Xfce 4.14 Maintenance and 4.15 Updates
Xfce 4.14 Maintenance
As promised we’re trying to be much better at doing maintenance releases for Xfce 4.14. In part, we had a hard time doing maintenance for Xfce 4.12 because with all the porting work it was hard to focus on fixing Gtk+2 bugs and many bugreports/fixes didn’t apply to both 4.12 and 4.14.
This has now changed and as many bugs apply to both Xfce 4.14 and the current 4.15 development versions we can much more easily backport fixes. Consequently we have already done quite a few maintenance releases so far and this week a few more followed, fixing bugs and featuring improved translations:
- xfce4-panel 4.14.3 (4.14.2 had a bad release build)
- xfce4-session 4.14.1
- xfce4-settings 4.14.2
- xfdesktop 4.14.2
Xfce 4.15 Updates
One of the major UI changes that we announced for the 4.16 cycle was the switch to GtkHeaderBars or so-called Client-side decorations (CSD). The first big step in this direction has now happened in libxfce4ui, our main user interface library. With the change, almost all dialogs will be converted to using CSD by default without any code changes in existing projects.
There are quite a few advantages we’re looking forward to (improved resize areas, consistent theming etc) by making use of this core Gtk feature.
A few more features that got released (in the xfce4-panel 4.15.1, libxfce4ui 4.15.1, libxfce4util 4.15.0 and xfce4-settings 4.15.0):
- an improved “About Xfce” dialog that features basics of the system properties
- improvements to the “Display” dialog (show Aspect Ratio, show Preferred Mode)
- only show Gtk themes that support Gtk3 in the “Appearance” dialog
- function for improved application icon lookup (used in Xfce Session’s settings dialog and in the Xfce Panel’s systray settings for now)
- the panel’ dark mode got enabled by default (which means it will look nicer with Adwaita e.g. on Fedora by default)
- the Directory Menu plugin now allows you to directly create Folders and Files
- we also bumped the overall Xfce version to 4.15 so people testing 4.15 packages should see the right version in e.g. the “About Xfce” dialog.
Enjoy! 
(and don’t forget to write bug reports 
)
Some Screenshots
Technical background: XfceTitledDialog with CSD
(This subsection is targeted at developers.)
Some components (namely Thunar, Thunar volman, xfce4-panel, xfce4-settings, xfburn and xfce4-mixer) inherit the XfceTitledDialogClass explicitly when creating their dialog object have to be fixed by using the new API introduced in the upcoming release libxfce4ui-4.15.1.
All other dialogs should work out of the box and not require any additional meddling.
- xfce_titled_dialog_create_action_area (to initialize the custom action area)
- xfce_titled_dialog_add_button (as an equivalent to gtk_dialog_add_button)
- xfce_titled_dialog_add_action_widget (as an equivalent to gtk_dialog_add_action_widget)
- xfce_titled_dialog_set_default_response (as an equivalent to gtk_dialog_set_default_response)
The point of the new API is packing the dialog’s action buttons in the action area at the bottom of the dialog (vs. the standard GtkDialog behavior of packing them in the GtkHeaderBar as part of the window decorations). This means that dialogs remain in their previous/traditional layout with minimal effort on the developer’s/maintainer’s side, in part because the parameters were kept the same as in their upstream GtkDialog counterparts.
Here is a (very simple) example commit of how to port existing dialogs that use XfceTitledDialogClass:
https://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-panel/commit/?id=35440ee2d9540a3c1afdcbff5f50dc0ee2f83d9b
Catfish 1.4.12 Released
Welcome to 2020! Let's ring in the new year with a brand new Catfish release.
What's New
Wayland Support
Catfish 1.4.12 adds support for running on Wayland. Before now, there were some X-specific dependencies related to handling display sizes. These have now been resolved, and Catfish should run smoothly and consistently everywhere.
Catfish 1.4.12 on Wayland on Ubuntu 19.10
Dialog Improvements
All dialogs now utilize client-side decorations (CSD) and are modal. The main window will continue to respect the window layout setting introduced in the 1.4.10 release.
I also applied a number of fixes to the new Preferences and Search Index dialogs, so they should behave more consistently and work well with keyboard navigation.
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
Release Process Updates
I've improved the release process to make it easier for maintainers and to ensure builds are free of temporary files. This helps ensure a faster delivery to package maintainers, and therefore to distributions.
Translation Updates
Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish
Downloads
$ md5sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2 9aad6a0bc695ec8793d4294880974cb2 $ sha1sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2 4e78e291a2f17c85122a85049bdc837b49afdd66 $ sha256sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2 c3fb30e02b217752aa493b49769be1a5fc2adde70b22aef381e6c67d5227134a
Catfish 1.4.12 will be included in Xubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa", available in April.
Catfish 1.4.12 Released
Welcome to 2020! Let's ring in the new year with a brand new Catfish release.
What's New
Wayland Support
Catfish 1.4.12 adds support for running on Wayland. Before now, there were some X-specific dependencies related to handling display sizes. These have now been resolved, and Catfish should run smoothly and consistently everywhere.
Dialog Improvements
All dialogs now utilize client-side decorations (CSD) and are modal. The main window will continue to respect the window layout setting introduced in the 1.4.10 release.
I also applied a number of fixes to the new Preferences and Search Index dialogs, so they should behave more consistently and work well with keyboard navigation.
Release Process Updates
I've improved the release process to make it easier for maintainers and to ensure builds are free of temporary files. This helps ensure a faster delivery to package maintainers, and therefore to distributions.
Translation Updates
Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish
Downloads
$ md5sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
9aad6a0bc695ec8793d4294880974cb2
$ sha1sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
4e78e291a2f17c85122a85049bdc837b49afdd66
$ sha256sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
c3fb30e02b217752aa493b49769be1a5fc2adde70b22aef381e6c67d5227134aCatfish 1.4.12 will be included in Xubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa", available in April.
Catfish 1.4.12 Released
Welcome to 2020! Let's ring in the new year with a brand new Catfish release.
What's New
Wayland Support
Catfish 1.4.12 adds support for running on Wayland. Before now, there were some X-specific dependencies related to handling display sizes. These have now been resolved, and Catfish should run smoothly and consistently everywhere.
Dialog Improvements
All dialogs now utilize client-side decorations (CSD) and are modal. The main window will continue to respect the window layout setting introduced in the 1.4.10 release.
I also applied a number of fixes to the new Preferences and Search Index dialogs, so they should behave more consistently and work well with keyboard navigation.
Release Process Updates
I've improved the release process to make it easier for maintainers and to ensure builds are free of temporary files. This helps ensure a faster delivery to package maintainers, and therefore to distributions.
Translation Updates
Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian Bokmål, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish
Downloads
$ md5sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
9aad6a0bc695ec8793d4294880974cb2
$ sha1sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
4e78e291a2f17c85122a85049bdc837b49afdd66
$ sha256sum catfish-1.4.12.tar.bz2
c3fb30e02b217752aa493b49769be1a5fc2adde70b22aef381e6c67d5227134aCatfish 1.4.12 will be included in Xubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa", available in April.