Olivier Fourdan is the primary developer behind XFCE, which has
been referred to as “the third desktop environment.” It cleaves
closely to CDE in terms of interface, and it’s designed to work
well with GNOME/GTk+. In this interview, we get a little insight
into Olivier’s work with GNOME interoperability and whether XFCE is
“just a CDE clone.”
From the interview: “Q:5. Is XFce the first X
desktop modified specifically to support Nautilus?”
“A: Not, far from it. Layers have been
available in many window managers for a while, but until now, I did
not see the need for layers in xfwm. Very few applications make use
of WM layers, and most can live without.”
“I’m pretty sure that Nautilus will make it on the Linux
desktop, so Xfce and especially xfwm, had to be compatible with
Nautilus to stay in the run. That’s why I started working on the
functionality and released Xfce 3.8 (which is actually much more
than just this new feature)”