Warning: this review contains heavy Linux Terminology. It is recommended that only experienced Linux users continue, as it may only confuse others :)

INTRODUCTION

Some people say 'Less is More', and while this may not necessarily apply to everything, I am inclined to agree in regards to window managers. If you really have to have an amazing looking window manager, then you'll probably want to stick with KDE2 or Gnome. However if you want a UI that is clean, tight, configurable and fast, which incorporates the things you need and use the most with out the extra 'fluff' of most other window managers then XFce is definately worth a serious look.

Like I have just mentioned above, it is not the 'prettiest' window manager out there, but when you're concerned with saving system resources, and having a no nonsense look and feel to your linux system, you're probably not going to be worried about using themes which will make it look sexy but chew system resources.

That said however, in my opinion, XFce certainly does has a very visually appealing and configurable interface, making it easy to use, and fine to look at. Its not a completely minimalist WM, but it certainly does deserve the title 'lightweight'. It is based on the GTK+ toolkit and thus enables all GTK+ programs to share the same color scheme, and have a relatively consistent appearance between applications.

INSTALLATION

I downloaded the latest version (3.8.1- i568) by following the links from the official site ( www.xfce.org ) to their sourceforge site. I used the binary RPM to install- using YaST (I'm using SuSE remember ;) ) to unpack it, but bare 'rpm' or a similar package manager should install it just fine. Installation went smoothly and quickly, taking only a few seconds, and after I logged out and logged back in, selecting 'XFmw' as my window manager, I was greeted with XFce's desktop and main panel.