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Xubuntu technical lead and Xfce core developer Sean Davis shares today a progress update for the upcoming Xubuntu 21.04 operating system, due for release in late April 2021.
For those who don’t know yet, Xubuntu is a lightweight and official Ubuntu flavor that uses the Xfce desktop environment as its default graphical interface.
As Canonical’s devs are currently working hard on the next major Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo), the Xubuntu team is doing the same and they added a neat set of new features and improvements in the upcoming release.
Xubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) promises the be an awesome release, shipping with the latest and greatest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment by default, which is already a huge change in the upcoming release since it adds numerous new features and enhancements, including a new look and feel.
Moreover, Xubuntu 21.04 will feature many internal and visual changes to enable mouse cursor support for Snap apps, support for smaller screens like those of mobile phones, window focus support for the PulseAudio plugin, a new “Sound” entry in the Settings Manager, and Xfce Terminal featured in the menu.
Also updated is the file manager, which now lets you open folders in a new tab with the middle mouse click, and no longer lets you change the window icon for special folders, such as Desktop, Documents, and others.
In addition, Xubuntu 21.04 will include new apps in its live image, such as the HexChat IRC client and Synaptic package manager. Also included is the adwaita-icon-theme-full package to make the Adwaita icon theme fully functional, and the mlocate command, which replaces plocate to make Catfish offers faster lookups.
Among other noteworthy changes, Xubuntu 21.04 appears to have adopted the Ayatana indicator stack from its bigger brother Ubuntu, which is accompanied by the Xfce Indicator Plugin and LightDM GTK+ greeter. Also, the separator between the clock and the tray in the Xfce Panel with text padding has been replaced.
But wait, there’s more, as Xubuntu 21.04 will feature new keyboard shortcuts to make navigation faster. These include Ctrl+Alt+Delete for displaying the logout dialog, Ctrl+Shift+Escape for launching the Task Manager, Super+R for launching the Application Finder, as well as Super+E and Ctrl+Alt+F for launching the file manager.
Some things that were present in previous Xubuntu releases are no longer there in Xubuntu 21.04. These include the StatusNotifier plugin, which was replaced with Systray, the “File System” and “Removable Device” icons, as well as of the applications menu from the right-click menu, which were removed from the desktop, and the Xfce Terminal Settings, TexInfo and Pavucontrol, which were removed from the menu.
Other than that, the Xubuntu devs have updated the documentation to help newcomers get started with the lightweight Ubuntu flavor much faster. However, the documentation still needs a lot of work as it wasn’t updated since Xubuntu 18.04, and the devs are looking for help from the community.
All in all, it looks like Xubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) will be an awesome release for fans of the Xfce desktop environment and Ubuntu Linux. Of course, Xubuntu 21.04 will also include all the core components of Ubuntu 21.04, such as the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, Python 3.9, GCC 10.2, GNU C Library 2.33, and many others.
Last updated 3 years ago
