XFCE 4.20 Released! Hybrid Sleep, Power Profiles, Initial Wayland Support

XFCE, the popular GTK based Linux Desktop environment, announced new 4.20 release yesterday on Sunday!

It’s a new major release with the effort of almost 2 years of development, features include initial Wayland support, revamped Thunar file manager, power profiles daemon, and more!

Wayland has being default in GNOME for a few years, and many other desktop environments (such as KDE, Cinnamon and MATE) are either already or on the road adding this display server protocol support.

And, XFCE desktop finally added initial Wayland support in the new 4.20 release. The Wayland support is experimental, user may encounter bugs and experience incomplete functionality, so ONLY recommended for advanced users only.

XFCE 4.20, image from xfce.org

XFCE 4.20 has a big improvements on its Thunar file manager. It now has 3 new tool-bar icons:

View Switcher to switch between icon, list, and compact view,
as well as new tab and new window icons to open current folder in new tab or window.

When you toggle hide the menu-bar, it now shows a hamburger menu in top-left for vertical menu. And, the file manager now supports client side decorations (CSD), that hides the title-bar and uses a more compact header, just like GNOME does.

thunar file manager with client side decorations

Other changes in Thunar file manager include:

Show an emblem for mount points, support ipv6 URLs and ability to create symbolic links for remote locations.
Option to use symbolic icons in the side pane and colored icons in the toolbar.
Auto-open folder that’s dragging hover.
Performance improvements involving bigger numbers of files.
Option to only copy files in parallel
Support folder expansion in list view.
And more!

For the panel, it now supports changing border width, removing panel items with delete key. Clock now supports 24h mode, and it’s able to show the desktop when hovering the mouse on the “show desktop” panel icon.

The power manager has been updated with power profiles support, meaning it now has built-in support to tune your CPU frequency as you need.

It now also supports hybrid sleep that saves your desktop state in RAM and swap. In the case, even if the power is cut, it can still restore the previous desktop status.

Other XFCE 4.20 changes include:

Update “About XFCE” dialog with Distro logo, and windowing systems type (X11 or Wayland).
Fix icons and thumbnail scaling for better HiPDI display support.
Application finder daemon support.
Add “Do Nothing”, “Shutdown” options for lid close action.
Support for stretch theme variants

There are as well tons of more changes in the release, see full changelog for details.

Get XFCE 4.20

The source tarballs of the new release is available to download at the link below:

Download XFCE (Source)

For normal users, it’s however recommended to wait your Linux Distribution updates. If everything goes well, XFCE 4.20 will be available in Arch, Fedora 42, and next Ubuntu 25.04.