A few years ago, Xfce had a reputation as a lightweight desktop that made few concessions to inexperienced users. However, the Xfce 4 series of releases have shown steady improvements in usability, and version 4.6 is no exception.

A few years ago, Xfce had a reputation as a lightweight desktop that made few concessions to inexperienced users. However, the Xfce 4 series of releases have shown steady improvements in usability, and version 4.6 is no exception.

Over the years, Xfce gained a reputation of being a lightweight alternative for the two major desktop environments on Linux, KDE and GNOME. In this article I will overview 7 essential applications for the Xfce desktop environment, including screenshots, most popular features, strong and weak points.

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager, a brand new session manager and sound mixer as well as several huge improvements of its core components.

KDE and GNOME pile on the eye candy and grow ever-larger and hungrier of system resources. Thankfully, Linux users who prefer a lightweight desktop environment have a number of great choices. Today Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of the attractive, nimble, and functional Xfce desktop.

Last week, the KDE community officially released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, a significant update of the open source desktop environment and its associated application stack. The new version delivers some user interface improvements, enhanced usability, new features, additional software, and a number of important bug fixes.

Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE was just released featuring the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Xorg 7.4 and XFCE 4.6 desktop. Linux Mint 7 has introduced us to some exciting improvements to mintInstall, mintUpdate, mintWelcome, and mintUpload along with several artwork enhancements.

Last year's DesktopLinux.com's survey showed Xfce was the third most popular desktop environment. Granted, it was a distant third to KDE's second place and GNOME's first place, but Xfce does seem to be gaining in popularity in the last few years.

Following on the third beta release two weeks ago, we are ready to present Drupal 6.0 beta 4. Since the previous beta release, we have committed over 80 fixes to the Drupal 6.x code. This beta version includes some usability improvements and lots of bug fixes for issues which the testers and contributed module upgraders encountered. The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!