Development of Xfce 4.16 has begun

Xfce desktop developers announced the on the completion of the phases of planning and freezing of dependencies, and the transfer of the project to the stage of developing a new branch 4.16. Development is planned be completed in the middle of next year, after which there will be three preliminary releases before the final release.

Of the upcoming changes, the termination of optional support for GTK2 and the implementation of modernization user interface. If, when preparing version 4.14, the developers tried to port the environment from GTK2 to GTK3 without changing the interface, then in Xfce 4.16 work will begin on optimizing the appearance of the panels. There will be support for client-side window decorations (CSD, client-side decorations), in which the window title and borders are drawn not by the window manager, but by the application itself. CSD is planned to be used to implement a multifunctional header and hidden frames in dialogs related to changing settings.

Some icons, such as closing a window, will be replaced with symbolic options that look more correct when the dark theme is selected. Support for displaying a "Desktop Actions" section will be added to the context menu of the plugin with implementations of shortcuts for launching applications, allowing you to launch application-specific handlers, such as opening an additional Firefox window.

The libgtop library will be added to the list of dependencies, which will be used to display information about the system in the About dialog. The Thunar file manager does not expect major interface changes, but it is planned to add many small improvements that make it easier to work with files. For example, it will be possible to save sorting mode settings in relation to individual directories.

The possibility of scalable mirroring of information on multiple monitors with different resolutions will be added to the configurator. To manage color rendering, it is planned to prepare its own background process to interact with colord, without the need to run xiccd. The power management manager is expected to introduce a night light mode and implement a visual interface for monitoring the dynamics of battery discharge.

Source: opennet.ru