• New upstream version 0.8.0

• New upstream version 4.16.0
• d/control: update homepage
• d/control: update standards version to 4.5.1

xfdashboard-0.8.0 "Xfce 4.16 is out … and me too :)" was released on 2020-12-23.

This is a stable release.

• NOTE: Raised minimum version of Glib to 2.38 for replacements of deprecated function g_type_class_add_private()

• New feature: New application icon which follows rDNS naming
• New feature: Implement pop-up menu which is currently only used by icons in quicklaunch when right-clicking at them.
• New feature: The windows in windows view gained support to show also their child windows, e.g. open/save dialogs etc. This feature is themable and enabled by default in default theme. But it can also be disabled at all by the user in xfdashboard settings application, e.g. for performance reasons. The user's decision to disable this feature in the settings overrides anything defined at the theme used. (GH #132)
• New feature: All windows can now be drag'n'drop from any actor to any other window-related actor. So it is now possible to move a window from a workspace to another workspace directly via the workspace selector without the need to change the workspace to the one containing the window first. You can also drag'n'drop windows from workspace to windows view to move a window to the current workspace. (GH #79)
• New feature: The window tracker and all other related classes are now interfaces to support multiple window systems, like X11, GDK and wayland. Currently only X11 is support as it did all the time but preparation work is done to support GDK as well and maybe wayland some day. (GH #129)
• New feature: Added a fine-grained controllable debug system. If debug is enabled in configure script the user can use the environment variable XFDASHBOARD_DEBUG to enable categories to debug. But also classes like XfdashboardActor can be set in this environment variable to debug a specific class. Classes are case-sensitive and must be in camel-case. You can mix categories and classes in enviroment variable. You can set multiple categories and/or classes to debug by separating them by commas.
• New feature: At a theme's layout xml file you can now specify which actor of the focusable ones should be selected on theme load. Therefore a new optional attribute to <focus>, a sub-node of <focusables>, was added which is called "selected". This attribute "selected" is a boolean attribute and expects to be set to either "true" or "false". If set to "true" this actor will be selected instead of the search box which is the default. If set to "false" it has no impact and handled as this attribute does not exist. This new attribute should only be used once over all layout xml files. A warning will be printed if it used more than once but the theme will load successfully. The user can also configure in the setting if this selected focus should be re-selected also when the application resumes at daemon mode (GH #144)
• New feature: New actions "selection-move-next", "selection-move-previous", "focus-move-first", "focus-move-last" and "focus-move-to" for use at custom key bindings were added. They are not bound at the default key bindings file installed. (GH #144, GH #145)
• New feature: Window tracker interface now supports a new experimental backend for GDK. The backend to use can be controlled with the new environment variable XFDASHBOARD_BACKEND. It can be either set to "x11" or "gdk". If this environment variable does not exists or is not set then the X11 backend is enforced as it is the known default behaviour of xfdashboard and GDK backend is marked as experimental. (GH #129)
• New feature: Allow user to override CSS files of themes to apply user favourite settings. This cChanged the way and order how CSS files of themes are loaded: First the CSS resources defined in theme's theme file (xfdashboard.theme) are loaded, then user's global stylesheet ($HOME/.config/xfdashboard/themes/global.css) is loaded if it exists and at last user's theme related stylesheet ($HOME/.config/xfdashboard/themes/user-[THEME_NAME].css) is loaded if it exists. This should make user changes to themes more convinient as the user does not need to copy the whole theme to $HOME/.themes or $HOME/.local/themes and then make his changes. The user also does not need to update its theme each time the origin theme changes and re-copy and re-apply its changes. (GH #152)
• New feature: Big sorry to all translators who did all the hard work to translate xfdashboard to their language but their hard work was never included. It was my fault as I was to stupid to use Transifex client tool correctly :( Now I do not only update all locales already included but I will also fetch new ones. So the number of supported languages raised from 8 to 13. New ones are: da, de, kk, pl and tr (GH #155)
• New feature: GDK backend is now optional and it will be enabled automatically if Clutter backend is available, i.e. FreeBSD does not install Clutter with GDK backend. (#13766, #13860)
• New feature: Support also current xfconf versions (4.13.x). New xfconf version support native GPtrArray (from glib) for string lists and make dbus-glib deprecated. dbus-glib is only needed (and checked by configure script) if current stable xfconf (4.12.x) is used as its GPtrArray is still needed in this case. (#13824)
• New feature: Support for touch screen which supports "clicking" buttons for now. Thanks to TheToq2 (GH #157)
• New feature: Support of application actions defines at desktop entries which get listed in the pop-up menus of application buttons. These application actions are already known as action in so-called "Jumplists" or "Quicklists" (GH #158, GH #160)
• New feature: Support of "Keywords" of desktop entries which are taken into account when searching (GH #159)
• New feature: Support for animations. Currently only one actor (XfdashboardCollapseBox) trigger an animation signal to open or close the collapsed area. All default themes of xfdashboard will slide in or out the collapsed area smoothly when animation is enabled (which is enabled by default).
• New feature: The user can turn on or off animations in the settings application.
• New feature: Support of more animations. So an actor can request an animation when a class or pseudo-class is added or was removed. Also an actor requests an animation when it was created and shown for the first time. Currently at last an animation is requested when the actor was moved and or resized.
• New feature: Support of animation if an actor is destroyed. It will be marked as destroyed by adding a CSS pseudo class "destroying". The actor will be destroyed finally when animation ends.
• New feature: Introduced a new signal 'actor-created' emitted at stage where a newly created actor was placed on. Plugins can connect to this signal to detect new actors they are interested in and to modify them.

