A new stable version of the Xfce desktop environment has been released.

Xfce 4.16 released

Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.

4.16 was a special cycle in many respects (not only pandemic-wise, but also). One of the corner-stones of the non-code changes concerns our migration to GitLab, which is a change in development workflow and a huge step forward in terms of becoming more contributor-friendly and welcoming. In parts, the  humungous changelog of Xfce 4.16 can be attributed to new contributors proposing merge requests (288 merge requests were merged or closed against our core components alone!). We also created a reference Docker container ( xfce/xfce-build) and added CI pipelines to all components to ensure we don´t break the build. None of this would have been possible without our hosting being sponsored by  Gandi and  Fosshost!

Another big change concerns our visual identity, which we updated from a strange mix of random (partly Tango-based) icons and not following any naming scheme to a new, visually consistent set (following the freedesktop.org naming specification and a fixed color palette). We´re aware this will generate some work for icon theme maintainers (if they really want to override our gorgeous icons ;)) but we believe the longterm benefit outweighs this one-time effort.

News – Xfce 4.16 released – Xfce