XFCE

Xfce

Xfce 4.x with panel on FreeBSD
Original author(s)	Olivier Fourdan
Developer(s)	Multiple
Initial release	1996; 21 years ago (1996)
Stable release	4.12 / 28 February 2015; 23 months ago (2015-02-28)
Development status	Active
Written in	C (GTK+)
Platform	Unix-like
Type	Desktop environment
License	GNU General Public License, GNU Lesser General Public License and BSD License
Website	xfce.org

Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters) is a free and open-source desktop environment for Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, Solaris, and BSD.

Xfce aims to be fast and , while still being visually appealing and easy to use. Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. It consists of separately packaged parts that together provide all functions of the desktop environment, but can be selected in subsets to suit user needs and preference. Another priority of Xfce is adherence to standards, specifically those defined at freedesktop.org.

Like GNOME, Xfce is based on the GTK+ toolkit. It uses the Xfwm window manager, described below. Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven, with the configuration files hidden from the casual user. Xfce does not feature any desktop animations, but Xfwm supports compositing.

Xfce began as a simple project created with XForms. Olivier Fourdan released the program, which was just a simple taskbar, on SunSITE.

Fourdan continued developing the project and in 1998, Xfce 2 was released with the first version of Xfce's window manager, Xfwm. He requested to have the project included in Red Hat Linux, but was refused due to its XForms basis. Red Hat only accepted software that was open source and released under either a GPL or BSD compatible license, whereas, at the time, XForms was closed source and free only for personal use. For the same reason, Xfce was not in Debian before version 3, and Xfce 2 was only distributed in Debian's contrib repository.