the 4.10 release news across the internet. If you have more questions, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.
A new stable release after 16 months? And no 4.8.1 release…
This is because Xfce has a different release model than for example GNOME or KDE when it comes to stable releases. Because of the limited team of developers we want to spend the least time possible on releasing packages. Big stable releases like other desktops do consume a lot of time, even with the small-ish amount of core packages in Xfce.
Therefore after 4.6 the following was decided: we only do 4 big releases (3 preview releases and 1 stable release) and after that only stable releases for individual packages. So the desktop version is 4.10 (notice the lacking micro-number), individual components could have higher 4.10.x numbers.
As an example, the last 4.8 stable release of xfce4-dev-tools is 4.8.0, the same as in the 4.8 fat-tarball release. The latest 4.8 release of xfce4-panel is 4.8.6 (6 stable releases after 4.8.0, which was in the 4.8 fat-tarball).
We know this is harder for starting users, who prefer to grab 1 tarball with all the latest versions, but instead need to crawl through /src/xfce and need to find the latest version. For distributions this is a lot easier: packagers are subscribed to the xfce-announce mailing list or peek identi.ca and once in a while they need to update 1 of the packages.
Nonetheless this is still a point where we can improve so I’ll see if I can provide more information on the website (announcements and links to the latest package versions).
4.10 only had 2 preview releases, because no critical bugs appeared and translations were in a good shape. Enough reasons for me to skip pre3 and release 4.10 instead.
Online Documentation Wiki
Just to be clear about this: we understand online docs are not a solution, but it was the best we could do in a short time. Hopefully the wiki-based setup will attract more contributors (who previously feared docbook or mallard, yes we tried that too) and lead to a complete set of documentation . When we feel satisfied with the content of the wiki we’ll look into a “wiki snapshot” for offline usage and ship that in an xfce4-docs package.
Gtk3
First 2 things: no Xfce 4.10 is not using gtk3, only the gtk-xfce-engine theme engine supports gtk3. Secondly we will discuss if Xfce 4.12 will be ported to gtk3. I’ll explain the latter:
Technically gtk3 is nothing different then gtk2 when it comes to programming. The hard parts are porting of some custom widgets (drawing and size allocation), replacements of some deprecated symbols and link to gtk3 libs. All things a user is not going to notice if we do it right.
Gtk3 is also not faster than gtk2, maybe there are some areas were it got a bit faster, but so there are areas where performance decreased a bit. Nothing shocking here.
An issue I’m aware of is theming issues in gtk3. From what I understand this changed back and forward in gtk 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4. So we need to decide which version we require to get this working consistently, because people will complain if only the Raleigh theme can be used :).
From the Xfce point of view there is (again) the resource problem for porting all plugins, because if for example the panel is ported to gtk3, also the plugins need to be ported. Not all goodies are maintained, but usually they work and distros can compile them. If in 4.12 suddenly 50% of the external plugins are not working that will be another thing users will notice.
At any rate, don’t get overly excited about gtk3, it’s just gtk 2.26 with a huge api break :). Once we decided which version we use in 4.12, I’ll post it on the blog.
LXDE still consumes less memory
*sigh* I’m not going to rant on this because as a user you should choose the desktop that makes you happy, but anyway it annoys me a tiny bit. So just to throw some information:
LXDE and Xfce are both based on the same toolkit and provide roughly the same set of features. That as a start makes it technically almost impossible to be much better or worse regarding memory usage. I think this whole myth started by comparing two distributions (clue: strcmp (distro_a + 1, distro_b + 1) == 0).
I’m sure Xfce consumes a bit more memory, because more processes are started. Especially when external plugins are added to the panel: a design decision to make the panel more stable.
I don’t know or care where this comparison started, but if somebody does this again the the future, please compare the actual memory usage and don’t use free. Or even better: don’t compare memory usage at all because it is pretty useless.
That said: if I start a default LXDE and Xfce 4.10 desktop (default Arch Linux packages) and use ps_mem.py, Xfce consumes 2 MiB more memory (same or desktop-equal applications are started). Do whatever you want this is number, as long as you compare apples and apples.
Not much accomplished in over 1 year
Sorry, I also work the entire week. But I don’t blame myself, Xfce is a fun project for all of us and if people move to another country, have a day job, a life, school/exams or simply don’t feel like working on Xfce not much progress is made.
Personally I don’t have the feeling not much was done in 4.10, we didn’t break anything major and a lot of the todo’s for 4.10 were completed in the release cycle. The focus was polishing and that’s what we did!
Updates:
- 01-05 13:34: Added “Not much accomplished in over 1 year”.