Finally We See XFCE 4.14 and GNU/Linux Distros with It

Now after Plasma 5.16 in June and a month before GNOME 3.34 in September, actually, in silent, the latest XFCE 4.14 released at 12 August 2019 after four years of development. Congratulations to XFCE Developers and especially Simon Steinbeiss and here's my short overview of latest XFCE I was waiting since 2015. I'm also looking for right time to write my own review next time. Here we go!

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Important Links

• Announcement (web)
• Announcement (mailing list)
• Announcement (Simon's)
• Release Notes (changelog)
• Discussion (Reddit)

1. Announcements

XFCE released slowly and not as fast as KDE or GNOME. So in 12 August 2019, after many years of development, this is the historic release announcement from official xfce-announce mailing list. It's announced by Simon Steinbeiss, the release manager of this time. Previous release was 4.12 announced by Nick at 2015.


Then below is announcement from the official website.


Simon Steinbeiss also announced XFCE 4.14 personally in his blog here. His message on that article is "In any case, enjoy Xfce 4.14 and join us to make 4.16 a great (and shorter) cycle!".


This time, the team published an Online Tour for us to see how well XFCE 4.14 doing.


And, all screenshots of 4.14 are prepared.

2. Desktop & Applications

Here's how default XFCE looks like at Xubuntu 19.10 pre-release version.


And here's Thunar File Manager with new ability to customize our right-click actions and also Ctrl+= to zoom in. More information about new features you could find at 4.4 Changelog.

3. Distros with XFCE 4.14:

I listed here desktop GNU/Linux distros that already have latest XFCE built-in and they have LiveCD+Install capability. Important: Eoan, Adelie, and Rawhide are currently (25 September 2019) in development or beta and not in stable state for daily use so proceed with your own risk. Once you download, make bootable, and run one, you enjoy 4.14 instantly and can install the OS into your computer.

• Xubuntu Eoan Ermine

Just like latest GNOME 3.34, latest XFCE 4.14 is also already included on Eoan Ermine. Download Xubuntu 19.10 daily build if you want to test it right now. Or wait until it released officially next October.

• Adelie GNU/Linux

This is a new musl-libc distro*, similar but different to Alpine, which already included XFCE 4.14. Interestingly, the installers are small approximately 300-400MB only. Download it here.

• Fedora Rawhide XFCE

Fedora Spin XFCE Rawhide Edition already included XFCE 4.14. Its manifest currently tells that xfce* packages there numbered 4.14. Download it here.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed XFCE

Once again, openSUSE helps people to test latest desktop environment versions in LiveCD with convenience. This is the only distro here to provide 32-bit XFCE (simply choose the i686 for it). To my understanding, it included 4.14 right now based on Factory information. Download it here.


*) I think Adelie is very interesting, not because it's name and mine, but because its website says "Truly Libre Software" I could expect it includes only libre software without any proprietary ones. It's really interesting if someday Adelie could be in same page with Trisquel on FSF's free distros list.

Upgrade XFCE to 4.14

Thanks to Repology.org, as per 25 September 2019, we can tell that users of Arch, Debian (Unstable), and Fedora 30 can already upgrade their XFCE to 4.14 among other distros. For libre distro users, currently Parabola is ready. Next time we surely will see more distros adopt this latest XFCE and we just need to wait.

Some Commentaries

I'm writing this when I'm very busy with teaching in my online class and distributing USB pendrives. I'm very happy with them. And because we now have latest Plasma, latest GNOME, and latest XFCE, I surely am happy too and I hope I have more time to review XFCE 4.14 soon. It's a great experience for me to manually search between distros (especially openSUSE) and make use of Repology.org to find latest XFCE on them. I hope this simple post helps out a lot for everybody.

Enjoy XFCE 4.14!

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This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.