Xfce 4.16 arrives with many improvements, such as a new look and goodbye to GTK2

A little less than a year and a half ago, the project in charge of one of Linux's lightest graphical environments He launched the last major update of it. A few hours ago he returned to lanzar another with more improvements, a Xfce 4.16 What its developers say was a special cycle, not only because of the pandemic, but something that has contributed to make it different. As an example, they mention that they have made the leap to GitLab.

El move to GitLab it is a huge change, as it allows the community to participate more. In fact, they say that much of the huge changelog, available at this link, has to do with this. Another major change has to do with the image, one they've updated from a weird mix of random icons that didn't follow any scheme to a new, much more consistent one. You have the rest of the most outstanding news after the cut.

Xfce 4.16 Highlights

• The window manager has received many updates and improvements regarding composition and GLX.
• They have added a new plugin to the panel called "statustray" that combines both the StatusNotifier and the legacy items from Systray. This includes a self-hiding animation and a dark mode that is on by default.
• Support for fractional scale.
• New tab in «About Xfce» that shows basic information about the system, such as the type of CPU and GPU.
• The ability to search and filter has been added in the Configuration Manager.
• The MIME Settings and Preferred Applications dialogs have been merged into one called "Predefined Applications".
• Thunar has received many fixes and a few features, such as pausing copy / move operations.
• The session manager offers improved support for the GPG 2.1 agent and the configuration dialog has been visually improved.
• The Power Manager received many bug fixes and a few smaller features, including a cleanup of its settings dialog, an optional visual indicator for when 'Presentation Mode' is enabled, battery status icons plus accurate and automatically dismiss low power notifications when connecting from a charger.
• The desktop mostly received bug fixes and small improvements, including the new default wallpaper.
• The garcon menu library received new APIs and now no longer launches applications as children of the process hosting the menu. The above behavior caused applications to crash along with, for example, the dashboard.
• The App Finder now allows you to sort apps by "frequency", a combination of frequency and topicality.
• Dependency updates: removed Gtk2, added LibGTop, uploaded to Gtk> = 3.22, GLib and GDBus> = 2.50.

Soon on your Linux distribution, depending on which one you use

The release of Xfce 4.16 it's official but, as with other graphical environments, right now it is only available in code form and it is best to wait for our Linux distribution to update the packages. The first to enjoy it will be those who use an operating system with a Rolling Release development model, such as a server, that uses Manjaro xfce-usb and hopes that the graphical environment, of which he is not a big fan, will improve a little more.