14 DAY TRIAL // After two years of hard work, the Xfce development team had the pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago, February 28, the immediate and general availability of the highly anticipated Xfce 4.12 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
This is a major release of the Xfce desktop environment, as it introduces a great number of new features, updated components, as well as many other attractive improvements. It is considered an update to the Xfce 4.10 desktop environment, which is currently the stable version on numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems. We've also announced earlier the new Xfce 4.12 default wallpaper.
“Today, after 2 years and 10 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.12, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.10. This long period can only be explained by how awesome Xfce 4.10 was. But as all things, it needed some refreshing - and for that we saw lots of new contributors providing valuable feedback, features and bugfixes,” the official release announcement read.
The number of features implemented in Xfce 4.12 are overwhelming
Prominent features of Xfce 4.12 include a brand-new, themable Alt+Tab dialog that includes a list mode and optional windows preview, support for client side decorations, improved window tiling mode (includes corner-tiling capabilities), a new zooming mode, a HiDPI Xfwm theme, intelligent hiding mode for the panel, support for GTK+ 3 plugins on the panel, a new wallpaper settings dialog, and support for adding a different wallpaper on each workspace.
Furthermore, Xfce 4.12 comes with better multi-monitor handling, support for displaying emblems on icons and folder cover art, hibernate and suspend support in the session manager, support for previewing icon sets and themes, libinput support in Xfsettingsd, a greatly improved power manager, and a small pop-up dialog that allows users to setup a new monitor has been added, which will appear each time a new monitor is plugged in.
The Thunar file manager is now better, faster, stronger, smarter
Thunar, the default file manager of Xfce, has also received a huge number of improvements, among which we can mention support for GTK+ 3 bookmarks, support for tabs, improved naming of links and file copies, better keyboard navigation, multiple file properties, better wallpaper support, improved renamers, treeview pane improvements, and numerous bug fixes.
But that’s not all, as Xfce 4.12 also comes with a revamped Settings dialog, support for CSS themes (deprecating their GTK3 theme engine), support for X11 screenblanking, Blu-ray disc burning support in Xfburn, a revamped Task Manager, redesigned Parole Media Player app, rewritten and GTK3 ported Mousepad app, Imgur.com support in the built-in screenshot utility, QR code support in the clipboard manager, improved Eyes, GNOME2 hardware monitor and Netload plugins, as well as a new GNOME Shell-like dashboard.
Download Xfce 4.12 right now via Softpedia or from its website, but keep in mind that we can only offer the source packages. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you wait for your GNU/Linux distribution vendor to make binary packages and release them via their software repositories, so make sure that you check for updates in the next coming days.