New Version of XFce Brings Improved Usability and Performance Standards

The XFce Team has announced the release of version 4.0 of XFce, a popular multi-platform desktop environment that is known for its speed, stability, flexibility, modernity and power. The new version brings a new level of usability and performance standards to today's desktop environments. XFce 4 is a complete rewrite of the previous version, based on the GTK+ 2.x toolkit and featuring extreme modularity and re-usability. It embodies adherence to standards, specifically those defined by freedesktop.org, which aims to standardize the Unix/Linux desktop. XFce 4 consists of a number of components that together provide the full functionality of the desktop environment, packaged separately and users can pick and choose from the available packages to create the best personal working environment.

The new version sports a number of new features such as improved file manager with Samba browsing and mount/umount capabilities, an easily re-locatable main panel, enhanced drag-n-drop support, anti-alias fonts, a new lightweight window manager with more than 60 window decorations available, Xinerama support, window shading, and desktop switching using the mouse wheel roller. The project is free software and the separate components are released under either the BSD license, the GNU LGPL or the GNU GPL. Source code is freely available and there is native support and packages for many popular Linux distributions, SPARC and x86 Solaris 8/9, FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x, OpenBSD 3.x. More Unix and other X11-based platforms are expected to be supported out-of-the-box soon.