After two years of development, the Xfce community has announced the release of Xfce 4.18. Xfce 4.18 is a major release of a popular open-source desktop project and brings several new features, bug fixes, and minor improvements. Thunar - the file manager - gets several improvements from the GSoC 2021 and GSoC 2022 programmes.

Xfce 4.18 featured image

What is new in Xfce 4.18?

The following section briefly highlights the noteworthy improvements in Xfce 4.18.

  • xfce4-panel combines DateTime plugin and Clock plugin into a single plugin. The new Clock plugin introduces a new binary time mode and provides a sleep monitor.
  • Xfdesktop - enables the option to hide the ‘Delete’ option from the context menu. Also, a confirmation message is introduced to before rearranging desktop icons.
  • The search box in xfce4-settings is simple now. It will be shown without any slider or button.
  • xfce4-display-settings receives minor improvements and the option to decide what to do when new displays are connected.
  • During the selection of a new theme, it is now possible to automatically set a corresponding xfwm4 theme, if available.
  • Thunar introduces image preview option. You can either see the preview on embedded mode or on side panel.
  • Thunar offers undo/redo options for file operations.
  • Files can be highlighted by setting the background and the filename to different colors.
  • Thunar introduces recusive search operations.
  • Workspace setting will now work as well with other window managers.
  • Improved support for UI scaling and fix for many blurry icons in the core components during scaling. The scaling improvement implies better HiDPI screen support.
  • All the header bars of Xfce windows are dialogs are rendered by Xfwm4 window manager. Some applications offers optional client side decoration (CSD)

For further information on Xfce 4.18, see the official release announcement on the projects website.

Download Xfce 4.18

The Xfce 4.18 Desktop will be sooner available in some of the GNU/Linux distributions. Meanwhile, if you are an advanced user, you can download the packages from Xfce website.

Download Xfce 4.18