Xfce Wiki

Sub domains
 

This is an old revision of the document!

WIP

Today, after 4 years and XX months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.

Why so much time ? because why not :) The long development of this release (Honestly: Porting from one version of a toolkit to a new - moving target - one is a partly boring, partly painful process that not many developers are ready to endure.)

In the 4.14 cycle we mainly focused on migrating from Gtk2 to Gtk3 and - correspondingly - from D-Bus GLib to GDBus. Along the way we ended up polishing our user experience, introducing some new features (read below) and updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies.

We can base our notes on bluesabre / ochosi / andre blogs:

Main highlights

The main highlights of this release are:

  • Settings
    • Clipboard manager is now able to handle large chunks of data
    • Color Profiles (colord frontend)
    • Display Profiles, for saving/auto-restore display configurations
    • HiDPI Support: GTK3 window scaling (1x or 2x)
    • HiDPI Support: XRandR display scaling (configured via Xfconf)
    • Improved multi-monitor support
    • Primary display indicator (shows configuration status of panel, desktop, and xfce4-notifyd)
  • Thunar
    • A completely revised pathbar
    • New preference to open new Thunar instances as tabs
    • New preference to show permanent delete optionally
    • New Thunarx-3 API (with GObject-Introspection support)
    • Numerous crashes fixed, making Thunar substantially more stable
    • Support for large thumbnails
    • Support for org.freedesktop.FileManager1 (DBUS)
  • Exo
    • Improved consistency of application preference dialogs
    • New helpers (Brave Browser, Geary, Google Chrome, PCManFM-Qt, Terminator)
    • Performance improvements with the icon browser
  • Xfwm4
    • HiDPI support
    • Improved GLX support with NVIDIA proprietary/closed source drivers
    • New default theme
    • Support for VSYNC using either Present or OpenGL
    • Support for XI2
    • Various compositor updates in Xfwm4
  • desktop
    • Sync user's wallpaper selection to AccountsService
    • Added orientation option for icon arrangement on desktop
  • tumbler: Added check to avoid sparse files, that cause high cpu and memory load.
  • panel
    • improved window grouping in tasklist plugin (better UX, visual group indicator etc)
    • per-panel “icon-size” setting
    • systray: Allow ordering of items (Bug #11929)
    • clock: new default format, format evaluator
    • new default panel layout, including more plugins by default (statusnotifier, xfpm, xfce4-notifyd) and features (intelligent hiding, tasklist grouping)
  • session
    • Startup priority groups in FailSafe session (avoiding race conditions during startup)
    • Optionally run commands on logout, suspend etc. (Bug #10172)
    • Hybrid sleep in session
    • UX improvements for session saving
    • UX improvements to the session chooser
    • Dropped splash screens from xfce4-session (not really a highlight, but worth mentioning)
  • appfinder: Small but sensible UX improvements
  • general
    • gobject introspection support for most of the components
    • Gtk2 support is still enabled in e.g. libxfce4ui because some major applications (e.g. ristretto) haven't been ported yet.

List of notable plugins/apps updates

Xfce wouldn't be what it is right now without all its goodies. In this area, we also saw a flurry of activity, most notably: Port to gtk3 of almost all apps/plugins

  • screenshooter
    • Revamped imgur dialog
    • Allow user to move selection rectangle
    • Show width and height of selection area
    • Command line options more flexible
  • terminal:
  • weather:
  • clipman:
  • ristretto:
  • volman with bluray
  • pulse audio plugin with mpris support
  • parole 1.0
  • notifyd: notification log, new panel plugin, do-not-disturb mode, blocking of notifications per application, support for primary displays, new animation (slideout)

List of new projects

  • screensaver: port of mate-screensaver
  • statusnotifier
  • xfce4-panel-profiles: migrated from Launchpad to git.xfce and renamed from xfpanel-switch
  • catfish: migrated from Launchpad to git.xfce
  • …

Deprecated projects

You'll notice we also moved a lot of things to the “attic” (read: the archive on git.xfce.org), because they were either not maintained anymore or dropped intentionally.

  • gtk-xfce-engine - so no more “official Xfce themes”. While we rely on and test everything with Adwaita (as it comes with the Gtk toolkit now) our current reference theme is Greybird, also seen in our documentation screenshots.
  • thunar-actions-plugin
  • xfce4-windowlist-plugin
  • xfce4-wmdock-plugin
  • xfce4-taskbar-plugin
  • Xfce4-wmdock-plugin
  • xfce4-kbdleds-plugin
  • xfswitch-plugin
  • xfbib
  • garcon-vala
  • pyxfce
  • xfc
  • xfce4-mm

Besides plugins and binding related projects, orage and squeeze were not ported and they didn't receive any update since 2015 and 2014 respectively. (Should we archive them?)

Known issues: