XFce 4.0 Released

New Version Brings New Levels of Usability and Performance to Unix/Linux Desktops and Workstations.

New Version Of The Popular, Multi-platform Desktop Environment Sports Highly Improved Usability And A New, Solid Architectural Design.

TOULOUSE, France -- September 25, 2003 -- The XFce Team today announced the release of version 4.0 of XFce. Unix and Linux X11/XFree86 users who are looking for a speedy, stable, flexible, modern and powerful user interface will find that XFce 4.0 brings a new level of usability and performance standards to today's desktop environments.

XFce 4 is a complete rewrite of the previous version. It's based on the popular GTK+ 2.x toolkit and it has a radically different architecture from XFce 3. It embodies extreme modularity and re-usability and all of XFce 4's core components have been written from scratch in order to fit into this new architecture. Another priority of XFce 4 is adherence to standards, specifically those defined by freedesktop.org, which aims to standardize the Unix/Linux desktop.

"Early XFce versions were highly inspired by CDE, the traditional Unix desktop," said the XFce team's founder and project leader, Olivier Fourdan. "With XFce 3 we took the CDE-like design to the next level, but with XFce 4 we tried to think completely out of the box and develop a modern and flexible desktop environment that would provide a worthy alternative to KDE and Gnome and please with its enhanced usability and brand new features."

XFce 4 consists of a number of components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment. They are packaged separately and users can pick and choose from the available packages to create the best personal working environment. XFce 4 includes a number of new themes, international keyboard support, easy-to-use preference panels for all common desktop actions, native interoperability with both Gnome and KDE and their applications, an improved file manager (Xffm) with Samba browsing and mount/umount capabilities, an easily re-locatable main panel (vertical or horizontal, with variable size, auto-hide feature and with easy-to-setup detachable menus and application launchers), enhanced drag-n-drop support, anti-alias fonts.

Additionally, XFce 4 sports a new lightweight window manager with more than 60 window decorations available, Xinerama support, window shading, and desktop switching using the mouse wheel roller, window resizing and moving from keyboard shortcuts, etc. More advanced features include a full development framework for writing applications, while XFce 4 also provides MCS, the Multi-Channel Settings (a modular, host independent, network transparent and centralized configuration system).

"XFce 4 was designed with the future in mind, both technically and strategically" said core developer Jasper Huijsmans. "Today, the enterprise is still using the proprietary CDE, which undeniably shows its age next to the latest open source alternatives. XFce 4 aims to be a truly capable alternative to both Linux home/professional users and desktop/workstation Unix professionals. The migration path is minimal as the installation procedure is both flexible and easy, and there is pretty much no learning curve to worry about. We see XFce 4 as the platform that leads to more professional desktops and workstations."

XFce is Free Software. The separate components are released under either the BSD license, the GNU LGPL or the GNU GPL. Source code is freely available and while XFce 4 is easily portable to all Unix flavors, there is already native support and packages for many popular Linux distributions, SPARC and x86 Solaris 8/9, FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x, OpenBSD 3.x, while more Unix and other X11-based platforms are expected to be supported out-of-the-box soon.

About XFce

XFce is a free software project that provides a lightweight desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while remaining visually appealing and easy to use. Originally built as a free alternative to industry's standard desktop environment, CDE, it has evolved into a completely new, innovative, and widely deployed desktop environment with exceedingly growing popularity. More than 15 developers, translators, artists and helpers contribute their time and effort to the project.

About the XFce Team

The XFce Team is comprised of many volunteer developers, translators, artists and others who are committed to the advancement of the XFce desktop environment. The group helps determining XFce's vision and roadmap. XFce is a free software project which develops a lightweight desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. The project offers a responsive, stable, efficient, intuitive, and innovative user interface with minimum migration path as it is among the very few fully compliant, with the freedesktop.org standards, desktop environments. More information on XFce is available at http://www.xfce.org