Tuxmachines.org has nice review of Xfce 4.4beta1, which provides a more detailed overview than my brief list of major changes.
Conclusion: Things are only getting better with xfce4 4.4. Updated interface configurations, new options, and new applications make this release an exciting prospect. If you’ve never tried xfce or haven’t tried it recently, you owe it to yourself to test it out.
As you might already know, Xfce 4.4BETA1 was released today, and it contains a lot of changes, that have been worked since the last major release. I’m going to present an (incomplete!) list of the most important changes in BETA1. I will not include Thunar here, read the Thunar 0.3.0 release notes for details about Thunar
One of the most often requested features during the Xfce 4.0/4.2 days was support for desktop icons. Xfce 4.4 finally includes support for icons on the desktop.
xfdesktop utilizes Thunar’s libraries to handle application launchers and files/folders on the desktop, and it is also able to display icons for minimized windows on the desktop (a popular CDE feature), or to disable desktop icons all together.
Mousepad, a simple and lightweight text editor, was included as part of Xfce 4.4. Mousepad starts up very fast and provides all the basic text editing features, which makes it a perfect default editor for Xfce.
Orage, the new calendar application based on xfcalendar, provides all the features one would expect from a time management application today, while it remains lightweight and easy to use.
The Xfce Panel was completely rewritten for 4.4, and supports multiple panels and external plugins (running as separate applications and thereby improving the stability of the panel). xftaskbar4 and xfce4-iconbox were dropped from the release, as their functionality is completely provided by the new panel now.
The panel items can now be added and reordered using Drag’n’Drop, and the panel launcher properties dialog was redesigned to make it easier to create and manage launchers with attached menus (there is also support for Zero Install now).
Most of the panel plugins, available via the Xfce Goodies project, have been updated for the new panel, and the new xfce4-xfapplet-plugin allows users to add GNOME panel applets to the Xfce panel.
A new preferred applications framework was imported into Xfce, so users no longer need to edit shell profiles to specify which browser and terminal emulator should be used by Xfce applications.
xfwm4, the Xfce window manager, saw a lot of improvements. One of the most interesting user-visible changes is the inclusion of a window manager tweaks dialog, which allows users to tweak several advanced options of the window manager.
There is also support to tweak the builtin composition manager in the window manager settings if xfwm4 was built with support for the Xcomposite extension.
This is just a very brief list of changes. A more complete review of Xfce 4.4BETA1 should be available during the next weeks.
Xfce 4.4beta1 was finally released today with all the nice stuff (new panel, Mousepad, Orage, Thunar, …). Be sure to grab your copy today!
I just released the second version of the thunar-archive-plugin. It includes a bunch of new translations, and fixes the problem that the folder was not properly reloaded after creating or extracting an archive. It requires Thunar 0.2.2alpha2 or above and File Roller.
Download: http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=910&release_id=9778
Release notes: http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?release_id=9778
Website (with screenshots): http://foo-projects.org/~benny/projects/thunar-archive-plugin/index.html</p>
I just released Thunar-0.3.0beta1 and libexo-0.3.1.6beta1 as part of Xfce 4.4BETA1 (separate tarballs are provided for users of Xfce 4.2.x that don’t want to upgrade yet, and users of other desktop environments). As suggested by the name, it is a beta release and it is thereby considered to be more or less stable in what it does, but it is still not a final version.
You will need atleast libxfce4util 4.2.2, GTK+ 2.6.4, shared-mime-info 0.15 and desktop-file-utils 0.10 to build and run Thunar. In addition Gamin or FAM are highly recommended to enable file system monitoring in Thunar. For HAL support on Linux, the libhal-storage-devel package is required (0.5.0 or above). The README file contains a complete list of dependencies and optional packages.
The official announcement is available at: http://thunar.xfce.org/news.html#2006-04-16
Additional (updated) screenshots are available at: http://thunar.xfce.org/screenshots.html
The source tarballs can be downloaded from: http://thunar.xfce.org/download.html#0.3.0
Installation instructions and documentation are available at: http://thunar.xfce.org/pwiki/
Please report bugs to the Xfce Bug Tracker (product Thunar) at: http://bugzilla.xfce.org/