Xfce (ɛf siː iː) is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris and BSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use.

The current version, 4.4, is modular and reusable. It consists of separately packaged components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment, but which can be selected in subsets to create the user's preferred personal working environment. Xfce is mainly used for its ability to run a modern desktop environment on relatively modest hardware.

It is based on the GTK+ 2 toolkit (as is GNOME). It uses the Xfwm window manager, described below. Its configuration is entirely mouse-driven, and the configuration files are hidden from the casual user.

Xfce is somewhat similar to the commercial CDE, but has been getting a little further away from that comparison with each new major version.

History

Olivier Fourdan started the project in 1996. The name "Xfce" originally stood for "XForms Common Environment", but since that time Xfce has been rewritten twice and no longer uses that toolkit. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as "XFce", but rather as "Xfce". The developers' current stance is that the initialism no longer stands for anything specific.

First versions

Xfce began as a simple project created with XForms, meant to be a free Linux clone of CDE. The program, a simple toolbar, was released by Fourdan to ibiblio (then "SunSITE"), and the community showed an impressive demand for expansion of the project.

Version 2

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 because the project was based on XForms. Red Hat only accepted software that was free and open source, but, 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. Xfce 2 was only distributed in Debian's contrib component.

Version 3

XForms, the proprietary library that Xfce was based on, was limiting the progress of the project. The popularity of the GTK+ toolkit was increasing, and Fourdan saw it as a fitting replacement. In March 1999, he scrapped the old XFce and began a complete rewrite of the project based on GTK+. The result was Xfce 3.0, which was licensed under the GNU GPL. Along with being based completely on open-source software, the project gained many benefits from using the GTK+ libraries, including drag-and-drop support, native language support, and improved configurability. Xfce was uploaded to SourceForge.net in February 2001, starting with version 3.8.1.