Xfce 4.18 Planning Begins With An Eye On Wayland Application Support

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning.

Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß laid out some of the recent 4.16 maintenance work and early stage work around Xfce 4.18. Additionally, Xfce developers have been working to enhance their developer documentation to make it easier to attract new developers.

Some of the new Xfce work includes porting its Task Manager to Xfconf and supporting client-side decorations, a new icon naming scheme, and updating various Xfce plug-ins.

There is also now an Xfce 4.18 road-map that for now puts the current state as in the initial planning phase. There isn't yet a firm timeline for the Xfce 4.18 cycle if the developers will aim for releasing in calendar year 2021 or if it will be bumped into 2022 given we are already through Q1.

Among the features to be explored for Xfce 4.18 is Wayland support in applications.

The brief post-4.16 Xfce status update can be found on Simon's blog.