Apr 23,2024 Xfce is moving from IRC to Matrix After a 6-month trial period, as of April 1, 2024, Xfce moved its official communication channels from IRC to Matrix. The old IRC channels will remain open, so you can still hang out there. However, the 'official' channels linked in the Xfce Wiki now will be the Matrix channels. This change affects the following channels: #xfce on libera.chat --> #xfce:matrix.org -- general user support and discussion #xfce-dev on libera.chat --> #xfce-dev:matrix.org -- development discussion #xfce-commits on libera.chat --> #xfce-commits:matrix.org -- no ..read more

Apr 06,2024 An Estimate on the Total Number of Xfce Users Recently, my wife asked me how many people in total actually use the software I develop in my free time (mostly thunar). I never thought about that question, so I just made a wild guess. Based on the number of people I believed are active on the Xfce Matrix / IRC channels, I answered: "... maybe between 2000 and 10.000 people do use Xfce". I know nobody can give exact numbers. It's all about package downloads, OS types reported by browsers, and other more or less biased data harvesting. However, the question nagged me, so I searched for ..read more

In the summer of 2022, I participated in Google’s Summer of Code, contributing to the Thunar file manager at XFCE, with the help of my mentor Alexander Schwinn. It’s been about a month since my GSoC term was officially over, and after a hectic couple weeks, I’ve finally decided to sit down and write down the closing blog post. New features in Thunar I’ll start off by introducing the features that I worked on, and a rough idea of how the implementation for the same works. Of these, undo-redo and file counts for folders are already merged on master and have been released with Xfce 4.18. The tour ..read more

Dec 15,2022 Xfce 4.18 released After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 ! Since Xfce 4.16 a lot of major development happened. Our team added multiple nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that is going to be released for your pleasure. This development cycle was influenced a lot by GSoC 2021 and GSoC 2022, which led to various new features, most of them for Thunar, the Xfce File Manager. Though as well multiple other Xfce components got a lot of love and many improvements were done under the ho ..read more

Dec 01,2022 Xfce 4.18 Pre2 Released Dear Xfce community, I am happy to announce the release of Xfce4.18 pre2. This platform pre-release consists of the Xfce core components and will be followed by the final Xfce4.18 release soon. We fixed some quirks which were found in Xfce4.18 pre1, did some further polishing and the result is now released as Xfce4.18 pre2. Early adopters are invited to give it a try and to check for compatibility before the final release, which is planned for 15. December. Xfce4.18 pre2 includes all Xfce core components. The tarballs for building it can be found here: Down ..read more

Nov 20,2022 Wallpaper Contest for Xfce 4.18 - End of submissions The submission deadline for the Xfce 4.18 wallpaper contest just ended, and I am happy to see that many submissions! Starting by now, one week of voting will show which wallpapers are the most popular ones. In order to cast your vote, login at gitlab.xfce.org and add a ❤️ or ? reaction to all wallpapers you want to upvote. Please keep in mind that you should vote for the best wallpaper, not for the best picture. E.g. it makes sense to leave some free space where desktop items can be placed. Voting will be closed on 27. November ..read more

About the Feature This feature aims to enable the user, when in list-view, to expand non-empty folders (as shown in the image above). Additions & Behaviors, An entry has been added to the preferences dialog under Display > View Settings to define the default behavior when a new tab/window with list-view is opened. When a new tab/window is opened with the list-view as the active view, it will respect the above mentioned setting for the tree-view option and default to that. This feature can be toggled on and off using the Enable Tree View entry under the View menu but this only affects ..read more

User-Profiles in Xfce-Terminal Note: This feature has not yet been merged. The UI/UX have been finalized but there are some internal implementations that are being reviewed. MR: https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-terminal/-/merge_requests/57 The Task The aim of this feature is to enable users to create multiple different profiles. A profile is just a combination of preferences. This allows the user to quickly switch between predefined profiles when the need arises. As a use case scenario, let us consider the following example. One might want to have one particular tab transparent. So o ..read more

Oct 20,2022 Wallpaper Contest for Xfce 4.18 Probably you already heared that Xfce 4.18 is planned to be released on 15th Dec. this year. It would be nice to have a new default wallpaper for that release. This time the idea is to ask the Xfce community to contribute a couple of wallpapers. With a community vote the default Xfce 4.18 wallpaper than can be selected. So if you have the required skills, your contribution would be very welcome ! Like the old Xfce wallpapers, the new wallpaper should be a vector graphic with an unmodified Xfce mouse on it and some fancy shapes. Note that the image mu ..read more

  Welcome back, it's been a while! Where have I been? I haven't had much time to actively contribute to Xfce in the past few months. Between mentoring Amrit for GSoC and completing my undegraduate thesis, I wasn't able to write patches at my normal pace. Things have started to pick back up, now that I've finished my undegraduate studies. I still won't be able to work on Xfce as much as I used to. In addition to starting my Master's degree, I have joined the AI Research Team of the University of Athens. Nonetheless, I will continue to maintain Xfce Terminal and contribute to Thunar and other co ..read more