Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around, is nearly ready - and should have preliminary, "minimally usable" Wayland support.

The latest release schedule for Xfce indicates that version 4.20 [insert stoner joke here] should go into feature freeze next month, for a planned release on December 15 - exactly two years after Xfce 4.18 appeared.

This means it goes Wayland 25 years after Xfce 3.0, the first open source release. Xfce 1 and 2 were proprietary and were built with the XForms toolkit, as creator Olivier Fourdain explained in a 1999 interview. You can see screenshots of those early versions on Oleg Slavkin's GitHub archive of early releases.

As befitting its dignified elder status, Xfce doesn't rush into things. We reported way back in February last year that preliminary steps towards Wayland support were coming, and they should start to bear fruit in the December release. The next version will not be a full, all-native Wayland environment. The plan is to retain X11 support - in part because Xfce isn't just a Linux desktop. It also supports all the BSDs, including Dragonfly BSD. The Wayland roadmap says:

Fresh Mint is coming too

A new version of Linux Mint, version 22.1, is "set to be released in December," according to the latest monthly update from project lead Clement Lefebvre. This will include version 6.4 of its in-house Cinnamon desktop, which the Mint developers forked from GNOME in 2013.

Cinnamon 6.4 will have a new dark theme with greater contrast, and uses new dialog boxes, on-screen displays (OSDs), and other screens implemented using the Clutter library. There's also a new, updated default theme. Mint users rarely see this because Mint employs its own themes, Mint-X and Mint-Y. However, Cinnamon is also gaining traction on other distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE, and Mint's upstream, Ubuntu. In those, the default theme is more visible, so it's getting refreshed.

Mint 22.1 will also replace some of Ubuntu's older tools and libraries used to handle Debian packages with its own new, in-house ones, which were introduced in the August blog post. Captain will handle graphical installation of .deb packages, replacing Gdebi and apturl; and aptkit for background activities, replacing aptdaemon.

Gtk is a moving target

We note that the Clutter project blog says that it's been retired, supplanted by Gtk 4, the new version of what used to be called the GIMP Toolkit, and then Gtk+. Gtk 4 is the version used in GNOME 40 onward, and aims to replace all other GNOME themes, to widespread unhappiness and discontent.

At the end of the 1990s, Xfce was rewritten from XForms to Gtk 2; by version 4.14 its developers moved it to Gtk 3. The MATE desktop started out as a fork of GNOME 2, which also used Gtk 2, and completed its move to Gtk with version 1.18.

Gtk is part of, and is maintained by, the GNOME project for its own use. If it's helpful to anyone else, that's great, but as the Mint team found before, working with GNOME code can be tricky.

There are concerns that the MATE and Xfce teams may need to cooperate and take over maintaining the now-obsolescent Gtk 3 code themselves... and that could now apply to Clutter too. ®