XFCE 4.20: Lean desktop on the way to Wayland

Comfortable, nimble, lightweight and happy with hardware from the last 15 years. With these strengths, XFCE has won many users as a desktop mainly under Linux, but also on BSD systems in the 27 years since the first version. XFCE has always been as easy and intuitive to use as a full-blown desktop environment without the flair of incompleteness that characterizes the similarly lean window manager and the LXQT working environment.

Two years after the last version, XFCE 4.20 is now dedicated to experimental topics: The desktop delivers a Wayland session for the first time. According to the developers, this is still at least one version step away from the necessary completeness, but it does offer a preview of XFCE with Wayland. XFCE uses Labwc or Wayfire for this, as its own window manager Xfwm4 does not yet support this protocol. However, the XFCE developers have removed the window placement from this component and transferred it to a new, separate program library libxfce4windowing, which works independently of the display protocol. Due to some missing components, this session is still far from being mature enough for actual work. However, there are also a number of new features for the familiar XFCE components, which are shown in the release notes and the following summary of the most interesting additions.

New: Desktop and file manager

For screens with very high resolutions, the desktop now allows background images in vector-based SVG format. The application finder has a few more configuration options and can automatically hide the dialog when this window loses focus. A new settings dialog can now define in detail how icons are displayed on the desktop and on which screen, benefiting users who use the desktop as a temporary file storage. Xfce now loads icon graphics and themes in a separate thread, which makes the desktop appear faster. A new Systemd user service also contributes to this, which takes care of loading all desktop settings from Xfconf at startup.

Among the XFCE applications, the file manager Thunar has undergone the most changes. It now also recognizes IPv6 addresses for network storage locations. In the file manager, the F3 key switches to a split view. An individual hotkey such as the Tab key can now be used to switch the active window section in order to adapt Thunar's behavior to Midnight Commander.

There is now an option in the settings to switch on client-side window decorations in the style of Gnome. The configurable toolbar then moves to the title bar of the window to save space. The developers state that Thunar no longer slows down even with folders containing a large number of files. File operations have also become faster: To compare source and destination files, Thunar now no longer calculates MD5 checksums, but instead performs the file comparison at file system level, which is significantly faster. When copying or moving files, Thunar will now only perform I/O operations in parallel if the target drive is not currently busy, in order to avoid file fragmentation.

To try it out: Live system with XFCE 4.20

It will be a few weeks before the leading Linux distributions include XFCE 4.20 in their package sources. For openSUSE Tumbleweed, a repository with the latest Git version of XFCE 4.20 is available for upgrading.

If you want to try out the new XFCE in an uncomplicated way, PorteuX 1.8 is also a compact live system based on Slackware with this new desktop. However, the Wayland packages are missing here, there is only the conventional Xorg session.

(dmk)