Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and light on system resources, while still being visually appealing and easy to use.

Xfce embodies the traditional UNIX philosophy of modularity and re-usability. All of Xfce's core components can be build and installed separately. Xfce 4 is based on the GTK+ toolkit version 2.

Adhereance to standards is one of the main design goals of Xfce 4, specifically those defined at Freedesktop.org. This allows Xfce 4 to seamlessly interoperate with programs written for other desktop environments that follow these specifications.

Xfce is all free software. The separate components are released under either the BSD license, the GNU LGPL or the GNU GPL (see the section called “Copyright and Licences” for details).