Xfce 4.18 is Arriving in MX Linux: Ready for Testing

MX Linux team is preparing for Xfce 4.18 updates and is now available to test drive.

MX Linux is the famous lightweight Linux distribution which is perfect for older hardware and brings Xfce, KDE Plasma and Fluxbox flavours for its users. Based on Debian’s stable branch, the current MX Linux 21 series features Xfce 4.16 desktop environment. Because Debian stable still has the Xfce 4.16.

Xfce 4.18 was recently released after more than two years of development effort. This release brings huge feature updates to the Thunar file manager with split view and image preview. In addition, you also get more updates on the Xfce panel, window manager and initial work for the modern Wayland display server.

Xfce 4.18 in MX Linux 21

MX Linux users were obviously waiting for Xfce 4.18 version to drop to enjoy these features. The Debian stable branch, which is currently version 11 “Bullseye”, may not get this Xfce version until the next stable release.

With that in mind, the MX Linux team prepared a dedicated repo with Xfce 4.18 packages. it is currently under testing. Here’s how to enable it.

Remember, it is still under testing. Hence things may break. So, use it with caution.

Open a terminal prompt. And open the /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx.list file. You can use the built-in lightweight editor featherpad to do this.

sudo featherpad /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx.list

And then, add the following line at the end of the file.

deb http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/ temp main

Save and close the file.

From the terminal, run the following:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

After completing the above command, reboot your system, and you should get the Xfce 4.18 in MX Linux.

The final release is expected on January 2023, and you should get it via the normal update path. You don’t need to follow the above steps after the official release.

Via announcement

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