Xfce 4.16pre2 released!

We are pleased to announce the second pre-release of Xfce 4.16 (a.k.a. xfce4.16pre2), moving us closer to the final release. As you all may have noticed, we are again a bit behind the schedule, but nothing like the 4+ years it took from 4.12 to 4.14, so please hold your excitement a tad longer while we are polishing the rough edges. For now, help yourself with the latest batch of changes:

Notable Changes

General

• More new app icons with rDNS naming scheme
• Bugfixes and minor improvements in all components
• Translation updates

Settings

• Disable UPower support by default
• Improve UX of settings dialogs (inline toolbar labels etc)
• Default Applications: Add ‘Open with…’ button to settings dialog

Libxfce4ui

• Revamped About Xfce tab
• Improve UI for setting shortcuts
• New API to launch “daemonized” processes

Panel

• Icon and appearance improvements

Power Manager

• More accurate status icons (Fixes #95) – 10 percent steps instead of “low, good, full”
• Respect the notification daemon’s timeouts (Fixes #57)

Session

• Tweak settings dialog (making columns sortable etc)
• Add xfsm-lock icon

Thunar

• Add support for transparency in gtk themes

Tumbler

• New thumbnailer plugin for epub files

Where can you get it?

Similary to pre1, you can either manually compile the tarballs or use xfce-test (ubuntu_20.04-xfce-4.16pre2 tag should be available at any moment) to enjoy a safe preview of Xfce 4.16. See the previous post for more options.

What’s next?

Finally, we will decide based on the feedback we get on pre2 whether to do a third pre-release or to go straight for the Xfce 4.16 stable release towards the end of the year. If no showstoppers are found we will try to release 4.16 still in 2020.