Xfce 4.18 Coming Soon and Offers SubtleImprovements

When the next version of Xfce is released, you might not be blown away by an array of new and game-changing features. Instead, what you'll find are plenty of subtle new features and fixes that make the open source desktop better than ever – all the while remaining very familiar, stable, and easy to use.

The new features include a number of improvements to the Thunar file manager – such as a new bookmark menu, recent sidebar entry, customizable keyboard shortcuts, option to show full directory path, recursive search, undo/redo options, a split view, support for drag & drop items in the view panels, and the ability to execute shell scripts from within a directory.

As far as the desktop, you'll find the panel length is now configured in pixels (as opposed to a percentage), a new Keep panel above windows option, more font options for the Xfce clock applet, and header bars that can be disabled in dialogs.

Also included are a new default multi-monitor behavior that can be configured before you attach a second display, fixes for move-to-monitor, and 1.25/1.75 scale ratios.

You can find out more – and learn how to get the first prerelease – from this official announcement from the team (https://www.mail-archive.com/xfce-announce@xfce.org/msg00715.html).

Orange Pi Board Has Arch-Based Linux Distribution in the Works

The developers of the Orange Pi board have made available four operating systems supported for their hardware: Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Manjaro. Soon, they will be adding another distribution into the mix, one based on Arch Linux.

This version of Arch Linux will be user-friendly and highly compatible with open source drivers. Orange Pi OS (Arch) will ship with LibreOffice and will support most of the major Linux desktops, such as Gnome, KDE, and Xfce.

According to the developers, Orange Pi OS (Arch) (http://www.orangepi.org/html/softWare/orangePiOS/arch.html) will be easy to install, stable, highly secure, support multi-framework systems (such as x86, Arm, and RISC-V), and will support a wide number of applications (including Code::Blocks, Gnome-disks, Inkscape, Thunderbird, VLC, VS Code, NeoChat, Remmina, and more).

Orange Pi OS (Arch) will also include support for most of the popular multimedia forms, multicore CPUs, command-line and GUI installation, and will be privacy and security conscious.

For more information on Orange Pi OS (Arch), check the official site for the operating system (http://www.orangepi.org/html/softWare/orangePiOS/arch.html), where the team will continue to add updates and news as they happen.

Alpine Linux 3.17 Now Available to the General Public

The first Alpine Linux release in the 3.17 stable series is now available for download and finally adds Rust on all supported platforms. The distribution ships with either Gnome 43 or KDE Plasma 5.26 and enjoys all of the new features and fixes found in both of those desktop environments.

As for what's new in Alpine Linux itself, the list includes Bash 5.2, GCC 12, Kea 2.2, OpenSSL 3.0, Perl 5.36, PostgreSQL 15, Node.js 18.12, Ceph 17.2, Go 1.19, Rust 1.64, and .NET 7.0.100. OpenSSL also is available with the openssl1.1-compat package.

It should be noted that PHP 8.0 has been officially deprecated and ISC Kea was moved to the main repository for long time support, whereas ISC DHCP was moved to the community repository. With this move, users are now encouraged to make the switch from dhcpd to Kea.

You can read more about Alpine Linux 3.17 in the official release notes (https://alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.17.0-released.html) and download an ISO for installation from the download page (https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/) for the following architectures: 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), ARMv7, 32-bit (x86), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x).