Xfce Screensaver 0.1.0 Released
Xfce Screensaver is a screen saver and locker that aims to have simple, sane, secure defaults and be well integrated with the Xfce desktop.
It is a port of MATE Screensaver, itself a port of GNOME Screensaver. It has been tightly integrated with the Xfce desktop, utilizing Xfce libraries and the Xfconf configuration backend.
Features
- Integration with the Xfce Desktop per-monitor wallpaper
- Locking down of configuration settings via Xfconf
- DBUS interface to limited screensaver interaction
- Full translation support into many languages
- Shared styles with LightDM GTK+ Greeter
- Support for XScreensaver screensavers
- User switching
Requirements
- DBus >= 0.30
- GLib >= 2.50.0
- GTK+ >= 3.22.0
- X11 >= 1.0
- garcon >= 0.5.0
- libxklavier >= 5.2
- libxfce4ui >= 4.12.1
- libxfce4util >= 4.12.1
- Xfconf >= 4.12.1
Screenshots
Downloads
Please be aware that this is alpha-quality software. It is not currently recommended for use in production machines. I invite you to test it, report bugs, provide feedback, and submit patches so we can get it ready for the world.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
New xfce4-settings release
After quite a bit of development time I’m happy to announce the next development point release of xfce4-settings in the 4.13 series.
There are many fixes in this release – most visibly also UI improvements. This includes consistent padding/margin etc across all dialogs as well as a restored hover-effect in the Settings Manager. Finally both the advanced (fake panel as indicator for primary displays, re-arranged settings and distinct advanced tab) and the minimal display dialog (new icons, improved strings) received a facelift.
But – despite the nature of the 4.14 cycle – there is also a new feature:
display profiles.
This new feature allows you to store one or more profiles for a particular display configuration that you may be using. In order to uniquely identify single displays we rely on the so-called EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) so a profile becomes a combination of those unique EDIDs. As already mentioned, you can store multiple profiles per setup to cover use-cases like rotating single screens or when enabling/disabling or re-arranging certain screens may be necessary. For instance in office situations where you switch a lot between one or multiple docking stations, projectors and other external devices, this feature will allow you to do so with ease.
Every scenario just has to be configured and saved once.
It is important to note that the list of available profiles is always filtered based on the currently connected displays. To be exact: this means that at least the currently connected displays need to be part of the profile definition for the profile to appear in the list. In turn this also means that if you only have your internal laptop display connected, you will see all profiles because your laptop display will always be part of every profile (even if it is disabled!).
To make the deal a little sweeter I implemented auto-applying of profiles when new displays are connected. This is an optional feature that automatically enables the first – if there are multiple defined for the set of currently connected displays – matching profile.
This action is also triggered if you open the minimal dialog, giving you a shortcut to auto-apply profiles. 
What is not yet implemented is profile-awareness for xfsettingsd. So the settings daemon does not automatically enable a profile if you simply start your session, but previously worked in a different display setup. However, this is a point I would like to address in a future release.
In the meantime, enjoy xfce4-settings 4.13.5!
Xubuntu Development Update September 2018
A week later than expected, it’s the September development update! The theme for August (and early September) has been visual improvements, with a few bug fixes tossed in for good measure. Check it out!
Xubuntu
Bionic Beaver (18.04)
Bionic was pretty stable in August, with only one of our packages making it through the SRU process and into the hands of our users.
- xfce4-terminal 0.8.7.4-0ubuntu0.18.04.1
- This is a new upstream release with a number of improvements (LP: #1782327).
We’re currently looking to get these new releases and fixes into Bionic.
- Catfish 1.4.6
- This is a new release with numerous bug fixes and a much-improved thumbnailer.
- Xfce Settings: Mouse acceleration not configurable in Xubuntu 18.04 (LP: #1758023)
- This issue is related to libinput taking over mouse configuration, and will be resolved by building xfce4-settings with libinput support.
Cosmic Cuttlefish (18.10)
The following source package updates landed in Cosmic in August.
- elementary-xfce 0.12-1ubuntu1
- The elementary-xfce icon theme is now available on Debian! Previously, this theme was part of the xubuntu-icon-theme package.
