I Finally Tried XFCE. Now I Understand..

Xfce explained: the Linux desktop that started in 1996 because CDE cost money, became the default on Kali, and still looks like 2010, which is the whole point. Olivier Fourdan was a help-desk analyst who liked CDE but didn't want to pay for it, so in 1996 he built a toolbar with XForms. In 1998 he asked Red Hat to ship Xfce 2, and Red Hat said no because XForms wasn't free software. Xfce 3 came out on GTK in 1999, and in 2007 Red Hat gave Fourdan a job. The FAQ says the name doesn't mean anything. In 2011 Linus Torvalds called GNOME 3 an "unholy mess" and moved to Xfce, and by 2013 he was back on GNOME. After the lore we count the distros that offer it (167 of 354 active ones on DistroWatch), find out why Kali switched in 2019, take the tour, and open the inventory: Thunar is named after Thor, Orage means thunderstorm, and one panel plugin is a pair of eyes "that spy on you". The boss fight starts with the backlog (the oldest open bug is from September 2006) and moves on to Wayland: xfwl4, a new compositor written from scratch in Rust with $40,000 of donations, and a 4.22 release plan where every date is a question mark. We also test whether it's still lightweight. Then the community ("Why XFCE? Because it works" and rices that look like Windows 95 or Mac OS 9), the numbers (9 core developers, 12 active contributors and about 14 million users by the Thunar maintainer's math), and whether you should run it now that Plasma and GNOME are dropping X11. It's a comedy video, but the facts are real, checked against xfce.org, the Xfce docs, wiki and GitLab, DistroWatch and the mailing-list archives in October 2026. Is your Xfce stock or riced? Today's sponsor is Hacker Blueprint: over 400 lessons on Linux, networking and Python that teach hacking from zero, with a Kali terminal next to every lesson. Try it free at https://hackerblueprint.com/yt/rootsh Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:59 The lore: why Red Hat said no 2:24 What Xfce is 2:38 Install speedrun 3:04 Tutorial island 3:24 The inventory: why it's named after Thor 3:57 Boss fight: the backlog, Wayland and RAM 5:47 Sponsor: Hacker Blueprint 6:38 The community 7:00 The numbers 7:34 Should you use it?