After nearly two years in development, Xfce 4.18 will be officially released on December 15th. This version is the follow-up version of the Xfce 4.16 stable series, adding many new features, such as upgrading the used GTK framework to GTK 4, initially supporting Wayland, and improving core applications.

• Updates for the file manager Thunar

Thunar is the default file manager for Xfce. In Xfce 4.18 it got a lot of new features and extended functionality.

For example, it is now possible toSidebar enable image preview. By default, a larger preview of the selected image is displayed on the left side of the sidebar. In addition, the option of “Independent Preview” is provided, and when enabled, the selected image will be previewed on the right panel by default. As shown below:

Additionally, Thunar’s new editable toolbar allows users toAdd and rearrange toolbar icons.

In addition to the above changes, the Folder Properties dialog has added a new Highlight option for selecting any custom color for the folder icon background and foreground. Ability to quickly navigate complex folder structures.

Other changes:

• Introduced a new bookmark menu that can add the current folder as a shortcut to the sidebar
• Added “Recent” option to the sidebar
• Optimize the status bar information layout
• The “Go” menu provides options for “Recent” and “Search”
• The Edit menu provides options for Undo and Redo
• Add option to restore tabs on startup
• Add option to execute shell script
• …

Of course, stability and performance have also been improved, and many bugs have been fixed.

• Update for desktop and panel

The new version of the panel is set up with two new options. The first is that the panel’s length is now set in pixels, rather than percentages. The second is to add an option to “keep panel in front of window”, which puts the window dialog behind the panel. Before this, the application’s window could only be located on the edge of the panel.

This release provides new font options for the clock program, and four clock layouts:

• date only
• only time
• date and time
• time and date

In addition to the new features of Xfce 4.18 described above, there are many additional bug fixes and performance improvements for the window manager and desktop.

The Wayland migration of the Xfce desktop core and native applications has started. It’s still a long way from being fully ready though. Users probably won’t see many Wayland updates in this release. However, many applications already work fine with Wayland. Click here to view more information about migration status.

Finally, Xfce 4.18 pre2 was just released today, experience address:Xfce 4.18pre2.