Xfce 4.8 released [LWN.net]

Version 4.8 of the Xfce desktop has been announced. "With Xfce 4.8 our users will be able to browse remote shares using a variety of protocols (SFTP, SMB, FTP and many more). The window clutter has been reduced by merging all file progress dialogs into a single one. Our panel application has been rewritten, thereby improving positioning, transparency, item and launcher management. It also introduces a new menu plugin to view directories. Its plugin framework remains compatible with 4.6 plugins." LWN previewed this release back in December.

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Xfce 4.8 released

Posted Jan 17, 2011 19:07 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (3 responses)

Extract from the announcement : "the folks using any of the BSD systems will notice a sudden loss of features. We think that this announcement is a good opportunity to express our disagreement with the recent "Linux-only" developments in the open source ecosystem".

Interesting to see that new Linux tools like Udev, ConsoleKit and PolicyKit are perhaps fragmenting the open source ecosystem. What should we do about this?

Xfce 4.8 released

Posted Jan 17, 2011 19:19 UTC (Mon) by JohnLenz (guest, #42089) [Link]

I think the problem is on the testing side, not the development side. All these linux-only tools are small tools that from a development point of view probably won't take too much effort to port. Take ConsoleKit. The web page says that FreeBSD is already supported. But who knows if it is tested regularly, and when bugs do appear does anyone spend the time to actually report the bug with enough detail to be fixed?

Even if ConsoleKit hadn't been ported, it is a very small tool (only 20 C files...) so I don't think it would be much work to do the development to make it work on FreeBSD. The problem is the testing. And even if there is some FreeBSD bug it probably needs a developer running FreeBSD to be able to reproduce it.

Xfce 4.8 released

Posted Jan 17, 2011 21:00 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If BSD people care, they need to step up to port these tools where it makes sense or plugin their replacements.

Xfce 4.8 released

Posted Jan 18, 2011 0:17 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

Their problem, nobody elses. There are dozens of open source operating systems. We shouldnt be required to hold back advancement for one until some volunteer ports it to all the others.