- ristretto 0.8.3-1 (Debian sync)
- thunar-archive-plugin 0.4.0-1 (Debian sync)
- thunar-media-tags-plugin 0.3.0-1 (Debian sync)
- xfce4-taskmanager 1.2.1-1 (Debian sync)
- xubuntu-artwork 18.10
- The development wallpaper is set on boot and the desktop.
- The xubuntu-icon-theme is now a branding package, that upgrades the elementary-xfce icon theme with the Xubuntu distributor logo.
- xubuntu-default-settings 18.10
- “Square icons” were enabled in all supported plugins, improving size and shape consistency on the panel.
- Orage configuration was updated to use the “paplay” command for sounds by default (LP: #1054396)
- The panel was updated to be 80% transparent at all times. This is a settings migration to support the new GTK+ 3 panel.
- The Xubuntu session was updated to correctly set XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP (LP: #1590089)
- xubuntu-meta 2.227
- This package release replaces the fwupdate dependency with the newly minted fwupd.
Xfce
New Releases
Xfce had 3 new releases in August, featuring a variety of bug fixes and usability improvements.
Xfce Display Profiles (Preview)
Simon has been hard at work implementing a nifty new feature for the Xfce Display Settings, display profiles! This feature allows you to save and switch between various display setups, useful for users on the go or presenters. This hasn’t been merged into master yet, so designs are not final.
Spacing Improvements
I’ve spent the last week submitting patches to the Xfce core applications, panel plugins, and Thunar plugins. My goal is to improve the overall look and feel of Xfce by improving the consistency of it’s preference dialogs. A few before and after screenshots are below.
I’ve based my work on the excellent GNOME 2 HIG Window Layout documentation. Xfce has long borrowed the design philosophies from this document (to varying degrees) and is once again benefiting from the well-written work.
Shimmer Project
Elementary Xfce Icon Theme
Xubuntu’s beloved icon theme has had a few significant updates in recent weeks. From build optimizations to new upstream icons, there’s a lot to unpack.
The theme has added a Makefile and build tool to convert the theme’s SVG sources to PNG. Xubuntu has included the PNG-building functionality for some time, and now it’s available for everyone. PNG-based themes are faster to load and generally crisper at various sizes. Included in the new build options are PNG optimization. Optipng is now used to optimize each of the generated files, reducing the overall file size.
Updated icons coming from upstream this month include dialog-password, selection icons, graphics icons, and manila-colored folders. The manila folders are a sharp contrast from the longtime blue, but after using them for a few days, they’re actually pretty nice.
Other Updates
Mugshot 0.4.1
I released Mugshot 0.4.1 early last month with a number of bug fixes and code quality improvements. You can check out the release notes and find downloads here.
Contributing
Ready to start giving back to your favorite open source projects? Remember that there’s something for everyone, and you can get started quickly with the Xubuntu and Xfce contributor docs. If you don’t know where to start, join us at #xubuntu-devel on Freenode… we’ll point you in the right direction.
Xfce4 Panel Profiles (Formerly Xfpanel Switch) 1.0.8 Released
Xfpanel Switch has a new name and home. With the 1.0.8 release, the application is now known as “Xfce4 Panel Profiles”, and is a part of the Xfce family. The latest release improves profile management and includes a number of translations.
What’s New?
At Home With Xfce
Bug Fixes
- Failure to save some panel configurations (LP: #1765565)
- Crash on corrupted panel configs (LP: #1765565)
- Apply more strict logic when removing bad plugins
- Remove orphaned plugins when loading configuration
General
- Tidied up pylint notices
Translation Updates
Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Downloads
New releases of Xfce4 Panel Profiles will now be found at the Xfce release archive. Previous releases are still available on Launchpad.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Catfish 1.4.6 Released, Now an Xfce Project
It’s a great day for fans of the fast and powerful Catfish search utility. With the 1.4.6 release, Catfish now officially joins the Xfce family. Additionally, there’s been some nice improvements to the thumbnailer and a large number of bugs have been squashed.
What’s New?
Xfce Transition
Catfish has long been included with most Xfce installations. It’s lightweight, fast, and a perfect companion to the Thunar file manager. With the transition from Launchpad to Xfce, things have moved around a bit. Update your bookmarks accordingly!
