Hello Linux Geeksters. For those who don’t know, XFCE is a lightweight, open-source desktop environment for Linux and Unix systems. It is based on GTK+2, but partial support for GTK+3 has been implemented.
After two year of development, the developers have released XFCE 4.12, coming with the below highlights:
- The window manager gained a new themable Alt+Tab dialog with optional windows preview and a list mode. Initial Client side decoration support was implemented, window tiling mode was improved providing support for corner-tiling, and a new zooming mode was added. A HiDPI Xfwm theme was also added.
- The panel can now intelligently hide itself, supports Gtk3 plugins, and saw lots of its third-party plugins updated to take full advantage of the features added in 4.10.
- The desktop has a new wallpaper settings dialog, per workspace wallpaper support, and better multi-monitor handling. It also supports displaying folder coverart and emblems on icons now.
- Our session manager was updated to use logind and/or upower if available for hibernate/suspend support. For portability and to respect our users’ choices, fallback modes were implemented relying on os-specific backends.
- Support for multi-monitor use was improved in a new display settings dialog and a quick setup popup on monitor plugging
- The appearance dialog now showcases previews for icons and themes.
- Xfsettingsd now supports libinput.
- Power management was not forgotten: A new panel plugin was created, logind/upower support was added to handle battery/lid/brightness events, and locking via light-locker was implemented. The settings dialog was also revamped, and support for X11 screenblanking was added.
- Our file manager, the beloved Thunar, saw an insane amount of improvements: tab support, tons of bug fixes, speed-ups, key shortcuts for custom actions, better naming of file copies and links, nice freespace bar in properties, tweaks for the renamer and other dialogs, improved keyboard navigation, fixes for the treeview pane, better wallpaper support, Gtk3 bookmarks support, multiple file properties..
- To prepare the future of Xfce with Gtk3, which no longer requires theme engines, we are stopping the development of our Gtk theme engine,and dropping our Gtk3 engine – theme makers, please update your themes to CSS if you want them to work on the next Xfce version.
- Due to gstreamer1.0 having dropped the mixer-interface entirely, and xfce4-mixer and xfce4-volumed relying on this interface with gstreamer0.10, our mixer application and volume daemon cannot be ported to 1.0 and are consequently not maintained anymore.
Also worth mentioning, XFCE 4.12 brings the below new wallpapers, which is used by default on the desktop:
In this article I will show you how to install XFCE 4.12 on Xubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Xubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Arch Linux, Manjaro and derivative systems, using XFCE.
For Xubuntu 14.10, Xubuntu 14.04 and derivative systems, XFCE 4.12 is available via two PPAs, so all you have to do is add the needed PPAs to your system, update the local repo index and perform a system upgrade:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/extras
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
For Arch Linux, Manjaro and derivative systems, XFCE 4.12 has been added to the default repositories, so all you need to do is run the system upgrade command, with pacman:
$ sudo pacman -Syu