Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters, /ɛks ɛf siː iː/) is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

Xfce aims to be fast and lightweight while still visually appealing and easy to use. 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.

Xfce is a highly modular desktop environment, with many software repositories separating its components into multiple packages. The built-in settings app offers options to customize the GTK theme, the system icons, the cursor, and the window manager. Additionally, Xfce provides a fully GUI-based system for modifying the desktop's status bar and system tray.

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which omits many of the visually appealing features (such as animations) present in other desktop environments such as KDE Plasma and GNOME. These omissions allow Xfce to run much more smoothly on low-end personal computers.

Olivier Fourdan started the Xfce project in late 1996 as a Linux version of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), a Unix desktop environment that was initially proprietary and later released as free software.

The name was originally written as XFce, as an abbreviation of XForms Common Environment, which referred to the XForms library. However, Xfce has been transformed and is now based entirely on the Xfce Toolkit (GTK). The name was kept, now with lowercase f, but the abbreviation no longer means anything.

The first Xfce release was in early 1997. However, over time, Xfce diverged from CDE and now stands on its own.

The name Xfce originally stood for “XForms Common Environment”, but since then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn't use the XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as “XFCE” and is no longer an abbreviation for anything (although suggestions have been made, such as “X Freakin' Cool Environment”).