"Under the hood there's much that makes Linux safer,
more efficient and secure than rival systems, but for most new
users it's what they can see on-screen that counts. SlashGear
caught up with Xfce creator Olivier Fourdan, whose desktop
environment has not only been selected by Intel for Moblin but can
be found on many existing Linux netbooks, and talked Intel, Moblin,
the future for netbooks and what challenges he sees for open-source
newcomer Android.
"Xfce is what you'd call a desktop environment, it includes not
only the usual applications you would expect from a desktop, ie a
window manager, a panel, a file manager, etc. but also an
infrastructure such as a settings mechanism now based on DBUS and
all the development libraries that help to write applications.
"Like GNOME, Xfce is based on the gtk+ toolkit but it does not
use gconf nor other gnome libs, except libwnck (that now replaces
the equivalent library that we had in Xfce up to 4.4) or gstreamer
(for the volume control applet)."