Xfce 4.12 after almost three years

Not Much New at the Panel

The Xfce panel is the nucleus of Xfce on one hand; but, on the other, it is a relatively mundane component. Xfce 4.12 has barely two improvements for the panel.

The panel now notices when it is obscured by a window that the system administrator drags and drops onto the desktop. The panel responds by disappearing until its original position is once again available.

The "intelligent disappear" feature offers a good compromise for users who may not want their panel to always automatically disappear but who find themselves colliding with the bar when moving windows.

Moreover, the panel can load GTK3 plugins in Xfce, which can then retrofit diverse functions based on GTK. The GTK toolkit has had its own plugin interface for a very long time. For example, many of the system tray icons are implemented in the form of GTK3 plugins. Xfce 4.10 was only able to deal with panels for GTK2. The successor has mastered the plugins from the new library.

Traditionally, Xfce has enjoyed lots of advantages because of its capability for loading Gnome plugins. This option also remains open for Xfce even though in testing, I observed occasional problems with theme consistency. For example, the tray icon with the GTK3 plugins frequently had a different background color from the rest of the Xfce panel. However, it was easy to get this problem resolved with the proper configuration in the Xfce control center.

Media Player Makeover

The Parole media player has been extensively cleaned up by the developers. In the release notes for Xfce 4.12, the complete GUI for the version that is still found in Xfce 4.10 is referenced as a "Rewrite." In fact, Parole offers many new functions. Some of these are found under the hood, whereas others are more readily apparent.

This media player has not always had an easy time of it. Many users were noticeably irritated when Parole first appeared as a component part of the Xfce 4 Goodies package. Given the existence of a large number of media players based on the GStreamer framework, many users asked themselves whether another player like Parole was really necessary. These doubts have now been refuted.

The reason that multimedia frameworks like GStreamer exist is to make it possible for front ends to use common functionality. Parole is clearly adapted to Xfce and delivers a complete user experience. This is no different in Xfce 4.12. The entire rewrite of the interface for Parole means that Parole 0.8 fits seamlessly into the lightly reworked appearance of Xfce 4.12 that is essentially based on GTK3. Even so, inexperienced users can easily operate the media player.

One obvious change is that the buttons for controlling replay dynamically insert themselves into the player when the mouse cursor is on top of the window. If the mouse cursor does not move for a few seconds, then the buttons disappear again (Figure 4). The buttons were always present in the window in the predecessor version when Parole was not running in full-screen mode.