Xfce 4.12 to be released next week!

[Blue Mountain]

I'm thinking with the new Xfce 4.12 coming out and Ubuntu 14.04.2 with the 3.16 Linux kernel already out that this could be a great next update to LL.

Simon Steinbeiß of Xfce announced this week that a string freeze for 4.12 would go into effect on Friday (today), in allowing translators one week to tidy up their translations. The announcement indicates that Xfce 4.12 is still gearing up to be out the door next weekend, 28 February / 1 March.

Unlike failed Xfce 4.12 plans of the past few years, it looks like this release will actually pan out in one week's time.

BM

Intel is heavily investing in the latest kernels for incrwsong the speed and features supported of their integrated graphics on the newer CPUs. Any improvement that is good for gaming is attractive to Windows switchers IMHO.


- Initial support for Cherryview, the upcoming Atom SoC update with Broadwell derived graphics.

- Support for large cursors. On HiDPI displays rather than limiting to 64x64 cursors, cursors can now be up to the hardware limit of 256x256 pixels.

- Work towards atomic page-flipping.

- Run-time Power Management is now enabled by default for new platforms.

- Universal primary plane support is now in good shape.

- Improved out-of-memory handling.

- Command parser work for some OpenGL/OpenCL features of Haswell.

- Userptr support to let user-space wrap up any malloc'ed allocations into GEM buffer objects.

- Broadwell now supports eDRAM, GPU Turbo, and VEBOX2 support.

- GPU reset improvements.

- Prep work for Dynamic Refresh Rate Switching (DRRS).

- and more...

[altman]

Thanx for sharing , might as well be included on next LL release .

[Valtam]

Unfortunately it's not as easy as just adding the XFCE repo and installing it to LL. We generally don't add bleeding edge Desktop environments to a stable OS, kinda risky! Especially considering how heavily modified LL is. We'll see how this evolves after release.

[altman]

Thanx for explanations Jerry , makes sense .

[Coastie]

... We generally don't add bleeding edge Desktop environments to a stable OS, kinda risky! ...

8)

[Blue Mountain]

The good thing about XFCE is the developers move slow and aim not to break between releases. And I missed adding Whisker Menu updated to 1.50.

I also forgot to add in these links as they'll help check the roadmap, critical bugs list (fixed and open) and individual

Roadmap:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.12/roadmap

Critical Bugs List:
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.12/roadmap/critical-bugs

News with some individual package changlog links to save some time:
http://blog.alteroot.org/articles/2014-0...-xfce.html

BM

[Blue Mountain]

For those wanting to try out XFCE 4.12 early both Manjaro and Xubuntu have built Xfce 4.12 distros already.

Manjaro gives you xfce 4.12 on an Arch Linux base and rolling distro updates to the latest versions of Xfce:

http://manjaro.github.io/Manjaro-XFCE-0....-XFCE-412/
I really like this Manjaro version with Xfce 4.12 it is fricking fast!!! Just google how to add Ubuntu fonts to Manjaro and you get awesome fonts and a fricking fast Xfce 4.12 distro!

Xubuntu gives you Xfce 4.12 on an Ubuntu Linux base:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Xubuntu-1...4381.shtml

And for intermediate users Xfce 4.12 ppa for installing xfce 4.12 on any Ubuntu flavor:

https://launchpad.net/~xubuntu-dev/+arch.../xfce-4.12

BM

[Valtam]

Those are either bleeding edge distros or future series release, completely irrelevant to our approach. If anyone tries to install 4.12 on LL, they won't get support.

[Blue Mountain]

Thats why virtual box is the distro samplers friend. I'd recommend installs on virtual box before deciding to install a distro on the bare metal as your primary operating system.

[Blue Mountain]

Its now officially released!

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Xfce-4-12...4540.shtml

Release notes for 4.12
======================

Today, after 2 years and 10 months of work, we are pleased to announce
the release of the Xfce desktop 4.12, a new stable version that
supersedes Xfce 4.10.

This long period can only be explained by how awesome Xfce 4.10 was. But
as all things, it needed some refreshing -  and for that we saw lots of
new contributors providing valuable feedback, features and bugfixes. As
always, Xfce follows its steady pace of evolution without revolution
that seems to match our users' needs.

In this 4.12 cycle, we mainly focused on polishing our user experience
on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to
take advantage of newly available technologies.

