Development of Xfce 4.16 has begun

The developers of the Xfce desktop announced have completed the planning phase and dependency freeze, moving the project to the development stage of the new branch 4.16. The development is planned to be completed in the middle of next year, after which three preview releases will remain before the final release.

Notable upcoming changes include the discontinuation of optional support for GTK2 and the implementation of upgrades to the user interface. While the developers tried to port the environment from GTK2 to GTK3 without interface changes during the preparation of version 4.14, in Xfce 4.16 work will begin on optimizing the appearance of panels. Client-side decorations (CSD) will be supported, where the title and window borders are drawn by the application itself instead of the window manager. CSD is planned to be used to implement a multifunctional title and hidden borders in dialogs related to settings changes.

Some icons, such as the close window icon, will be replaced with symbolic versions that look more appropriate when a dark theme is selected. The context menu of the plugin for application launch shortcuts will add support for displaying the ‘Desktop Actions’ section, allowing specific application handlers to be launched, such as opening an additional Firefox window.

The library libgtop will be added to the dependencies, which will be used to display system information in the About dialog. No drastic changes are expected in the Thunar file manager’s interface, but many minor improvements are planned to simplify file handling. For example, the ability to save sorting mode settings tied to specific directories will be introduced.

The configurator will include the ability for scalable mirrored output of information on multiple monitors with different resolutions. A dedicated background process is planned for managing color reproduction through colord, eliminating the need to run xiccd. The power management manager is expected to introduce a night light mode and a visual interface for monitoring battery discharge dynamics.

Source: opennet.ru