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The March 2021 issue of my Xfce’s apps update roundup continues with new releases of Thunar, Xfdashboard, Gigolo, and several panel plugins.
The development team behind the widely used and lightweight Xfce desktop environment have done a great job this month keeping several important apps and plugins updated with new features, improvements, bug fixes, and updated translations.
The star of this month is Thunar, Xfce’s default file manager, which received not one but three maintenance updates to version 4.16 that re-introduce alternative shortcuts for the zoom functionality, add the ability to select the copied files after copy operation, prevent it from merging folders when creating a copy with same name, add the ability to reload the current directory before selecting new files, add the ability to hide the “properties” menu-item for unmounted devices, and revamp the documentation to modernize and uniform it across components.
Some of these improvements also landed in the next major version of Thunar, which promises major new features like split view and file creation times. The latest development release, Thunar 4.17.1, also adds the ability to open a new folder after its creation in the Shortcuts View, a more specific device eject label, improved device unmount messages, and support for toggling the menu visibility when pressing the F10 key if the menu is hidden.
Xfdashboard, a GNOME Shell-like dashboard for Xfce, also received one maintenance update and two development releases in March, which introduce a couple of new features that improve its settings, implemented a new color class with support for solid colors (single colors) and path gradients, and changed the default theme to make use of the new path gradients at outlines.
Also updated in March 2021 is Gigolo, a graphical utility that makes it easier to manage connections for remote filesystems using the GIO and GVFS technologies. Gigolo received a new icons that follow the new style and reverse DNS format, as well as in the window titlebar, now only shows an error dialog if the host field is visible or required, and several bug fixes and updated translations.
Several Xfce plugins have been updated as well this month. This include the Netload (Network Monitor) and System Load Monitor plugin, which switched to rDNS naming. The Netload plugin also got a better looking progress bar and a new ‘About’ dialog, and the System Load Monitor plugin now features a simple network bandwidth monitor that uses libgtop as a fallback and received various bug fixes.
Also updated this month were the Battery Monitor plugin, which gets a Help button in the Properties dialog, improved support for very small panels, and drops the subtitle from settings dialog, as well as the CPU Frequency plugin, which now features an improved CPU icon color that respects the frequency and switches to symbolic close icons.
In related news, the Xfce project has been accepted as one of the organizations in the Google Summer of Code 2021 event, which will take place from June 7th to August 31st. On this occasion, the Xfce team is looking for students to boost the project and eventually recruit new contributors and maintainers.
If you want to receive Xfce’s apps update for March in your GNU/Linux distribution, make sure you update your installations as soon as possible. The packages should already be available in the stable software repositories of various popular distros using the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment series.
Image credits: XFCE Nation
Last updated 3 years ago
