14 DAY TRIAL // With the Planning Phase and Dependency Freeze development stages behind them, the Xfce developers have officially kicked off the development phase of the upcoming Xfce 4.16 desktop environment.
Xfce 4.16 won't be as big as Xfce 4.14, but it will bring some interesting and exciting changes, such as the move to a newer and modern GTK release, GTK3, as developer Simon Steinbeiß recently announced that the optional GTK2 dependency is being dropped from Xfce 4.16.
"In the 4.14 cycle we tried to do a 1:1 port of what used to be our Gtk2 desktop environment, avoiding visual changes. In the 4.16 cycle we plan to harmonize the appearance of certain elements that either became inconsistent through the port or already were inconsistent before," said Simon Steinbeiß.
Among other changes, the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment will also introduce a new dependency on libgtop to display information about the system in the "About" dialog, a dark panel, initial support for client-side decorations, as well as some smaller improvements and goodies for the Thunar file manager.
Xfce 4.16 also promises a new "slide out" animation for panel's autohide modes, the Launcher plugin will be able to display the desktop actions of a launcher item in the right-click menu, support for scaled mirror mode will be available in Display Settings, and a new "Night Light" feature in the Power Manager to reduce strain on the eyes.
Xfce 4.16 expected to arrive in mid-2020
As revealed in August by developer Simon Steinbeiß, the Xfce 4.16 desktop environment is expected to hit the streets in early next year. It won't take years to release another maintenance update, like it was with Xfce 4.14, due to a new, rapid development cycle.
With that in mind, Xfce 4.16 should arrive in mid-2020, and we will probably see in installed by default with the upcoming Xubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system in late April. Xfce 4.16 will be developed under the Xfce 4.15.x umbrella, and there will be three pre-release versions released until the final release.
