Xfce 4.16 Should Be Out Next Year But Without GTK4 Or Wayland

With Xfce 4.14 having finally been released last week following a four year development cycle, prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has begun talking about the now-started Xfce 4.16 development cycle.

Simon acknowledges the need to improve their release model and get back on track to around six-month release cycles. But for the Xfce 4.16 release, he envisions it being about a year or so out to their next stable release.

Steinbeiß seems quite sure for Xfce 4.16 they do not want to embark on any major technical changes like adding GTK4 support or achieving Wayland support. Talked about ideas at this point for Xfce 4.16 include house-keeping of the code and improving it for themselves and future contributors. Aside from the code itself, they are looking at following GNOME/FreeDesktop.org to using a Gitlab driven workflow.

"In any case, enjoy Xfce 4.14 and join us to make 4.16 a great (and shorter) cycle!" More details in this blog post.