So finally – here goes the official post for the Xfce 4.14 release…

Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course of last week.

So I’m pleased to give you the official Xfce 4.14 tour, which nicely summarizes many of the nice user-facing changes that we pushed into the release (despite it being planned as feature-less, porting-only).

We’re also working on other aspects of our website, like the screenshot reel on the frontpage, which is mostly up-to-date now, and the screenshots section. If you have more screenshots that you think we – and everyone else – should see, please get in touch via IRC (join #xfce on freenode) or the mailing list and if we like it too, we’ll gladly add it!

What’s next?

Well, obviously Xfce 4.16, for which the planning phase just started. We want to certainly stick closer to our release model (which prescribes a 6-month release cycle) this time and go for roughly a year to get to our next stable release. To some extent the schedule will depend on the outcome of the planning phase, but one thing I’m pretty sure I can announce straight away is that we’re not going for the next technological jump (yet) – so don’t expect Wayland or Gtk4 to play a major part in the coming cycle.

However, what we will need to do is some house-keeping and improving things for ourselves and potential contributors. We are strongly considering to follow freedesktop.org and Gnome in terms of switching to Gitlab (for Git and issues at first). They have done a tremendous job and as someone who recently contributed to one of the Gnome libraries I can say the bar is so much lower than what we currently have with Xfce (read: create bugzilla account, report bug, attach patch, wait patiently…).

In any case, enjoy Xfce 4.14 and join us to make 4.16 a great (and shorter) cycle!