• New feature: Introduced a new signal "initialized" in XfdashboardApplication which is emitted when primary instance is fully initialized, that means all managers and the stage were set up successfully.

• New plugin 'middle-click-window-close' which allows the user to close windows in windows view with a middle click. This plugin is not configurable. (GH #128)

• New plugin: Added dummy example search provider plugin. It's main purpose is to provide a skeleton for creating new search provider plugins.

• Enhancement: Changed loading key bindings to one-or-nothing to incremental loading. The default behaviour how bindings are loaded has been changed. Previsouly it tried to the first bindings configuration file from these location (in this order): The full path defined at environment variable XFDASHBOARD_BINDINGS_POOL_FILE (if debug mode was enable at configure script), the user's configuration folder (usually $HOME/.config/xfdashboard) and at last the system-wide folder. Now it tries to load the system-wide one first, then the one at user's configuration folder and merges all bindings loaded from there to the one already loaded. At last it check if the environment variable is set (no need for debug mode anymore) and loads the bindings from this file and merges them too. (GH #167)
• Enhancement: Added '–version' command-line parameter to determine the version of xfdashboard running.
• Enhancement: Followed main Xfce project by switching to "foreign" mode at automake
• Enhancement: Added blue theme screenshot. Thanks to gsantner (GH #152)
• Enhancement: The plugin 'hot corner' support also additional monitors and not primary monitor only. This option is configurable by user.
• Enhancement: Use xfce library function instead of implementing own version
• Enhancement: Enviroment varible XFDASHBOARD_PLUGINS_PATH supports now more than one additional path with a colon-seperated list
• Enhancement: Improved loading performance of images and icons at XfdashboardImageContent as it will only start loading when the actor using this icon or image is mapped. Previously the image or icon might have been loaded before the actor is mapped resulting in loading it multiple time as the size of the actor and/or icon or image changed a lot before mapping the actor. The performance was improved to stop loading images or icons unneccessaryly. All actor will benefit of this change automatically, like XfdashboardLabel.

• Enhancement: Improved CSS parser to determine recursion at theme CSS file which causes the application to crash due to run out of memory (GH #143)

• Changed themes/CSS: Rewrote XfdashboardButton by splitting it into a XfdashboardLabel class and make XfdashboardButton a sub-class of it. XfdashboardLabel is exactly the same what XfdashboardButton was but it does not emit the "click" signal.
• Changed themes/CSS: Splitted XfdashboardLiveWindow into two classes. XfdashboardLiveWindowSimple just shows a live preview of a window when possible and XfdashboardLiveWindow is a sub-class of it but adds a title and controls layer (close button) on top of it.
• Changed themes/CSS: Remove themable property 'show-window-content' from XfdashboardLiveWorkspace. Just replace the following CSS: XfdashboardLiveWorkspace { show-window-content: <true or false>; } with: XfdashboardLiveWorkspace XfdashboardLiveWindowSimple { display-type: <icon or live-preview>; }
• Changed themes/CSS: The CSS class "primary-monitor" will be added to or removed from XfdashboardStageInterface depending on the primary state of associated monitor. With this CSS class the stage interface of the primary monitor could be themed different as the other non-primary (secondary) ones.
• Changed themes/CSS: Made XfdashboardDynamicTableLayout stylable and added a new stylable property named "fixed-columns" to disable dynamic allocation of columns depending on largest width of a visible child found and enforce a fixed number of columns. Setting this property to 0 (default) will disable this feature. (GH #168)
• Changed themes/CSS: Properties 'margin-top', 'margin-bottom', 'margin-left' and 'margin-right' of ClutterActor are now themable.

