Xfce 4.20 Desktop Released With Wayland Improvements & New Features

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays.

Xfce 4.20 was released right on schedule today as the newest feature update to this desktop environment. There are new features, a "gazillion" bug fixes, and various minor improvements. Much of the focus though was on preparing for better Wayland support while continuing to keep X11 compatibility.

Wayland improvements were a major focus for Xfce 4.20 though it remains experimental in this release. Only "advanced users" are encouraged to try the Wayland support. Using Xfce 4.20 on Wayland means having to resort to a compositor like Labwc or Wayfire with Xfce not yet having a native Wayland compositor -- but plans are for Xfwm4 to eventually support Wayland.

Aside from the ongoing Wayland work, Xfce 4.20 brings improvements to icon and thumbnail scaling, Exo enhancements, the new libxfce4windowing library for handling windowing concepts in a windowing system independent way, Thunar file manager improvements, various performance optimizations, and much more.

Read more about the many Xfce 4.20 features via the release announcement.