While all of the talk recently in the Linux desktop world is about GNOME 3.8, KDE 4.10, or the desktop forks like Consort and Cinnamon, the Xfce desktop continues moving along vigorously. The next major release, Xfce 4.12, is due out in mid-March.

Xfce 4.12 is due to be released in March and early on there was talk of Xfce 4.12 using GTK+3 as it's toolkit rather than GTK2. However, it was ultimately decided that a full conversion to GTK3 won't happen for the 4.12 release.

What has been happening to Xfce 4.12 is slowly transitioning to the newer version of the tool-kit using by GNOME.

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