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.
