Xfce 4.10 is the latest release of the excellent Xfce desktop, full of useful incremental improvements and no shocking surprises.
Workflow and efficiency are everything. I want my Linux graphical environment to be the way I like it, and not an obese system hog. I have a lot of favorite Linux desktop environments (Fluxbox, KDE4, Ratpoison, E17, Razor-qt) and Xfce is always near the top.
My Xfce 4.10 desktop on Linux Mint 13.
Xfce 4.10 was released on April 28, and Linux Mint 13 Xfce was released on July 21 with Xfce 4.10. After beating up Linux Mint 13 Xfce for a few weeks my executive summary is Xfce 4.10 is Pretty Darn Good, and a worthwhile upgrade from 4.8. There isn’t anything radically new, but more of a nice bit of polish and finishing touches.
To me XFCE is a useful blend of the best of GNOME 2 and KDE: It’s fairly easy to configure, it uses middle- and right-click menus and it handles GNOME and KDE applications without freaking out. Some Linux users prefer pure environments and have only pure GNOME, or pure KDE, or whatever their favorite is. Not me — I want it all. I install whatever apps I jolly well feel like installing, and mix software repositories: different distros, official and unofficial, third party and different versions. It’s a testament to how good Linux package management has become that I can do all this crazy stuff, and suffer dependency conflicts only once in a great while.