The team behind MX Linux – the number one distro in DistroWatch’s rankings – has said that Xfce 4.18, which was released in mid-December, will be available to MX Linux users in January. The plan is to add Xfce 4.18 to the main MX repositories in January, then MX-21 users running Xfce will get the upgrade through the MX Updater program.
“There are a lot of benefits to Xfce 4.18, including dual pane capability in thunar, updates to the Xfce applets, panel, and terminal, and options to have Xfce apps use the older Xfwm window theming instead of gtk3-client-side-decorations,”, the MX Linux team said.
Those who want to try to out the new Xfce update early, preferably on a spare machine, can enable the “temp” development repository. To do this, open /etc/apt/sources.list.d with elevated privileges and add deb http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/ temp main to the file. Close the file and run sudo apt update and sudo apt dist-upgrade. This should upgrade your Xfce desktop to the new version.
As MX Linux uses Xfce by default and the 4.18 update is major, the MX Linux team has also decided that it’ll spin new ISOs when the update is released in January. This will be nice for users who were planning to install MX Linux as it will come with previous updates already rolled into the ISO so users will spend less time doing post-install updates.
If Xfce is not for you, MX Linux also has KDE and Fluxbox editions. Just head over to the download page and choose whichever one you want; most people will be good with MX-21.2.1_x64, though. The aim of MX Linux is to combine elegance, efficiency, stability, and solid performance. It is based on Debian Stable so its base is rock solid.