The main highlights of this release are:

- The window manager gained a new themable Alt+Tab dialog with optional
  windows preview and a list mode. Initial Client side decoration
  support was implemented, window tiling mode was improved providing
  support for corner-tiling, and a new zooming mode was added.
  A HiDPI Xfwm theme was also added.
- The panel can now intelligently hide itself, supports Gtk3 plugins,
  and saw lots of its third-party plugins updated to take full
advantage
  of the features added in 4.10.
- The desktop has a new wallpaper settings dialog, per workspace
  wallpaper support, and better multi-monitor handling. It also
supports
  displaying folder coverart and emblems on icons now.
- Our session manager was updated to use logind and/or upower if
  available for hibernate/suspend support. For portability and to
  respect our users' choices, fallback modes were implemented relying
on
  os-specific backends.
- Support for multi-monitor use was improved in a new display settings
  dialog and a quick setup popup on monitor plugging
- The appearance dialog now showcases previews for icons and themes.
- Xfsettingsd now supports libinput.
- Power management was not forgotten: A new panel plugin was created,
  logind/upower support was added to handle battery/lid/brightness
  events, and locking via light-locker was implemented. The settings
  dialog was also revamped, and support for X11 screenblanking was
  added.
- Our file manager, the beloved Thunar, saw an insane amount of
  improvements: tab support, tons of bug fixes, speed-ups, key
shortcuts
  for custom actions, better naming of file copies and links, nice
  freespace bar in properties, tweaks for the renamer and other
dialogs,
  improved keyboard navigation, fixes for the treeview pane, better
  wallpaper support, Gtk3 bookmarks support, multiple file properties..
  need we say more?
- To prepare the future of Xfce with Gtk3, which no longer requires
  theme engines, we are stopping the development of our Gtk theme
  engine,and dropping our Gtk3 engine - theme makers, please update
  your themes to CSS if you want them to work on the next Xfce version.
- Due to gstreamer1.0 having dropped the mixer-interface entirely, and
  xfce4-mixer and xfce4-volumed relying on this interface with
  gstreamer0.10, our mixer application and volume daemon cannot be
  ported to 1.0 and are consequently not maintained anymore.

Xfce wouldn't be what it is right now without all its goodies. In this
area, we also saw a flurry of activity, most notably:

- Xfburn gained BluRay Disc burning support
- Task manager UI was totally revamped, and got ported to Gtk3
- Parole's UI was totally redone, parts of it rewritten with many
  features added. Furthermore it was ported to Gtk3 and gstreamer1.0
- Mousepad was totally rewritten and got an initial port to Gtk3
- Imgur.com support was added to the screenshooter
- A new GNOME-Shell-like dashboard named xfdashboard is now available
- A new alternative menu for the panel named whiskermenu was added
- The GNOME2 hardware monitor plugin was ported to our panel
- Weather plugin got a totally new user interface with powerful
customization options and provides tons of detailed information
- Eyes plugin uses 3D coordinates to calculate its eye position, so
  even more sometimes scary, sometimes funny eyes will spy on you!
- Netload plugin works with the new udev net interface names and can
  be configured to show transfer rates in the panel
- Clipboard manager plugin optionally displays a QR code
- Cpufreq plugin now supports the intel pstate driver and can adapt
  better for different panel sizes and information displayed
- Nearly all plugins have been improved to give the same look and feel
  and to support the new deskbar panel mode


An online tour of the changes in Xfce 4.12 can be viewed here:

  http://xfce.org/about/tour

A more detailed overview of the changes between Xfce 4.10 and Xfce 4.12
can be found on the following page:

  http://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:

  http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.12

**Thank you, everyone!**

A warm thank you all the contributors, translators and packagers for
your efforts in making this release possible. We would also like to
thank our fantastic users and occasional contributors who submitted bug
reports, helped us find issues and sometimes provided patches. We are
currently reviewing all patches sent to us and will include many more
fixes to Xfce in the next release. We would also like to thank the many
people who donated money to our project via Bounty Source
(https://www.bountysource.com/teams/xfce). This will help us meet and
hack on Xfce in the future!

As always, we welcome everyone who would like to contribute to the
development of Xfce!

  http://docs.xfce.org/contribute/start

Best regards,
The Xfce development team

BM