The continued development has been recorded by ToZ on the Xfce Forums, and Skunnyk in his blog (parts 1, 2, and 3). Both are worth a look to see how far Xfce has come in recent months. If you’re looking for screenshots, you’ll find a few at those links and a gallery at the end of this post.

With just one week until the determined release date (February 28), string freeze is behind us and all that remains is bug fixes. If you’ve got some development skills, why not swing by the Xfce Bugzilla and provide some patches? Right now your patches have the best chance of being noticed and merged, so your hard work won’t go to waste! And development is not the only way to contribute…

Areas for Contribution

Check out the Xfce Contribute page for more details.

Fixing “easy“, “critical“, and any other bugs you never want to see again

Reviewing bugs and patches: Some bugs date back to 2007 and there is a good possibility they are no longer valid. If you don’t think one applies any longer, comment on it indicating as much.

Testing: With the sudden influx of fixes and new releases, we need testers more than ever. Take the new releases for a spin and let us know if you see anything… odd.

Translations: Is your native language missing from Xfce? Is the choice of words not quite right? Help us out!

Screenshots

The following screenshots are not an exhaustive list of the new features, but rather a select list of highlights in the upcoming release.

A clean screenshot showing off the desktop and panel shadows (new in xfwm4)

Per-monitor configuration was greatly improved during the development cycle.

CSDs (client-side decorations) work out of the box with compositing enabled in xfwm4.

Many enhancements have been added to the alt-tab switcher. Window previews, a list view, nicer highlights for windows.

Quickly pick a theme with the new color previews.

New icon theme previews show off the most common icons in each theme.

A new drag-and-drop configuration and the ability to add a “primary” display.

A quick selection tool for common display configurations.

Lots of bugfixes, and a new percentage bar indicating free space in the Properties dialog.

Intelligent hiding is new with this release. The panel will hide to avoid covering up windows.

Control power events based on inactivity.

Fine-grained control over display power settings.

See a wealth of power information for attached devices

The power manager panel plugin allows quick brightness settings and shows battery life for attached devices.