• debian/xubuntu-wallpapers.links:
  • Link to development wallpaper
• usr/share/plymouth/themes/xubuntu-text/xubuntu-text.plymouth
  • Bump plymouth-text version number for jammy

• New release

Xubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" was released on October 14, 2021. Check out the release announcement and release notes. I've expanded on both below.

New Features

GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer

GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab) scans folders, devices, and remote locations to provide an in-depth report on disk usage. It can quickly identify large files and folders wasting disk space and enable users to act on them. A tree-like and graphical representation are used to display disk usage.

GNOME Disks

GNOME Disks provides an easy way to inspect, format, partition, and configure disks. You can view SMART data, manage devices, benchmark physical disks, and image flash drives using GNOME Disks. Another benefit is that it can mount partitions on-demand or automatically.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is a music-playing application. It features a media library, podcast feeds, and live internet radio stations. It integrates with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin in Xubuntu, controlling playback and granting easy access to recent playlists. Xubuntu ships with the Alternative Toolbar plugin enabled, making the application layout fit in with the rest of the desktop. Additionally, the Music key on multimedia keyboards will now launch Rhythmbox instead of Parole.

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Super Key Support

The Super (or Windows) key will now reveal the application menu, similar to Windows and other desktop environments. This is possible thanks to the inclusion of xcape. xcape is used to configure modifier keys to act as other keys when pressed. For Xubuntu, the left Super key is now mapped to trigger the Ctrl+Escape key combination used for the Whisker Menu. For a peek into the technical reason for this workaround, please see the upstream Xfce bug.

Today's @Xubuntu daily iso (2021-08-20) features xcape, enabling the Super key for showing the Whisker Menu.

Download here: https://t.co/dcaG1gN84b
More information: https://t.co/6fmT7DlK0j pic.twitter.com/lQbokbqBW9

— Sean Davis (@bluesabredavis) August 20, 2021

The Super key now works exactly as you'd expect.

PipeWire

PipeWire is now included in Xubuntu and the other flavors. PipeWire is a project that improves audio and video handling in Linux. It is used alongside PulseAudio to significantly improve hardware support, particularly for Bluetooth audio devices. For regular usage, PipeWire quietly works in the background. Audio devices are still controlled through the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin and PulseAudio Volume Control (pavucontrol).

Pidgin Removal

Pidgin, “the universal chat client,” is no longer included in Xubuntu. Due to an increasing number of chat services moving to proprietary and restricted protocols, the overall usefulness of Pidgin has diminished significantly over the years. However, if you still use Pidgin, it can be installed from the repository.

Late Night Linux Extra episode 32 featured Gary Kramlich, the lead Pidgin maintainer. In this episode, Gary explained that while many of these services are no longer available within Pidgin by default, existing plugins enable support for those services. Unfortunately, many plugins change rapidly, making it impossible to keep them packaged and up-to-date in Ubuntu.

UX Updates

In continuing our keyboard shortcut clean-up, the long-obsoleted Super+{1,2,3,4} shortcuts were removed. These shortcuts go way back to when Xubuntu had a two-panel layout and launched the first four pinned applications. For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts, click here.

We also made a minor change to our Thunar defaults, updating the title bar to always display the full path of the current directory. This should make navigating and managing the filesystem easier with multiple open windows.

About the Xubuntu Versions

Xubuntu has three installable versions. Using the main ISO (2.0G), you can pick from the Normal or Minimal installation option, whereas Xubuntu Core (1.0G) will result in a much smaller installation size. Normal includes everything you need to be productive and have fun with Xubuntu. Meanwhile, Minimal and Core are designed to provide the bare essentials, enabling you to tailor Xubuntu to your needs.

Core and Minimal seem to have the same purpose, but Core has a few advantages. For one, the download size is much smaller and more accessible for those with limited connectivity options. Second, the install size is quite a bit smaller due to how the different versions work. Core installs only the minimal set of packages. Minimal first installs the Normal Xubuntu version and then removes the excess packages. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to reliably identify and remove all of the extra packages, so you end up with another 1.0G of bloat.

You can learn more about Xubuntu Core here or view the spreadsheet I put together with the package and memory differences here.

Wrapping Up

Xubuntu 21.10 features the work of numerous contributors from the Xfce, GNOME, MATE, Ubuntu, and Debian communities. If you'd like to contribute, check out the following links:

• Xfce

• GNOME

• MATE

• Xubuntu

• Debian

Next up, we have the 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" LTS cycle. The next six months will be focused primarily on bug fixes and other improvements, building a solid LTS foundation for the next three years. As it is an LTS, we'll be running a Wallpaper Contest again, so keep an eye on the Xubuntu website and Twitter for updates.

This is a development release.

• Replace the deprecated GtkActionEntries with XfceGtkActionEntries (Issue #79)
• Opening a dialog from a drop-down window closes the window (Issue #136)
• Add Fill background image style (MR !23).
• Improved options parsing (for both short and long forms)
• Add a menu entry to send signals to the foreground process (Issue #59)
• Fix keep window open preference being applied on restart.
• Rework "–tab" and "–window" behavior (Issue #13)
• Ignore unused modifiers for scroll wheel zooming
• Add alternative shortcuts for zooming (Issue #126)
• Expand scrolled window and make dialog size 70% of parent (!17)
• Support libxfce4ui XfceTitledDialog new API

Unsafe Paste Dialog:

• Update unsafe paste dialog text (Issue #73)
• Fix paste button focus
• Replace subtitle by infobar for Unsafe paste dialog
• Fix the unsafe paste dialog to actually paste

Cleanup:

• Update .gitignore, HACKING, AUTHORS, COPYRIGHTS
• Update –preferences, –tab and –window documentation
• Fix various typos
• Fix compilation warnings
• Remove unnecessary function call (!24)

Temporary changes (will be changed before the final release):

• Add a "Do not warn me again" checkbox for the "Unsafe Paste" dialog (Issue #129)

Translation Updates: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Armenia), Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Eastern Armenian, English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Interlingue, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uyghur

The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 21.10.

