The desktop environment is designed to embody the traditional Unix philosophy of modularity and re-usability, as well as adherence to standards; specifically, those defined at freedesktop.org.

[5] Xfce is a highly modular desktop environment,[6] with many software repositories separating its components into multiple packages.

[7] The built-in settings app offers options to customize the GTK theme, the system icons, the cursor, and the window manager.

The Slackware Linux distribution has nicknamed Xfce the "Cholesterol Free Desktop Environment", a loose interpretation of the initialism.

"[16] In the SuperTuxKart game, in which various open source mascots race against each other, the mouse is said to be a female named "Xue".

He requested the project be included in Red Hat Linux, but it was refused due to its XForms basis.

Red Hat accepted only open-source software released under a GPL- or BSD-compatible license, whereas, at the time, XForms was closed-source and free only for personal use.

[19] In March 1999, Fourdan began a complete rewrite of the project based on GTK, a non-proprietary toolkit then rising in popularity.

[21] Changes in 4.2.0, released 16 January 2005, included a compositing manager for Xfwm which added built-in support for transparency and drop shadows, as well as a new default SVG icon set.

A new web application was employed to make release management easier, and a dedicated Transifex server was set up for Xfce translators.

[27] The project's server and mirroring infrastructure was also upgraded, partly to cope with anticipated demand following the release announcement for 4.8.

[citation needed] Xfce 4.10, released 28 April 2012, introduced a vertical display mode for the panel and moved much of the documentation to an online wiki.

[28] Xfce 4.12 was released on 28 February 2015,[29] two years and ten months later, contrary to mass Internet speculation about the project being "dead".

[31] Xfce 4.13 is the development release during the transition of porting components to be fully GTK3-compatible, including xfce-panel[32] and xfce-settings.

[37] Some notable changes in this release include new icons with a more consistent color palette; improved interfaces for changing system settings; various panel improvements like animations for hiding, a new notification plugin with support for both legacy SysTray and modern StatusNotifier items, and better support for dark themes; and more information included in the About dialog.

[40] Many aspects of the panel and its plug-ins can be configured easily through graphical dialogs, but also by GTK style properties and hidden Xfconf settings.

It resembles GNOME's Nautilus, and is designed for speed and a low memory footprint,[48] as well as being highly customizable through plugins.

Orage has alarms and uses the iCalendar format, making it compatible with many other calendar applications, e.g. vdirsyncer to sync via CalDAV.

It does offer tabbed files, syntax highlighting, parentheses matching and indentation features commonly found in software editors.

It originated as a fork of Leafpad,[56] was developed by Erik Harrison and Nick Schermer, but has since been rewritten from scratch.

[60] It is similar to GNOME Videos, but it has some advantages and disadvantages compared to it: An image viewer (supporting slideshow mode).

Debian makes a separate netinstall CD available that installs Xfce as the default desktop environment.