• Changed themes/CSS: Allow windows view to filter windows which are at current workspace via a new themable property called 'filter-workspace-windows'. This new option is set to TRUE by default so that all themes will still work as they did before. (GH #126)

• Replace URLs from goodies.xfce.org to docs.xfce.org (#16229)
• Lots of larger and smaller bug-fixes

• Lots of new API documentation

• Translation: Reduced number of translatable strings drastically
• Translation: New translations for bg, ca, el, id, ja, nb, nl, pt, pt_BR, sl, sq, sv, zh_CN

• Translation: Updated translations for da, de, es, fr, gl, he, it_IT, kk, lt, pl, ru, sr, tr

• Thanks to all translators and contributors

• Fix dialog icons and add title to error dialog
• Go back to actions dialog if image upload fails (#12)
• Go back to actions dialog if GtkFileChooser is dismissed (#33)
• Make radio buttons execute actions on enter/space press
• Exclude shadow borders from CSD windows (!10)
• Capture mouse cursor in rectangle selection (#30)
• Region size should show updated size (!9)
• Add info about Ctrl to "Select region" tooltip
• Replace AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR with AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS (!4)
• Added 24px and 32px icons
• Fix screenshot capture when scale > 1
• Add new App icon and switch to rDNS icon name
• Switch to README.md and foreign automake mode
• Bug #16717: Move from exo-csource to xdt-csource
• Update homepage link at appdata.xml
• 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, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Interlingue, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan (post 1500), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Urdu (Pakistan), Uyghur, Vietnamese

• Add basic GitLab pipeline
• Updated README file
• Add DBG anchors
• Add <icon> amd <iconclick> elements
• Make Save translatable
• Fix config values sometimes going to default
• Fix label sometimes re-appearing
• Enable multi-row support
• Remove unused variables and code
• Fix indentation
• Catch some edge cases
• Set tmp variable default values
• Fix period spinner display when cancelled
• Fix label toggle display when cancelled
• Fix font display when cancelled
• Support new libxfce4ui API
• Change close to save
• Closing config window cancels changes
• Change layout of config dialog
• Make tooltips translatable
• Update support URLs to docs.xfce.org
• Allow compilation with panel 4.15

• Replace deprecated xfce_create_panel_button

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

• Add option to not move cursor after calculations (#3)
• Align spin buttons in properties dialog
• Add close button to properties dialog
• Handle delete event when properties dialog is closed
• Adds new README.md updates AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
• Update URLs from goodies.x.o to docs.x.o (Bug #16155)
• Allow compilation with panel 4.15
• Disable emoji input
• Translation Updates: Albanian, Armenian (Armenia), Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Eastern Armenian, English (Australia), English (Canada), Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Interlingue, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Persian (Iran), Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian

• Dependency Changes:
  • GLib >= 2.52.0
  • GTK >= 3.22.0
• New Features:
  • Allow to change the font size from keyboard/mouse (#46, #54, !60)
  • Switch to asynchronous search (!58)
  • Give more choice for whitespace display (#44, !46)
• Appearance Changes:
  • Improve the look of the search bar
  • Add a spinner to the search widgets
  • Make the occurrences count appear in the search bar
  • Reformulate "Home/End Keys" setting description
• Code Refactoring:
  • Code refactoring around MousepadView properties (!60)
  • Code refactoring around GMenuModel-bindings (!50)
• Bug Fixes:
  • Decrease reference count of anchored documents
  • Filter document signals on the active document
  • Fix a memory leak in the templates menu
  • Fix wrong conversion from uri to filename (#81)
  • Warn when using GLib functions newer than requirements (Mousepad 0.5.0 actually required GLib 2.60 due to such an oversight)
• Translation Updates: Catalan, Chinese (Taiwan), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish

Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.

4.16 was a special cycle in many respects (not only pandemic-wise, but also). One of the corner-stones of the non-code changes concerns our migration to GitLab, which is a change in development workflow and a huge step forward in terms of becoming more contributor-friendly and welcoming. In parts, the humungous changelog of Xfce 4.16 can be attributed to new contributors proposing merge requests (288 merge requests were merged or closed against our core components alone!). We also created a reference Docker container (xfce/xfce-build) and added CI pipelines to all components to ensure we don´t break the build. None of this would have been possible without our hosting being sponsored by Gandi and Fosshost!

Another big change concerns our visual identity, which we updated from a strange mix of random (partly Tango-based) icons and not following any naming scheme to a new, visually consistent set (following the freedesktop.org naming specification and a fixed color palette). We´re aware this will generate some work for icon theme maintainers (if they really want to override our gorgeous icons ;)) but we believe the longterm benefit outweighs this one-time effort.

