After more than a year of development, the Xfce team announces the availability of the new stable release 4.16.
Xfce is a desktop environment for Linux and BSD operating systems that aims to be fast and lightweight while remaining visually appealing and easy to use, gives the user a great deal of freedom of customization, and is known for the relatively long period between one release and another, which means fewer updates and changes. Therefore, it is a great choice for productivity-focused users.
The new Xfce 4.16 comes with many new features and improvements, along with several bug fixes to improve the user experience. In this release, the interface's visual identity has been updated with new modern icons -based on a shared palette to ensure consistency -for all the core applications to give Xfce a visual flair and beauty out of the box, it also follows freedesktop.org specifications and a new static color palette.
The Settings Manager itself received a visual refresh of its filter box, which can now be hidden permanently, at the same time, the search capabilities of the filter box were improved by searching the descriptive 'Comments' part of each dialog's launcher (aka .desktop) file, and the settings dialog of the power manager was cleaned up and shows either 'on battery' or 'plugged in' settings as opposed to both in a huge table.
A new "Default Applications" dialog has been added to the Settings Manager as well, and it's a merging of pre-available "Mime Settings" and "Preferred Applications" dialog boxes to give users easier access to set default applications for specific file types. A new fractional scale based on the RandR extension for X11A has been added to the Display Settings to better support high-density displays. Moreover, the preferred display mode is now marked with an asterisk, and aspect ratios are displayed along with the screen resolution.
The keyboard shortcuts dialog has also been visually updated, and more keyboard shortcuts are added to the desktop environment out of the box, for instance for window tiling or to open Thunar.
Speaking of Thunar, the default Xfce file manager has gained some features as well, and now the copy and move dialogs can be paused. Furthermore, support for queued file transfer, remembering view settings per folder, and support for transparency in Gtk themes were added.
The panel received quite a few noteworthy updates: an animation for autohide and intellihide, a new 'Status Tray' plugin that combines both legacy Systray item support with modern StatusNotifier item support, dark mode support, launchers showing additional actions on right-click, window buttons offering to 'Launch a new instance...'.
The About Xfce dialog also contains a new System tab that displays basic information about a user’s system, and the About tab has been reworked to be more visually appealing and easily parsable,
