Xfce
open-source desktop environment for Linux and BSD
Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters, ) is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Xfce aims to be fast and lightweight while still visually appealing and easy to use. The desktop environment is designed to embody the traditional Unix philosophy of modularity and re-usability, as well as adherence to standards; specifically, those defined at freedesktop.org.
Features
User experience
Xfce is a highly modular desktop environment, with many software repositories separating its components into multiple packages. The built-in settings app offers options to customize the GTK theme, the system icons, the cursor, the window manager and more. Additionally, Xfce provides a fully GUI-based system for modifying the desktop's status bar and system tray.
Performance
Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which omits many of the visually 'appealing' features (such as animations) present in other desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and GNOME. These omissions allow Xfce to run much more smoothly on low-end personal computers.
History
Olivier Fourdan started the Xfce project in late 1996 as a Linux version of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), a Unix desktop environment that was initially proprietary and later released as free software.
The name was originally written as XFce, as an abbreviation of XForms Common Environment, which referred to the XForms library. However, Xfce has been transformed and is now based entirely on the GTK toolkit.
The public source identifies “Xfce” as open-source desktop environment for Linux and BSD. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Xfce, open-source and desktop.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q170821. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Xfce” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.