- Homepage (Xfce Docs)
- Bugs (Xfce Bugzilla)
- Git (Xfce Git)
- Translations (Transifex)
Improved Thumbnailer
Based on the FreeDesktop.org Thumbnail Specification, now featuring:
- Improved error handling
- Proper permissions for thumbnail directories and files
- Logging of failed thumbnail generation
- Saving of thumbnail file attributes
- Support for relative thumbnail directories
Bug Fixes
- Added inode/directory mimetype to desktop entry (Xfce #14505)
- Disabled overlay scrollbars to improve interacting with the results list (Xfce #14487)
- Enabled launching of executable AppImage files (Xfce #14500)
- Fixed invalid date in appdata (Xfce #14502)
- Replaced stock icons with standard Mime Type icons (Xfce #14503)
- Improved handling of exceptions when parsing settings (Xfce #14491)
- Improved handling of UnicodeDecodeErrors (Xfce #14490)
- Improved handling of PermissionErrors (Xfce #14488)
- Improved support for hidden files (Xfce #14497)
- Remember window size and position between sessions (Xfce #14504)
- Xfce: Open directories with the preferred file manager (Xfce #14483)
Translation Updates
Albanian, Belarusian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian
Downloads
New releases of Catfish will now be found at the Xfce release archive. Previous versions will be added there soon. In the meantime, past releases are still available on Launchpad.
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Xfce Settings 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 Released
The latest developments in Xfce Settings continue to make their way to both the stable and development releases. Both 4.12.4 and 4.13.4 include a number of improvements, and 4.13.4 is steadily marching toward the 4.14 future.
What’s New?
Bug Fixes (4.12 and 4.13)
xfsettingsd --replacedoes not replace old daemon (Xfce #14381)- Uninitialized scalar variables (CID #292062, #292063)
- Resolved warnings for
-Wcast-function-type(GCC 8) - Fixed redefinition of DISTCLEANFILES in Makefile.am
- Fixed typo in display manufacturers, “PRECISON” to “PRECISION”
Improved Display Manufacturer Recognition (4.12 and 4.13)
- Refreshed PNP IDs from hwdata
- Added support for VBX (VirtualBox)
- Standardized and shortened manufacturer names
- Updated laptop detection to include eDP in XfceRandr
Xfce 4.14 Progress (4.13 Only)
- Xfce Settings has been ported from D-Bus GLib to GDBus as of 4.13.3
- D-Bus GLib was deprecated in favor of GDBus with GLib 2.26
XRandr Display Scaling (4.13 Only)
- This new feature is equivalent to
xrandr --scaleand is used to scale the entire display area - The scale values are stored in Xfconf under
/Default/<NAME>/Scale/{X,Y} - For now, this setting can only be configured via Xfconf. If you’d like to submit a patch to add it to the GUI, we’d love to have it!
Translation Updates
Belarusian, Catalan, English (Australia), Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian
Downloads
XFCE SETTINGS 4.12.4
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
XFCE SETTINGS 4.13.4
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Exo 0.12.1 (and 0.12.2) Released
Xfce application developers rejoice! A new version of the Exo support library is now available. With performance improvements and full support for GCC 8, both users and developers should be excited for this news.
What’s New?
Bug Fixes
- Use the “user-bookmarks” icon instead of “bookmark-new” (Xfce #14243)
- Properly scale application icons in Preferred Applications dialog (Xfce #14362)
- Remove pure attribute of function that returns void (Xfce #14427)
Missing varargs init or cleanup (CID #30799)- Reverted in 0.12.2 to get rid of some unwelcome segmentation faults (Xfce #14465)
- Uninitialized scalar variable (CID #127777)
Exo Icon Chooser Dialog
- Dropped deprecated International icon context, added Stock icon context
- Increased context title max length to support long translations
- Symbolic icons are no longer populated in the icon chooser dialog, which could lead to significant performance gains with various icon themes
- Added a new test to the test suite for the GTK 3 version of this dialog
Helpers
- Added PCManFM-Qt (from LXQt) to supported file managers (Xfce #14333)
Compiler Support
- Disabled
-Wexpansion-to-definedand resolve various compiler warnings for GCC 7 - Fixed
-Wcast-function-typefor GCC 8
Translation Updates
Albanian, Amharic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), Finnish, French, Galician, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish
Downloads
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Thunar 1.8.0 Release
Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager!
The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.
By the way, by “our team” I mean Alexander Schwinn and myself, as well as all other developers which contributed to the project, specifically Jonas Kümmerlin, without his work we wouldn’t get here.
