Why we shut the hell up and went with XFCE (Again)

With the release of Freespire 6.0.3 a lot of customers and users saw that we had yet again gone with XFCE as our user interface.  While this may have irked some people we made this change because of several factors which we will discuss here.

We already had products based on XFCE

While MATE and KDE were great there were a few reasons why we chose XFCE. 

• It is lightweight
• Its easier to customize
• It requires fewer system resources
• Its more modular

We also have products that already utilize XFCE namely Linspire Enterprise Server and Linspire Workstation.  We also eventually want to release an ARM version of Linspire and XFCE was the easiest, from our current production run, to customize and make it an exact clone of the x86_64 release.  So this would allow us to work with a singular desktop with mere graphical changes versus a lot of infrastructure change.  This also allows us to run on older Chromebooks that may have reached EOL but may not have had the resources to run KDE, Mate or even GNOME.

Development of XFCE is more stable

With Mate and KDE, we had the issue of their development cycle.  Whenever a new release of Mate or KDE was released it would require a lot more testing and rolling out new desktop features.  With XFCE development is a lot slower with new releases coming every 2 or 3 years versus every 2 to 6 months and upgrading an XFCE installation is much easier with a simple repository added and a mere system update without having to worry about broken packages and modules where some core system utility would crash and burn. 

Less Drama associated with XFCE

There seems to be a lot of drama involved with certain sides of the community.  With KDE its the issues of Kubuntu versus Canonical and KDE vs QT where that introduces uncertainty and as a company that markets sells, and develops software for fortune 500 companies and in government and education that also added a certain complexity.  With GNOME and Mate, we found ourselves patching bugs, submitting patches, and those groups rejecting the patch which made us have to basically ship it with our distributions, and when a new desktop release arrives it basically breaks everything again.  With XFCE there is little drama involved and they work well with exterior developers.

Advantages of XFCE

Once again, it's lightweight.  It works well with GTK, QT, and Web-based applications and looks less "ugly" while doing it.  You can run XFCE reasonably well within lower RAM systems.  It allows you to work with multiple classes of systems and also has great touch capabilities for touch screen systems.

All around we made this decision based on what's good for the users, our customers and our companies.  We have perhaps one of the better-looking XFCE desktops and even with our Linspire 9.0 prototypes, people are loving it.

Goodbye macOS X, we hardly knew ya

As everyone knows by now Apple is officially launching macOS 11 which means the end of the line for OS X.  Apple also announced a shift from Intel to its own ARM chip.  While many people in computing today do not remember the 1990's and how big and ambitious OS X was starting with Rhapsody I certainly do.  I was a NeXT guy and was with Apple until they mutilated the OpenStep development environment I look at this in reflection.  In some ways, I feel like Apple is going back in time to the same screwups that almost killed the company in 1997.  Apple is a much stronger company today then it was back then.  It's now worth over a trillion dollars has plenty of cash on the books and is well-positioned to try to be a trendsetter that it couldn't be in 1997.  For those of you, that remember how PowerPC was supposed to change the game, and people were placing the bets that PowerPC was supposed to be the future well we saw how that turned out.

Can Apple do the same thing twice and expect a different result?  In this case, it might be able to pull it off.  In some developers that I have spoken to there is certainly some tension in the air.  The painful reminder of having to maintain two separate code bases for a few years is definitely a nightmare.  A lot of you Apple fans are right now screaming at your computer screen as you read this "ROSETTA!!!!!!!!" let's be real.  Rosetta SUCKED during the PowerPC to Intel transition how well do you think it's going to fare here?  Emulation technologies even as cost-efficient as they are, are great for testing but running high-end productivity software on a regular basis?  C'mon now let's get serious.  The other half of you that agreed with what I just said are going to come back with, "Well most development houses have iOS versions of their software so they can just use that right" and yes they can.  But, Tablets, Phones, and PC's are totally different creatures.  macOS 11 is not going to have touch capabilities.  This means that developers are going to have to write in features that are not found in Phones and Tablets which means more complexity and more dollars spent.  Now let's go beyond developers to the consumer and more importantly Apple's pro customers.  ARM-based systems have not been used as a primary platform for high-end graphics, music, and video production.  The most serious ARM-based supercomputer has over 158 thousand nodes, let's say that again; over 150,000 nodes.  What is Apple's plan?  To bring back an ARM-based Xserve and force customers to buy another system that has 500 nodes just so people can do the comparable work that was achieved using a Xeon based system?

Yes, there is uncertainty about what's going to happen here.  Will the 27 inch iMac just turn into a 27 inch iPhone with a keyboard and mouse?  Only time will tell.  As someone who has devoted his life to technology, I do appreciate the fact that Tim Cook is trying to push Apple to "Think different" again which was one of its most endearing qualities back in 1998.  But do you really think doing the same thing twice will achieve a different result?  But, this is the problem when stock price dictates a companies direction and should Tim Cook screw this up.  Well, there is no Steve Jobs to save them.