And then finally we did some housekeeping (e.g. by dropping Gtk2 support code) and we also added features and improvements - all while sticking to a reasonable release cycle timeframe.

So without further ado, here go the main highlights of this release:

• The window manager received lots of updates and improvements again in the area of compositing and GLX. If a primary display was set, the alt-tab dialog will now only be shown there. Furthermore some handy new options to zoom the cursor along with rest of the display as well as an option to keep minimized windows in the most recently used list complement this release.
• We added a new plugin to the panel dubbed "statustray" which combines both StatusNotifier and legacy Systray items. An animated autohide transition now clearly shows the user "where the panel has gone" and a dark mode (enabled by default) makes the panel drop into the background a bit more with bright themes like the Gtk default Adwaita. Quite a few more smaller improvements were also introduced like accessing desktop actions from a Launcher´s right-click menu, the Window Buttons plugin now offering to `Launch a new instance` of an application and the Workspace Switcher now optionally showing automatic numbering for workspaces.
• Support for fractional scaling was added to the display dialog, along with highlighting the preferred mode of a display with an asterisk and adding aspect ratios next to resolutions. Falling back to a working mode after misconfiguring the display layout has also been made more robust.
• A new tab in the "About Xfce" dialog shows basic system information like CPU or GPU type. Furthermore the layout and visuals of the dialog were improved.
• The settings manager has improved search and filter capabilities. Furthermore all settings dialogs now use window decorations drawn by Gtk (client side decorations).
• The "Mime Settings" and "Preferred Applications" dialogs were merged into the "Default Applications" dialog - making it easier for users to set which application handles which filetype or action from one place.
• Our file manager Thunar received a boatload of fixes and quite a few notable features, including pause for copy/move operations, support for queued file transfer, remembering view settings per directory and support for transparency in Gtk themes.
• Our thumbnailing service tumbler became more flexible by being able to exclude paths. Furthermore support for .epub (e-book format) was added.
• The session manager offers improved support for GPG agent 2.1 and the setting dialog was visually improved.
• The power manager received a lot of bugfixes and some smaller features - among them a cleanup of its settings dialog, an optional visual indicator for when `Presentation Mode` is enabled, more accurate battery status icons and automatically dismissing low-power notifications upon the connection of a charger.
• The desktop mostly received bugfixes and small improvements - and the new default wallpaper!
• Our menu library garcon received new APIs and now doesn´t launch applications as children of the process hosting the menu anymore. The previous behavior led to applications crashing along with e.g. the panel.
• The applicaton finder now allows for sorting applications by "frecency" - a combination of frequency and recency.
• Dependency updates: Drop Gtk2, add LibGTop, bump Gtk >= 3.22, GLib and GDBus >= 2.50

An online tour of the changes in Xfce 4.16 can be viewed here:

https://www.xfce.org/about/tour416

A detailed overview of the changes between Xfce 4.14 and Xfce 4.16 releases can be found on the following page:

https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs

This release can be downloaded either as a set of individual packages or as a single fat tarball including all these individual versions:

https://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.16

Best regards,
The Xfce development team

• Set new wallpaper as default
• Add wallpaper for 4.16
• settings: Drop subtitle
• Drop autogenerated xfce-backdrop-settings.desktop.in from git
• Remove GLIB_CHECK_VERSION IFDEFs which are obsolete after glib bump
• bump glib (and gio, gthread, etc) minimum to 2.50.0
• Remove GSourceFunc casts
• Avoid warning, pointer target in assignment differ in signedness
• Translation Updates: Chinese (China), Danish, Greek, Norwegian Nynorsk, Slovenian

Xfce 4.16 is now available for download.

It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:

exo 4.16.0 garcon 0.8.0 libxfce4ui 4.16.0 libxfce4util 4.16.0 thunar 4.16.0 thunar-volman 4.16.0 tumbler 4.16.0 xfce4-appfinder 4.16.0 xfce4-dev-tools 4.16.0 xfce4-panel 4.16.0 xfce4-power-manager 4.16.0 xfce4-session 4.16.0 xfce4-settings 4.16.0 xfconf 4.16.0 xfdesktop 4.16.0 xfwm4 4.16.0

Individual tarballs are available for download now: https://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.16/src

A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here: https://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.16/fat_tarballs

Release notes for 4.16

Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.

You can find a release post summarizing the main changes of this release here: https://xfce.org/about/news

An online tour of the (visual) changes in Xfce 4.16 can be viewed here: https://www.xfce.org/about/tour416

A detailed overview of the changes between Xfce 4.14 and Xfce 4.16 can be found here: https://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs