14 DAY TRIAL // XFCE fills a particular niche for Linux users, a lightweight desktop environment built entirely on GTK2. It's been two years from the last major release, but XFCE 4.8 is finally here to the delight of fans everywhere.
The latest version brings quite a few new features, both user facing as well as under the hood, things like better remote shares support, a brand new panel app, a new file operations dialog and many others.
Underneath, technologies like ThunarVFS and HAL with GIO, udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit should make XFCE play well with most modern Linux distros.
"Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6," the XFCE team announced.
"Xfce 4.8 is our attempt to update the Xfce code base to all the new desktop frameworks that were introduced in the past few years," the announcement added.
The Thunar file manager got one big update with the inclusion of support for GVFS. This, in turn, means that Thunar will now be able to handle remote shares via FTP, Windows Shares, WebDav and SSH servers.
The file operations process dialog got an update as well, it now groups all operations in the same window, making multiple tasks a lot more manageable.
The XFCE panel has been rewritten. It now supports proper background transparency, a great addition in the looks department, and comes with enhanced positioning and size handling.
Other improvements to the XFCE panel include a new item editor, drag-and-drop launchers, and a new directory menu plugin. The panel in XFCE 4.8 also supports all XFCE 4.6 plugins.
"We also improved our settings dialogs. The display configuration dialog now supports RandR 1.2, detects screens automatically and allows our users to pick their favorite resolution, refresh rate, rotation," XFCE noted some of the other updates.
"Screens can be configured to either work in clone mode or be placed next to each other. Keyboard selection has become easier and more user-friendly. Also, the manual settings editor has been updated be more functional," it continued
XFCE 4.8.0 is available for download here on Softpedia.