The team behind Xfce, the venerable Linux desktop environment, announced the release of version 4.20, bringing a number of improvements and experimental Wayland support.

Xfce is one of the oldest Linux desktop environments (DE), and is remains one one of the most popular, usually coming in just behind Gnome and KDE Plasma. Xfce is particularly known for being incredibly stable and efficient, providing a fast, reliable experience on everything from the newest computers to older machines getting a new lease on life.

Version 4.20 has been in development for nearly two years and brings a slew of improvements.

After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20.

Since Xfce 4.18 a lot of major development happened. Our team added many nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that was released for your pleasure.

The major focus during this development cycle was the preparation of the codebase to be ready for Wayland. So that we meanwhile have experimental Wayland support for most components. More details in the ‘Wayland’ section below.

Wayland

One of the biggest changes is experimental support for Wayland, the display server that is replacing X11 on Linux. Gnome and Plasma already have Wayland support, with both DEs planning to switch to Wayland-only in the future.

Smaller DEs—such as Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and others—have been working to implement Wayland support, making 4.20 an important release for the project. Even so, the developers warn that Xfce support is still experimental in 4.20, meaning it should only be used by experienced users who don’t mind a bit of extra troubleshooting and paper cuts.

Important Notice: Please be aware that the Wayland support in Xfce 4.20 is experimental. It is recommended for advanced users only, as you may encounter bugs and experience incomplete functionality. Proceed with caution!

Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.

This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, “libxfce4windowing” was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components.

So far Xfce does not feature a compositor which supports Wayland. If you want to run Xfce in Wayland, Labwc and Wayfire will give you the best results. A detailed instruction on this can be found here. Please be aware that Wayland support is still experimental!

Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

Non-Wayland Features and Improvements

Aside from Wayland support, Xfce 4.20 includes a slew of features and improvements, including to the Thunar file manager, Appfinder, the Xfce panel, Power Manager settings, Desktop settings and views, as well as additional improvements to various settings and options.

There are a couple of changes in particular that will be welcome improvements for many users.

Power Manager

The Screen Locking settings under Power Manager have been improved and streamlined.

There is no dedicated “security” tab anymore. Lock screen management was massively simplified and “Light Locker” was dropped. “lock-on-sleep” is now synchronized with xfce4-session and xfce4-screensaver.

Screen locking settings are now only handled by xfce4-screensaver to avoid conflicts.

Similarly, the team added the ability to manager power profiles.

Support for handling different power profiles via power-profiles-daemon was added.

The overall charge state calculation was wrong for some cases and is now fixed.

When the critical power dialog pops up, unintentional user actions are now prevented.

There is now support for the hybrid sleep mode.

The device details tab now as well shows the energy rate.

Thunar

Thunar was already one of the fastest and most feature-rich file managers available, but the new version improves the performance even more, especially when dealing with a large number of files.

In the past, you might have faced situation involving bigger numbers of files in which thunar showed a freeze. Due to various different performance measures, thunar now is much more bullet-proof for action involving huge numbers of files.

This was achieved by using appropriate container types, moving some actions into separate jobs and throttling of view-updates.

A number of integration test cases will be used in order to keep performance on the current level in the future.

Similarly, file transfer speed has been improved significantly.

For file validation in thunar 4.18.x a md5 checksum was calculated for source and target file. This calculation turned out to be rather slow and actually superfluous. Now files are just compared directly. In addition, the usage of direct I/O operations now attempts to prevent comparison of possibly cached buffers.

An option was added to only copy files in parallel if the relevant devices are in idle state. This prevents possible fragmentation during copy for HDD drives.

Transferring files no longer steals the current focus.

The file transfer question dialog now provides the same options while having less buttons. In addition, file thumbnails now are properly requested by the dialog.

Conclusion

Xfce remains an important project in the Linux and Unix communities, providing users a fast, reliable experience, regardless of the hardware it’s deployed on. Version 4.20 brings some major improvements, and goes a long way toward moving the venerable DE into the future with Wayland adoption.

Those interested in reading the entire list of changes can find it here.