Xfce’s Apps Update for January 2023: New Releases of Thunar, Xfce Panel, and Whisker Menu

Includes new releases of thunar-shares-plugin, xfce4-datetime-plugin, xfce4-notifyd, and xfdesktop.
Xfce’s apps January 2023

The January 2023 issue of my exclusive “Xfce’s Apps Update” monthly roundup is here to inform fans of the lightweight Xfce desktop environment about the latest releases of their favorite Xfce apps, plugins, tools, and more.

January 2023 was quite busy for the Xfce developers as they kicked off the development cycle of the next major release of the desktop environment, Xfce 4.20, which will finally bring Wayland support. As expected, the Xfce 4.20 development cycle takes place under the Xfce 4.19 umbrella, and several components are already available for early adopters.

But January 2023 also brought many updated apps and plugins, starting with two updates of the Thunar file manager up to version 4.18.3. These improved the bulk renamer to remember the last active mode, added support for properly handling resident plugins, and fixed several bugs to prevent a rare crash when closing the app or after closing windows.

The Xfce Screenshooter screenshot utility (xfce4-screenshooter) also received several updates during January, up to version 1.10.3, which fixed capture of CSD windows, fixed active window and region capture modes, added support for saving the preferences of the panel plugin, and added a preview of the selected file in the save dialog.

The Xfce Panel (xfce4-panel) has been updated to version 4.18.1, a release that fixes scrolling through window buttons and group button visibility, fixes sync timeout for the clock applet, and addresses a bunch of issues for the tasklist applet.

Also released in January 2023 is Thunar Shares Plugin 0.3.2, which lets you quickly share a folder using Samba from Thunar, Xfce Datetime Plugin 0.8.3, which shows the date and time in the panel, and Xfce Whisker Menu Plugin 2.7.2, which provides an alternate menu for the Xfce desktop environment. All these releases contain various minor bug fixes and updated translations, but the new Whisker Menu version makes use of Thunar to add launchers to the desktop.

Last but not least, the xfce4-notifyd notification daemon for Xfce received three updates in January, up to version 0.7.2, which brought support for notification sounds, an option to hide the panel button when there are no unread notifications, the ability to disallow certain apps to send critical notifications, a context menu that allows individual known application deletion, the ability to exclude specific applications from the log, a redesigned known apps panel, and Wayland support.

That’s it for my Xfce’s Apps Update roundup for January 2023. For more details on the changes mentioned in this article, check out the Xfce mailing list archive. Meanwhile, you can install these updates on top of your Xfce 4.18 installation from the stable software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution.

See you again with another roundup at the end of February 2023.

Last updated 1 year ago

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