Xubuntu 21.10, codenamed Impish Indri, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until June 2022. If you need a stable environment with longer support time we recommend that you use Xubuntu 20.04 LTS instead.

The final release images are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/download/.

As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.

Xubuntu Core, our minimal ISO edition, is available to download from unit193.net/xubuntu/core/ [torrent]. Find out more about Xubuntu Core here.

We’d like to thank everybody who contributed to this release of Xubuntu!

Highlights and Known Issues

Highlights

• New Software: Xubuntu now comes pre-installed with GNOME Disk Analyzer, GNOME Disk Utility, and Rhythmbox. Disk Analyzer and Disk Utility make it easier to monitor and manage your partitions. Rhythmbox enables music playback with a dedicated media library.
• Pipewire: Pipewire is now included in Xubuntu, and is used in conjunction with PulseAudio to improve audio playback and hardware support in Linux.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: The Super (Windows) key will now reveal the applications menu. Existing Super+ keyboard shortcuts are unaffected.

Known Issues

• The shutdown prompt may not be displayed at the end of the installation. Instead you might just see a Xubuntu logo, a black screen with an underscore in the upper left hand corner, or just a black screen. Press Enter and the system will reboot into the installed environment. (LP: #1944519)

For more obscure known issues, information on affecting bugs, bug fixes, and a list of new package versions, please refer to the Xubuntu Release Notes.

The main Ubuntu Release Notes cover many of the other packages we carry and more generic issues.

Support

For support with the release, navigate to Help & Support for a complete list of methods to get help.

• New upstream version 2.6.1

• Minimize delta with Debian: remaining changes:
  • Bump epoch (change committed on git)
  • add unity integration
  • make libpurple-dev multiarch (not tagged ad such since it still requires work on plugins)
  • update preferences file.
  • add Ubuntu patches:
    • 04_let_crasher_for_apport.patch
    • 05_default_to_irc_ubuntu_com.patch
    • 10_docklet_default_off.patch
    • 11_buddy_list_really_show.patch
    • 13_sounds_and_timers.patch
    • 60_1024x600_gtkpounce.c.patch
    • 60_1024x600_gtkprefs.c.patch
    • pounce-webview.patch

• Fix menu not toggling. (Issue #61)
• Fix small icon in multi-row panels. (Issue #37)
• Fix missing minimize and maximize buttons in settings dialog.
• Replace deprecated code for grab check.
• Translation updates: Greek, Slovak, Spanish.

• Dependency Changes:
  • libxfce4ui >= 4.16.0
  • libxfce4util >= 4.16.0
• New Features:
  • Allow to choose the default scale (!29)
  • Keep the scale in memory for each loaded image (#7, #17, !28)
  • Toggle fullscreen mode by double clicking on the image
• Performance Improvement:
  • Optimize directory loading (#20, #22, #32, #37, !31)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Disable overlay scrolling (#64)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Reuse source surface (#64, !26)
  • Avoid using Cairo Xlib backend to create surfaces (#60, #61, #62, !25)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Animation (#64)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Background color (#64)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Clock (#64)
  • Optimize image viewer redraw: Selection box (#64)
  • Don't redraw the main window when it loses focus (#64)
  • Remove the shadow of the toolbar buttons (#51, #64)
• Appearance Changes:
  • Hide thumbnail scrollbar when unused (!24)
  • Use the same background for the image and the thumbnails (#36, !23)
  • Drop preferences-desktop-default-applications icon
• Code Refactoring:
  • Flatpak build (!32)
  • Refactoring: Use only one file filter for the app
  • Refactoring: Icon bar adjustments
  • Cleanup: icon_bar.c
  • Cleanup: Pass orientation directly from file to viewer
  • Code refactoring: Image viewer adjustments, scale and drawing (!27)
  • Use integers for the image rendering rectangle
  • Code cleanup: Build sanitation, obsolete code removal, spacing, normalization (!22)
  • Transfer contents from dispose() to finalize()
  • Add debugging macros
• Bug Fixes:
  • Protect asynchronous jobs from an application exit
  • Fix position of the active item in the icon bar when vertical (#34)
  • Take into account the device scale (#47, !30)
  • Properly load images via drag and drop (#67)
  • Delay GdkPixbufLoader "closed" signal handler
  • Use the same scale factor to zoom via action and scrolling
  • Fix a lack of centering when zooming via the menu action
  • Fix some memory leak (several commits of this kind)
  • Fix file creation monitoring
  • Try to display the image on GDK_PIXBUF_ERROR_CORRUPT_IMAGE (#39)
  • Always set adjustment upper bounds greater than page sizes (#35)
  • Scaling/zoom corrections (#30, !8)
  • Fix animated GIF display
  • Automate and sanitize memory management of sources (#65)
  • Fix rstto_icon_bar_rows_reordered() (#48)
  • Chain up to parent in dispose() and finalize()
• Translation Updates: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Armenia), Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Eastern Armenian, English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Interlingue, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uyghur

• Lower peak memory consumption in case of a long CPU load history
• Fix OpenBSD codepath (issue #28)
• Initially hide run-in-terminal checkbox if the command is empty (#23)
• Translation Updates: Albanian, Arabic, Armenian (Armenia), Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Eastern Armenian, English (Australia), English (United Kingdom), Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Interlingue, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uyghur