Xfce 4.16 To Drop GTK2 Support, Explore Some Client-Side Decorations

Prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has shared more of the group's plans for the planned 2020 release of Xfce 4.16.

After the much belated Xfce 4.14 release, the developers are working hard to release about one year from now while ultimately striving to get on a six-month release cadence.

With the expedited Xfce 4.16 release compared to 4.14, they are already talking about the feature plans:

GTK2 support was left intact, but that is being nuked now for this next release.

- For Xfce 4.16 they seek to "harmonize the appearance of certain elements that either became inconsistent through the [GTK3] port or already were inconsistent before."

- Investigating client-side decorations where it makes sense, but don't expect any radical changes or complete overhaul of CSD support for the 4.16 cycle.

- Many smaller improvements to the Thunar file manager.

- The new dark mode option for the Xfce Panel.

- Support for scaled mirror mode and other new settings.

- Likely adding a night light mode to the Xfce power manager.

- Other smaller changes.

More details on Simon's blog.