After over four years of development desktop environment release , aimed at providing a classic desktop that requires minimal system resources for its operation. Xfce consists of a number of interrelated components that can be used in other projects if desired. These components include a window manager, application launcher, display manager, user session management and power management, Thunar file manager, Midori web browser, Parole media player, mousepad text editor, and environment settings system.
All :
- Transition from GTK 2 to GTK 3 library;
- The xfwm4 composite manager has added vsync via OpenGL, libepoxy and DRI3/Present support has appeared, GLX is used instead of Xrender. Improved processing of synchronization with vertical blanking pulse () to provide protection against tearing in the output. The new scaling capabilities from GTK3 are used to improve performance on high pixel density (HiDPI) screens. Improved GLX support when using proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Added support for XInput2 input system. A new theme has been introduced;
- New backend added to xfce4-settings configurator to set the correct color reproduction using color profiles. The backend allows out of the box to provide color management support for printing and scanning, to apply monitor color profiles, you need to install an additional service, such as xiccd;
- Improved screen customization tools. Added indents for more convenient perception of information in all dialogs.
- The ability to define monitor profiles has been added, which allows you to save several sets of presets and automatically change profiles when connecting or disconnecting additional displays. Fixed flickering when changing screen settings.
- Added the ability to define the primary monitor on which panels, desktop and notifications will be displayed. This feature can be useful in multi-monitor configurations for linking panels to a specific monitor or for hiding unnecessary information when organizing presentations.
- Added an option to enable window scaling and the ability to select a monospaced font (monospace) to the dialog for setting the appearance. Theme preview support has been dropped (couldn't achieve the desired result with GTK3);
- Redesigned notification indicator. Added a button to clear the notification log, moved the do not disturb switch up.
- A plugin has been added that displays a block of application indicators on the panel that determines their status. The plugin can be used as an alternative to the system tray and replaces the Ubuntu-based xfce4-indicator-plugin for most indicators;
- The panel has adjusted the use of transparent and translucent background images. Added support for GObject introspection, which allows you to create plugins for the panel in various programming languages ββ(for example, Python). Added the ability to embed a settings dialog in xfce4-settings-manager. Added support for customizing the size of icons common to the panel and all hosted plugins. Settings have also been added to the configurator for automatically calculating the size of icons depending on the width of the panel and linking the size of icons to different panel instances.
Improved window grouping tools - grouped window buttons now handle states such as window activity, window minimization, and presence of important information. A new indicator of grouped windows has been implemented and the general layout of elements has been updated.
New CSS-style classes are introduced for use when creating skins, for example, a separate button class is added for operations with groups of windows and specific settings for vertical and horizontal placement of the panel. Symbolic icons are used in plug-ins for the panel and in applications. Replaced obsolete widgets;
- The main structure includes the Panel Profiles utility, which allows you to create, save and load profiles for the layout of elements on the panel;
- The xfce4-session session manager provides support for launching applications based on priority groups, allowing you to define a dependency chain at startup. Previously, applications started all at once, which created problems due to race conditions (theme disappearing in xfce4-panel, running multiple instances of the nm-applet applet, etc.). Now applications are launched with division into groups. Stopped splash screen at startup.
Improvements have been made to the login and logout management interface. In addition to the previously available autorun, support has been added for executing custom handlers (arbitrary commands) when exiting, hibernating or restarting. Provided session management of GTK applications via DBus. Implemented support for hybrid sleep mode. Improved session selection interface and related settings;
- Improved power management interface (xfce4-power-manager). Improved support for desktop systems that no longer display the battery out of battery warning. Added filtering of power-related events passed to xfce4-notifyd for reflection in the log (for example, brightness change events are not passed). Added the ability to call the power management interface when pressing the XF86Battery button.
Added options for displaying remaining battery life and charge percentage in the panel plugin; - Updated the Gigolo GUI application for configuring network storage sharing using GIO/GVfs. The program allows you to quickly mount a remote file system and manage bookmarks to external storage in the file manager;
- The Parole media player, which uses the GStreamer framework and the GTK+ library, has been stabilized. The composition includes plugins for minimizing to the system tray, manipulating stream metadata, setting your window title and blocking the transition to sleep while watching a video. Significantly simplified work on systems that do not support hardware-accelerated video decoding. The mode of automatic selection of the most optimal video output mechanism has been added and enabled by default. Implemented a compact version of the interface. Improved support for streaming and playback of files from external systems;
- The Thunar file manager has been updated, in which the file path display panel has been completely redesigned. Buttons have been added to the panel for switching to previously opened and next paths, switching to the home directory and the parent directory. An icon appeared on the right side of the panel, clicking on which opens a dialog for editing a line with a file path. Added support for handling "folder.jpg" icons, through which alternatives to the default folder icons can be defined. Bluray support has been added to the volume control interface.
The screenshot below shows the old and new panel options for comparison:Updated the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx), which provides support for GObject introspection and the use of bindings in various programming languages. Provided display of file size in bytes. Now it is possible to assign handlers to perform user-defined actions. Implemented the ability to use Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for external network resources. Optimization of style and interface has been carried out;
- Support for the Fujifilm RAF format has been added to the thumbnail display service (tumbler);
- The Ristretto image viewer interface has been modernized and ported to GTK3. Added a button to use an image as desktop wallpaper;
- Implemented an option to launch the application search interface in a separate window and simplified navigation through search results using the keyboard. The main structure includes an interface for searching files ;
- Added own (xfce4-screensaver), which provides seamless integration with Xfce. Disabling the transition to sleep mode and turning off the screen during video playback (including when watching YouTube in Chromium);
- The option to add the next background image (Add Next Background) appeared on the desktop and synchronization of wallpaper selection was provided through AccountsService. Improved interactivity of interaction with the desktop and support for customization through themes. Added support for selecting orientation when placing icons;
- The screenshot utility now has the ability to move the selected area and display the height and width values. Changed image upload dialog via imgur service;
- Support for the MPRIS2 protocol has been added to the panel audio control plugin using PuplseAudio for remote control of playback in multimedia players. The ability to use multimedia keys on the entire desktop is provided (through the launch of an additional xfce4-volumed-pulse background process);
- Support for GObject introspection and the Vala language has been added to the configuration management backend (xfconf) and some other Xfce components;
- Instead of dbus-glib, a library is used for messaging on the D-Bus bus and a transport layer based on GIO. The use of GDbus allowed us to solve problems with use in multi-threaded applications;
- Removed support for deprecated or unmaintained components: garcon-vala, gtk-xfce-engine, pyxfce, thunar-actions-plugin, xfbib, xfc, xfce4-kbdleds-plugin, xfce4-mm, xfce4-taskbar-plugin, xfce4-windowlist -plugin, xfce4-wmdock-plugin and xfswitch-plugin.
Source: opennet.ru