The third pre-release of the next long-term stable version has already been released from the classic Linux desktop environment, Xfce 4.14. This third version of Xfce is ready for testing and is only as good as the final version in terms of features, as this new release is a final freeze.
Since in this new liberation there are no great big changes or so many to highlight if we take into account in comparison with Xfce 4.14pre2, what if there are many bug fixes and small adjustments, but there is nothing innovative.
Within the fixes that arrived in this new version are found for xfce4-session, the risk of race conditions is minimized due to the application of xfsettingsd settings (which applies all kinds of X and Gtk related settings like font, theme, screen layout) simultaneously with the release of other Xfce components.
In window manager xfwm4 several solutions have been introduced related to songwriting at launch, especially helping, for example with applications based on Electron.
As well as Finding replacement icons for windows have been improved and by default, windows open on the screen with the cursor active.
For the case of the file manager Thunar has added support for dragging and dropping items with the right mouse button, fixes problems with mounting external drives and fixes a bug that causes 100% load on the CPU when there are no rights to read the home directory.
On the other hand also fixed various bugs in xfce4 panel plugins and the ability to use plugins based on GTK 2 was returned
For the case of xfce4-panel several bug fixes were received, most of which affect plugins. As with Xfwm4, the alternative search for window icons for the panel was also improved.
Disabling Gtk + 2 support by default was also considered but later reversed due to document creation issues. Generally, support for Gtk + 2 plugins will remain as part of the final 4.14 version of the panel and will only be removed in loop 4.16.
In the case of xfce4-power-manager added screen saver support (xfce4-screensaver) and automatically hides the systray power management prompt in case of running a separate dashboard plugin showing similar information.
In addition, power manager now checks if dashboard plugin is present and automatically hides the systray item in this case.
This is especially interesting for distributions like Fedora that ship a vanilla version of Xfce and they would end up with the systray item (which is enabled by default in power manager to always have a backup for the user) and the dashboard plugin (which was added to the new default dashboard layout).
Disabled transition to sleep mode and turn off screen during video playback (even when watching YouTube on Chromium) screen dimming and idle action.
The changelog for xfce4-screensaver is as follows:
- Code cleanup
- Drop the libXxf86 dependency, it is no longer implemented or not available
- Unnecessary login window build code removed
- Removed window shaking on failed login
- Unused code removed from gs-manager / gs-window-x11
- Simplified screen lock code
- Simplified screensaver activation and lock code
- The xfce4-screensaver-command command was migrated to GDBus
Finally To test Xfce 4.14 pre3, a container image has been prepared in Docker format which you can get from the link below.
The final 4.14 version scheduled to be released on August 11 will only contain fixes for the very few remaining bugs.