Day: February 9, 2025

I am oddly very proud that I use the XFCE 4 desktop environment on my computer. I love it, so old fashioned but fast.

It has not changed much since 2003, and even back then it was released as a throw back to the late 1990s for those who wanted a fast window manager and hated the gloss and new ways of doing things of Mac OS X, Windows 2003, and most notably GNOME 3. I just remember to 2003, how awful I thought GNOME 3 was and how refreshing of a throw back XFCE was. 

Maybe that’s the great things about Linux in general. You don’t have to change as old reliable programs keep working with small features added over time but generally keep running the way they’ve always run.

AWK is the classic example – it’s turning 50 next year – a half century old – but it keeps working as it always has and still gets small useful new features like adding native CSV parsing. While Python can do much of what AWK does, nothing beats AWK for simple data processing.