by 
The October 2021 issue of my exclusive “Xfce’s Apps Update” roundup is out now and it’s packed with awesome news about some of your favorite Xfce applications, plugins, and tools.
The month of October 2021 brought some great application releases for users of the lightweight Xfce desktop environment, starting with the powerful Ristretto image viewer, which has been updated to version 0.12.0, a release that introduces the ability to choose the default scale, support for entering full-screen mode by double clicking on the image, and the ability to keep the scale in memory for each loaded image.
Ristretto 0.12.0 also brings lots of performance improvements over previous releases by optimizing directory loading and various image viewer redraw functionality, including animation, background color, clock, selection box, and overlay scrolling, which has been disabled in this release. In addition, this release removes the shadow of the toolbar buttons and avoids redrawing of the main window when focus is lost or using the Cairo Xlib backend to create surfaces.
But wait, there’s more, as Ristretto now automatically hides the thumbnail scrollbar when it’s not used, makes use of the same background for both the image and its thumbnail, and offers a much-improved Flatpak package.
The CPU Graph plugin for the Xfce4 panel has been updated as well in October. In fact, two new versions were released, 1.2.4 and 1.2.5, which introduce new icons, slightly improve CPU count detection when CPUs are offline, fix a CPU topology initialization memory leak, lower the number of false positives in sub-optimal SMT scheduling, lower peak memory consumption in case of a long CPU load history, and increase type-safety of the return types of callback functions.
Also updated in October is the Xfdashboard GNOME Shell dashboard-like interface for use with Xfce desktop, to version 0.9.5, a release that fixes the signal definition of “can-suspend” at XfdashboardCore that prevented it to return the correct value if suspend is supported, even when Xfdashboard was run in daemon mode.
The Xfce Terminal 0.9.0 modern terminal emulator app was released as well in October, a development release that adds alternative shortcuts for zooming, adds a menu entry to send signals to a foreground process, improves options parsing for both short and long forms, expands the scrolled window and makes the dialog size 70 percent of the parent, improves the “–tab” and “–window” behavior, adds Fill background image style, and introduces support for the new libxfce4ui XfceTitledDialog API.
Last but not least, the Whisker Menu alternate application launcher for the Xfce desktop has been updated to verison 2.6.1, a release that fixes menu toggling, adds the missing minimize and maximize buttons in the Settings dialog, and makes the icon in multi-row panels bigger.
That’s it for Xfce’s Apps Update roundup for October 2021. You should expect the new app versions to arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution in the coming days, so make sure that you keep your installations up to date at all times.
More details about the new application releases presented in this roundup can be found here.
Last updated 2 years ago
