Xfce Archive

The Xfce project just announced the first maintenance release of the Xfce 4.4 branch, Xfce 4.4.1. There is a changelog, and you can download it from the Sourceforge download page. In case you lived under a rock the past few years: "Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use."

"For years, the lightweight Xfce has been a popular desktop environment for Linux distributions running on older hardware, thanks to its lower demand on resources as compared to KDE and GNOME; it's an ideal desktop for machines with less than 256MB of memory. Until recently, however, using Xfce was a little laborious, but with its latest release last month, Xfce is a much more usable desktop environment."

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.4.0 has just been released. Xfce 4.4 features new tools such as the much awaited Thunar file manager as well as several improvements in its core components. Benedikt Meurer had also prepared a tour for the newcomers.

"A new bug fix release of Xfce 4.2 is available. This release is supposed to be the last release for the 4.2 branch. It includes several fixes ported from the current development branch. This release should not be confused with the upcoming Xfce 4.4 release, it's a bug fix release of the previous stable branch. Get it from this page."

The Xfce development team is pleased to announce that the first release candiate of Xfce 4.4 is now available for download. A lot of bugs were fixed during the last two months and several new features were added. For example the brand new Xarchiver 0.4.0 is included, trash support was added to Thunar and xfdesktop, and the overall memory usage was reduced. See the ChangeLog for a complete list.

The Xfce development team is pleased to announce that Xfce 4.4 beta2 is now available for download. Besides Mousepad and Thunar, this release also includes the new Xfce archive manager Xarchiver. Other than that a larger number of bugs wered fixed, and several core components wered improved. See the changelog for details.

"Every major release of the 4.x series of Xfce has been pretty major. 4.0 was the result of over a years work, a major rewrite of the entire desktop. 4.2 saw the introduction of major features and enhancements that were incomplete for 4.0, and new developers as Xfce4 gained popularity. 4.4 is going to be a major upgrade to Xfce, with new components, major upgrades to old ones, and more tools for developers. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what’s coming."

XFCE project released a new development version of its Xfce Foundation Classes, which is a "set of integrated C++ classes for developing Xfce applications on UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux". Here you gain access to the full annoucement (description, minimum dependencies, enhancements from 4.3.0, fixes and, of course, packages downloads).

Benedikt Meurer of XFce is hard at work preparing Thunar, the new XFce-focused file manager. There are four UI suggestions so far, but the first one seems to be the strongest one so far: a mix of GTK+'s file selector and Mac OS X's Finder & PathFinder.

XFCE 4.2.1 was released today.

The WashingtonPost has an interesting article on the matter, but registration required.

As part of the FOSDEM preparations for later this month, the organization has posted three interviews with Alexander Larsson (Nautilus & GnomeVFS maintainer), Matthias Ettrich (creator of KDE & Lyx, now at Trolltech) and Oliver Fourdan (creator of XFce).

MadPenguin reviews and details the new XFce visual installer.

The third Release Candidate of the new version 4.2 of Xfce is now available for download. This third Release Candidate provides several bugfixes over the second Release Candidate. Also see the graphical installation wizards and changelog.