In an interview, Olivier Fourdan, creator of the XFCE, talks about the desktop environment's growing popularity in netbooks. He also discusses Intel's recent contributions to XFCE, which the Intel-sponsored Moblin project is using, as well as the broader potential for Linux-based environments such as XFCE or Android in netbooks.

In the Slashcode interview, Fourdan describes XFCE as a complete GTK-based desktop environment, including a window manager, file browser, panel, development libraries, and a D-Bus-compatible settings manager, MCS, that doesn't use gconf. Resembling a lighter, faster version of GNOME, the environment seems to be fairly modular, with Fourdan discussing capabilities like using Compiz in place of XFCE's native window manager. Patching in Moblin's interesting Clutter 3D UI library is another area of interest.

Unlike Android, which Fourdan says is still very centralized at Google, XFCE has, since it began in 1996, attracted a vigorous community of both core and add-on developers. The latter group includes projects such as the lightweight Midori web browser. More XFCE subprojects are listed on its project page and on a separate Goodies site.

Fourdan praises Moblin for its use of existing open source projects, comparing it favorably to Android in that context. He also notes that Intel contributed “interesting patches” to XFCE, in part to enable the five-second boot times it is currently getting with the recent release of Moblin V2 (alpha).

The enjoyable interview can be found here.

 
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