After two years of development, the release of the Xfce 4.20 desktop environment has been presented, offering a classic desktop that consumes minimal system resources when possible. Xfce consists of several interrelated components that can be used in other projects if desired. Among these components are the window manager xfwm4, application launcher panel, user session management, power management system, graphical configurator, file manager Thunar, calendar-planner Orage, media player Parole, text editor Mousepad, and terminal emulator xfce4-terminal.
The key innovation in the Xfce 4.20 branch is the experimental support for the Wayland protocol. The Wayland-based session covers most capabilities but is currently recommended only for advanced users, as it is not completely free of bugs and requires specific adjustments for full everyday use by regular users. To start a Wayland-based session, the command 'startxfce4 --wayland' is suggested.
To abstract operations over Wayland and X11 in Xfce 4.20, a new library, libxfce4windowing, has been implemented. This library provides a graphics system-independent layer with window management components (screens, root windows, virtual desktops, etc.). This proposed layer allows for Wayland support in almost all Xfce components while maintaining their ability to operate in window systems based on the X11 protocol.
Instead of libmutter, the library wlroots, developed by the Sway project, is used in the Wayland session. As composite servers In the Wayland session, it is recommended to use Labwc or Wayfire. The window manager xfwm4 continues to be used in the X11-based session. In the future, xfwm4 plans to add support not only for X11 but also for Wayland.
Among the features currently unavailable in the Wayland session are: lack of support virtual desktops; the unpreparedness of the keyboard and mouse settings pages in the configurator; the ability to create screenshots only of the entire screen (not of individual windows); the absence of icons for some applications in the system tray, which were not migrated from API GtkStatusIcon to StatusNotifier. The following components remain unported on Wayland: Xfwm4, Xfdashboard, Xfce4-screensaver (there is a port, but it did not make it into the release), Xfce4-windowck-plugin, and Xfce4-xkb-plugin.
Other changes and improvements in Xfce 4.20:
- The capabilities of the Thunar file manager have been significantly expanded:
- New buttons have been added to the toolbar: toggle view mode (compact, list, grid of icons); vertical hamburger menu (shown when the main menu is hidden); create a new tab with the contents of the current directory; create a new window with the contents of the current directory.
- When reducing the window size, the non-fitting elements of the tool panel are now moved to a special menu »
Source: opennet.ru
- New buttons have been added to the toolbar: toggle view mode (compact, list, grid of icons); vertical hamburger menu (shown when the main menu is hidden); create a new tab with the contents of the current directory; create a new window with the contents of the current directory.
