Heya, folks! Following the announcement of the first pre-release of XFCE 4.20, we started work on updating our XFCE packages, so there would be less to do once 4.20 is actually released. If you would like to follow the development, watch this Pull Request.

Similar to what has been done recently with major Plasma and GNOME updates, I have created a separate repository that people wanting to test this new version of XFCE4 can add.

Warning!

This is meant to be used for testing purposes only! Regular users should not use this repository!

How to test

If you are an XFCE user on the Unstable repository, see our Help Center article on using a local repository. While this repository isn't local, the information and steps are the same.

  1. Remove your current repositories
  2. Add the XFCE testing repository
      sudo eopkg add-repo "XFCE4 Testing" https://shared.getsol.us/ebonjaeger/xfce-testing/eopkg-index.xml.xz
  3. If you had a local repository set up, re-add it
      sudo eopkg add-repo Local /var/lib/solbuild/local/eopkg-index.xml.xz
  4. Re-add the Unstable Solus repository
      sudo eopkg add-repo Solus https://cdn.getsol.us/repo/unstable/eopkg-index.xml.xz
  5. Update the repository indexes and install updates
      sudo eopkg ur && sudo eopkg update

After installing updates, restart your system.

Providing feedback

Since this is to test the next major release of a desktop environment, feedback and reporting bugs are very important. If you encounter an issue, please leave a comment on the Pull Request linked above. That way, we can ascertain if the issue is an issue with Solus packaging, or an upstream issue that then needs to be reported to XFCE.

thank you for the hard work and looking forward to more Wayland options and XFCE 4.20

Some packaging changes have been made. If you've installed the test package updates, you will need to reinstall the changed packages.

  • xfce4-session:

    • The Wayland session has been split into its own package: xfce4-session-wayland
  • xfdesktop:

    • Set the default background via the build script
    • Disable the desktop menu module (it was hidden by our branding, anyway)
    • Enable showing notifications when mounts are added or removed

I have the xfce4-session reinstalled (command sudo eopkg it --reinstall xfce4-session) and the option to log in to Wayland is gone now, which is fine if it's not ready yet. But thought, the main focus of this release is about Wayland support, isn't it? If not the Wayland support, what are the changes from user's perspective? I find no issue for the moment after upgraded to 4.20, but also seeing no changes 🙂. Please correct me if I missed some details in their announcement.

And thank you for maintaining this. I find XFCE is very stable at the moment except a few time freezes with no reason, but it's acceptable.

    minh But thought, the main focus of this release is about Wayland support, isn't it?

    It's more about preparation for Wayland support. The XFCE developers have been very adamant that Wayland on XFCE is still very experimental for 4.20.

    etokarew That would be firewalld. The applet is a separate package; I forget the name. Searching for firewalld should show it.

    This question is a little frivolous, but, how did you put the Solus logo in About Xfce? It looks beautiful.

      joluveba we don't do anything special. It probably gets it from /etc/os-release or something.

        Just pushed a change to xfce4-panel to enable gtk-layer-shell support on Wayland. Hopefully that solves the issue of the panel floating in the middle of the screen with window decorations... xD

        a month later

        XFCE 4.20 has been released and is now in the Unstable repository! If you added the testing repository, remember to remove it with:

        sudo eopkg rr "XFCE 4.20"

        Whether you tested the pre-release or not, you will get the 4.20 update as normal.