The final pre-release before Xfce 4.14 stable is out since two days ago so here goes a quick look at the most notable bugfixes. While this release was optional, we decided to give ourselves a little more time for bugfixes and translation updates to flow in, which results in sticking to the original plan of releasing 4.14 in mid-August.

That said, many components only received translation updates, which hopefully means there are no more bugs to fix in them 😉

Some highlights

xfce4-session

We worked again towards the reducing of race conditions between xfsettingsd (which applies all kinds of X and Gtk related settings like font, theme, display layout) and other Xfce components that rely on these settings (like xfwm4 or the xfce4-panel).

xfmw4

Various fixes related to compositing found their way into the release as well as improvements to looking for fallback window icons, especially helping with e.g. Electron-based applications.

Another fix in this release concerned the placement of new windows, which are now defaulting to the current display (i.e. the one with the mouse cursor).

Thunar

A fix for mounting external drives was part of this release (sometimes they were erroneously mounted with root privileges) as well as a bug that caused Thunar to use 100% CPU when the parent directory wasn’t readable.

Finally some usability improvements were added (right-click drag and drop, additional zoom accelerators, keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs).

xfce4-panel

Various bugfixes, most of them affecting plugins (tasklist fixes for the new group indicator, directory-menu, clock). As with Xfwm4, we also improved the fallback lookup for window icons for the panel.

Considered disabling Gtk+2 support by default but then reverted because of problems with building docs. In general support for Gtk+2 plugins will remain as part of the final 4.14 release of the panel and will only be removed in the 4.16 cycle.

xfce4-power-manager

Support for xfce4-screensaver was added in this release. Furthermore the power manager now checks if the panel plugin is present and automatically hides the systray item in this case. This is especially interesting for distributions like Fedora that ship a vanilla Xfce and would end up with both the systray item (which is enabled by default in the power manager to always have a fallback for the user) and the panel plugin (which got added to the new default panel layout). Finally screen-dimming and the inactivity-action (e.g. suspend on inactivity) now get inhibited by video playback in players that support this (e.g. a YouTube video in Chromium). A patch for parole for this feature is already in review.

What’s next?

Well we’re currently ironing out the (hopefully) last quirks and bugs that we find – some of them may actually result in a bit of work for translators.

Furthermore we have finally branched off the 4.12 documentation on docs.xfce.org and started to update and extend it for 4.14. As an example, we have added a WIP page about the newly added color dialog of xfce4-settings.

Only two more weeks until the final release…