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The Road to Xfce 4.14 Desktop Environment Continues, Aiming at Full GTK3 Porting

Several apps and plugins were already ported to GTK+ 3

May 30, 2017 19:33 GMT  ·  By
Xfce 4.14
   Xfce 4.14

It's been more than a year since the Xfce development team reported on their progress towards the Xfce 4.14 desktop environment release, and today, one of the developers posted an in-depth story about the latest developments.

Xfce 4.14 will be a transitional release where the main goal is to port all of the desktop environment's components to the GTK+ 3 toolkit, just like the MATE team did with the release of the MATE 1.18 desktop environment. For now, the supported GTK+ 3 version appears to be 3.20, but support for GTK+ 3.22 series is coming too.

"GTK+3 minimum version has been bumped to version 3.20 (and maybe 3.22), because of so much changes since gtk 3.14 (broken themes, css), this will remove a lot of ifdef maze and code complexity to support several gtk versions. By the time of 4.14 release, all major distributions will have gtk>3.20," said the dev.

And the good news we want to share with you today is that almost all of Xfce's core components were successfully ported to GTK+ 3, including xfce4-settings 4.13.0, xfce4-session 4.13.0, garcon 0.6.0, xfdesktop 4.13.0, xfce4-panel 4.13.0, tumbler 0.1.90, exo 0.11.2, and libxfce4ui 4.13.1.

Thunar file manager GTK+ 3 port on its way too

As you can see, the development cycle of the Xfce 4.14 desktop environment is done under the 4.13.x umbrella, similar to what the GNOME Project does with its upcoming stable releases of the GNOME desktop environment, so expect to encounter issues if you attempt to compile and install the Xfce 4.13.x packages.

In the meantime, the road towards Xfce 4.14 continues with the porting of the Thunar file manager to the GTK+ 3 technologies, but help is needed, so if you have any GTK+, GDK or Cairo skills, don't hesitate to contact the Xfce Project. GTK+ 3 ports of taskmanager, xfce4-notifyd, panel, and clipman are coming too.

The xfce4-terminal and xfce4-screenshooter apps were also ported to GTK+ 3, along with numerous plugins. If you want to get an early taste of the Xfce 4.14 desktop environment, you are encouraged to take a look at the xfce-test Docker image and check the blog announcement for more details on reporting bugs.