Panel Improvements Merged Ahead Of The Forthcoming Xfce 4.16

Xfce 4.16 continues to move along on new and improved features with hopes of shipping this calendar year. A batch of xfce4-panel improvements were merged today.

A lot of improvements hit xfce4-panel today, namely around the merging of the status notifier plug-in with the system tray plug-in in this panel code. All the patches that hit the Git repository today can be seen here.

This Wiki page outlines the Xfce Panel 4.16 plans and what has been accomplished so far ahead of the official release. Among the work tackled so far this cycle includes adding a dark theme switch in the appearance tab, an auto-hide animation, dropping GTK2 support, the system tray and status notifier improvements now merged, desktop actions support on right-click with the launcher, workspace switcher improvements, and other changes.

Aside from xfce4-panel, for Xfce 4.16 the work remains underway on session improvements, a variety of file manager enhancements, cross-display tiling, and a wide assortment of other items.

The previously published Xfce 4.16 schedule is putting the 4.16pre1 release potentially happening this month along with the soft string freeze, a second pre-release a month later to mark the actual code freeze, a third pre-release after that for the final freeze, and then to have the Xfce 4.16.0 once everything is buttoned up. That schedule pegs Xfce 4.16 for October~November timeframe though we'll see how it all ends up playing out given the delays seen during the 4.14 cycle but hold out hope they indeed are forming a rhythm for an annual release cadence.