Evolution, not revolution, to match users’ needs: That is what’s behind the process the Xfce team uses in developing their desktop environment. So, despite what some consider a long time between releases, Xfce released version 4.12 last week, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.10.
According to their website, among the highlights of this release are: Improved multi-monitor use, improved power management, BluRay disk burning support and a new GNOME-shell like dashboard named xfdashboard. A full list can be found here.
“A warm thank you all the contributors, translators and packagers for your efforts in making this release possible,” the Xfce development team stated in a release on the Xfce site. “We would also like to thank our fantastic users and occasional contributors who submitted bug reports, helped us find issues and sometimes provided patches. We are currently reviewing all patches sent to us and will include many more fixes to Xfce in the next release. We would also like to thank the many people who donated money to our project via Bounty Source. This will help us meet and hack on Xfce in the future.”
One of the things that bear special mention is improvements to Thunar — “an insane amount of improvements,” according to the Xfce development team — which includes tab support, key shortcuts for custom actions, better naming of file copies and links, fixes for the renamer and other dialogs, improved keyboard navigation, among a host of others.
Another thing that deserves mention is xfdashboard. Some may like it and some may not. Using it makes your desktop look like GNOME, which may be appealing to some, but for those of us who use Xfce because it stands apart from the direction desktops like GNOME and Unity are taking, it might take a little getting used to. I tried it while it was included on the Korora 21 Xfce beta (since removed before Korora 21 Xfce was released) and I wasn’t crazy about it. But your mileage may vary.
The update is available at the Xfce site, or for those who are already Xfce users, your particular Xfce distro will provide the update along with its regular slate of updates.
Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
