Xubuntu Development Update January 2025

Welcome to 2025, Xubuntu fans! Xubuntu’s January update features Xfce 4.20, GIMP 3.0, and many updates to supporting libraries and components. MATE 1.28 is still on the horizon and expected before 25.04 launches in April.

January Schedule

The Plucky Puffin Release Schedule for January is… well, it’s blank. But that’s okay. Xfce 4.20 was released last month, and Debian packages are being built and uploaded as new releases are published. January is a time for early testing and integration improvements.

Major Package Updates in Xubuntu 25.04

The Plucky Puffin is continuing to take shape. The arrival of Xfce 4.20 in December brought a new stable Xfce desktop environment to Xubuntu. Packaging updates are still in progress on Debian and will sync to Xubuntu over the next few weeks. GIMP 3.0.0 RC2 refreshes the powerful image editing app to support GTK3 and other modern technologies. For other package updates, see last month’s December Update.

exo 4.20.0

Exo 4.20.0 patches bugs and memory leaks, boosts performance, and improves usability with two new features. The ExoTreeView component adds a new Ctrl+Shift+Click gesture to add a range of files to the current selection (#116). The second feature improves integration with other applications by communicating files created by the exo-desktop-item-edit utility (e4c86e84).

thunar 4.20.0

Thunar 4.20.0 fixes several memory leaks and bugs, makes various appearance improvements, and adds a variety of small, useful features. Regressions for middle click (#1455) and admin:// protocol support have been fixed. Optional CSD support has been added to the preferences dialog. A view switcher element has been added to the toolbar. Emblems have been added to mount points, similar to Nautilus, Caja, and Nemo (#1388). The replace dialog now shows the name of the parent folder (#62). Various improvements have been made to dialogs to ensure they’re reasonably sized (#58, #1392, #1412). Many other improvements and features can be found in the release notes!

xfce4-panel 4.20.0

Xfce Panel 4.20.0 fixes memory leaks, makes numerous improvements to Wayland support, fixes several bugs, and adds some new features! The panel adds a border width option and per-panel CSS customization. The clock plugin adds support for a 24-hour analog clock and improves the layout of the LCD and digital clock modes. The showdesktop plugin adds an option to reveal the desktop on mouse hover. The Systray plugin now always scales icons and updates the preferences dialog with improved search and smaller icon sizes. The tasklist plugin fixes button sizing and respects user icon size preferences. The panel preferences dialog features improved usability with keyboard bindings and allowing multiple applets to be removed at once.

xfdesktop 4.20.0

Xfdesktop 4.20.0 fixes several memory leaks, introduces new Xfce wallpapers, and adds some new features. Folders can now be sorted before files (#332). The icon sorting confirmation dialog can now be disabled (#266). Icon labels now have customizable text and background colors. Options have been added to the Window List Menu to show all workspaces and urgent windows from other workspaces. Editable keyboard shortcuts have been added to the desktop and icons.

There is a known issue with Xfdesktop 4.20.0 showing the Xfce default wallpaper instead of Xubuntu’s (#364). This won’t be resolved upstream and will require workarounds by the Xubuntu team. This should be resolved before Xubuntu 25.04 is released in April.

The 25.04 To-Do List

The Xubuntu 25.04 project board lists many outstanding tasks that we’d like to review this cycle. If you’d like to contribute to Xubuntu, pick a task and get to work. :) There are many other ways to contribute to Xubuntu listed on our website.

Look forward to many more updates in January!