[ Thanks to mhead for this link. ]
“While Weber makes the coupling of Xfce and Darwin sound simple
and fun, the pairing also makes sense in his mind for a number of
reasons. He began by describing the desktop environment’s
capabilities: ‘Xfce is collection of utilities together with a
window manger (xfwm),’ he explained. ‘It offers a background
application to choose different background patterns and a launcher
panel (Xfce itself), file windows that allow drag and drop for
coping, and control panels for mouse, sound (audio is not working
yet), and fonts.'”
“Weber ported Xfce to Darwin when other desktop environments
proved less desirable. ‘Some people, including me, have tried to
port GNOME or KDE to Darwin. I am still working on the GNOME port,
but I got stuck at the GNOME-libs [libraries],’ he explained. ‘The
major advantage of Xfce is its size. It is very small. The entire
source code is only 2.5 MB (zipped). It needs a lot of the GNOME
libraries to run, like glib and gtk+, but these things are
available for users as binary downloads.'”
“Weber is also the first to admit that the match isn’t perfect.
‘Some things don’t work at all yet, like the audio support,’ he
said. ‘This is because of the different hardware driver model
between Darwin and Linux. The GNOME audio support has to be adapted
to the Darwin IO-kit [input-output-kit] first.'”