We picked up where Jonas left off, his initial port saved us a lot of work, with few adjustments we got Thunar to run under Gtk+ 3. But so we discovered this was no easy job, let’s just say Gtk+ migration path was far from a smooth experience. Besides fixing bugs and regressions, new features were introduced. Not to mention the wonderful work done by translators in promptly updating translations.
What Thunar 1.8.0 has to offer?
- A completely revised pathbar
- Buttons next/previous/up/home added
- Click on the right filler opens path as editable string
- Here’s a comparison between the old pathbar and the new one
- GObject Introspection support for thunarx
- It paves the way to new language bindings
- Thunarx-python has already been updated
- Minor improvements:
- Show file size as well in bytes
- Add systemd user unit for D-Bus session services
- Make it possible to assign accelerators to custom actions
- Enable Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for remote locations
- Refreshed tray icons for file transfer
- Improved various styling details
While moving to Gtk+ 3 it was necessary to replace parts of the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx). It means that to update to Thunar 1.8.0 one should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop to their latest versions, see the compability matrix for more details.
A complete list of added features, bug fixes and translation changes can be found in the NEWS file.
That’s it, we hope you enjoy the new Thunar.
Thunar 1.8.0 Release
Good news fellow Xfce users, we proudly present a new Thunar release, our beloved easy-to-use and fast file manager!
The main highlight in this release is that Thunar, as all Xfce components, is saying goodbye to Gtk+ 2 and is now Gtk+ 3 based. Other than that, our team has addressed several critical bugs that compromised Thunar’s stability. Most of those fixes were backported to 1.6.x series and we hope our users do not experience crashes anymore.
By the way, by “our team” I mean Alexander Schwinn and myself, as well as all other developers which contributed to the project, specifically Jonas Kümmerlin, without his work we wouldn’t get here.
We picked up where Jonas left off, his initial port saved us a lot of work, with few adjustments we got Thunar to run under Gtk+ 3. But so we discovered this was no easy job, let’s just say Gtk+ migration path was far from a smooth experience. Besides fixing bugs and regressions, new features were introduced. Not to mention the wonderful work done by translators in promptly updating translations.
What Thunar 1.8.0 has to offer?
- A completely revised pathbar
- Buttons next/previous/up/home added
- Click on the right filler opens path as editable string
- Here’s a comparison between the old pathbar and the new one
- GObject Introspection support for thunarx
- It paves the way to new language bindings
- Thunarx-python has already been updated
- Minor improvements:
- Show file size as well in bytes
- Add systemd user unit for D-Bus session services
- Make it possible to assign accelerators to custom actions
- Enable Thunar UCA (User Configurable Actions) for remote locations
- Refreshed tray icons for file transfer
- Improved various styling details
While moving to Gtk+ 3 it was necessary to replace parts of the Thunar Plugin API (thunarx). It means that to update to Thunar 1.8.0 one should also update all installed thunar-plugins and xfdesktop to their latest versions, see the compability matrix for more details.
A complete list of added features, bug fixes and translation changes can be found in the NEWS file.
That’s it, we hope you enjoy the new Thunar.
Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.4.0 (and 0.4.1) Released
Stable as a rock. Xfce PulseAudio Plugin hit a new stable milestone with the 0.4.0 release. This release wraps up the awesome development cycle we’ve had on this over the last few months and is recommended for all users.
What’s New?
Since 0.2.5, the previous stable release.
Device Management
- Added support for audio input devices
- Added support for the XF86AudioMicMute key
- Added ability to switch active audio devices and streams
- Simplified audio volume controls
MPRIS2 Integration
- New optional MPRIS2 support (play/pause, raise, track switching, playlists)
- Added multimedia keyboard support, keys control the active media player and add keyboard support for any MPRIS2-enabled player
- Experimental libwnck support adds support for raising windows that do not otherwise support it (Spotify included)
- Players can be selectively hidden from the menu in the preferences dialog
General
- Significant code cleanup, dropping unused IDO support and simplifying widgets
- Improved memory management with numerous memory leaks patched
Translation Updates
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmal, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Source tarball (md5, sha1, sha256)
Available on Debian Testing and Ubuntu 18.04 “Bionic Beaver”. Included in Xubuntu 18.04.