Hi everyone, the first release of XFCE is out there.
You can read the announcement here.

Has anyone tried to build this.

Looks interesting, but I'll only check it out after is has been released (Jan/11).

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Read about this a couple days ago. Sounds like a lot of nice new changes apart from still not having a native menu editor again

This is in the announcement:
I never felt need for a menu-editor, but it seems they have been listening to users.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to 4.8 when it hits -current in the future. Good news indeed.

XFCE used to be seen as a lightweight alternative to gnome, but they're increasingly using gnome components: glib, and now gio, Is there really much difference left between them and the basic gnome environment any more?

Gnome still uses more system resources than XFce. Xfce runs faster on my systems than Gnome.

There's also the fact that XFCE doesn't suck quite as bad as gnome does... although it's close. Can't change your default file manager, WTF...

I agree that Xfce has somewhat bloated recently, but before gio there was Thunar-vfs, and these days you have to have something of that sort to create a useful DE, I think. So gio doesn't bring in extra bloat, it only replaces something. But bare Gtk+ apps are getting heavier with these inclusions, of course. While I'm not too happy about it, I understand that this had to be done, especially for keeping Gtk as a competitive alternative to Qt. I haven't tested 4.8 but so far, the bloating speed of Xfce has been well behind the average increase in processor speeds, thus I'm not too worried. I used to be quite fond of lightweight systems but these days I find, say, fluxbox needlessly primitive on an average computer.

I have an old PIII 667 MHz IBM 300 PL in my basement gathering dust that runs Fluxbox very well without swapping too much. But, I'm like you, I prefer a WM/DE that has a few bells and whistles. KDE and Gnome use too many system resources for my liking. XFce has the right blend of functionality and speed for me.
I'm pretty-much sold with XFce.

I think I'll let Robby work out all of the Slackware specific issues before I try it out.

I am actually in the process of building it for my laptop. If I happen to get it done before someone else does I'll post back. This is my first attempt at really building something this big for Slackware, so it's taking me a bit longer than I expected but I am definitely learning a lot.

I'm currently running the 4.8 prerelease stuff, and it's all quite nice. The main drawback is that there are a *lot* of new deps required, and quite a few of them are a bit intrusive - enough so that it's going to be a new adventure in keeping my tradition of releasing packages for it :/

Once the next set of updates hit the -current tree, I'll have more of the prerequisites for all of this in place, so at that point, I'll look into packaging up some stuff for folks to try. Until then, you'll just have to be patient

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Can't be any worst that KDE 4.xx, can it?

How is it going to work with PolicyKit? Are we gonna have to patch Xfce or is polkit going to be added?