André Miranda has announced the release of Xfce 4.16pre1.

Xfce 4.16pre1 released!

As scheduled we have just released Xfce 4.16pre1 on August 27th (sorry for the long time to write a post about it) - the first development release leading up to Xfce 4.16. And it comes with a boatload of new features and improvements, so prepare yourselves.

Notable Changes
General
Dropping lots of code (Gtk2 support), improving maintainability
Adding new icons to all core components to extend Xfce’s visual identity (also: follow freedesktop.org rDNS icon naming standard)
A revamped and improved “About Xfce” dialog that also holds general system details
Switch to client-side decorations for settings dialogs
Lots of bugfixes everywhere

Settings
New “Default Applications” dialog: merge between “Mime Settings” and “Preferred Applications”
Display: Support for fractional scaling (with XRandR), better fallback in case of mis-configuration
Settings Manager: Improved search/filter

Panel
New Plugin: “Status Tray” - a merger between the systray and the statusnotifier plugin, will make life for users much easier and less confusing, now supports the panel’s global “icon size” setting
Autohide animation: Makes “autohide” more easily understandable (in the sense of: where did my panel just go?)
Launchers now show desktop file actions on right-click (e.g. “Open a New Private Window” for Firefox)
The Window list now supports “launching a new instance” of an application in the right-click menu
The Workspace switcher can optionally show numbering for workspaces
Dark mode for the panel (precondition: your theme has to support dark mode)

Thunar
Copying and moving can be paused
Support for queued file transfer (configurable)
Initial support to remember view settings per directory
New versioning scheme

Volman
Removed PDA Tab
New versioning scheme

Xfwm4
Show alt-tab dialog only on the primary monitor (if one is set)

Power Manager
Cleaner settings dialog (battery and “on power” settings)
Optional visual indicator in the panel when “Presentation mode” is enabled
Automatically dismiss low-power notifications upon connecting of a charger

Session
Improved gpg-agent support
Smaller visual cleanups

Appfinder
Allow sorting apps by frecency (frequency and recency)

Thumbnailing Service
Support for excluding paths (in the tumbler.rc settings file)

Xfconf Settings Service
Enable gsettings backend by default
Bash auto-completion for xfconf-query
Drop Perl bindings

Where can you get it?
Besides manually compiling tarballs, it’s also possible to use xfce-test (ubuntu_20.04-xfce-4.16pre1 tag) to easily preview Xfce 4.16 without the risk of breaking your system.

Please go ahead try this release if possible, we would be more happy to hear your impressions as well as get bug reports before the final release.

What’s next?
We’re expecting to release Xfce 4.16pre2 at the end of this month and if necessary pre3 will be released in October. If everything goes as planned Xfce 4.16 should be released by November!

Xfce 4.16pre1 released!