Whisker Menu 2.5 Released With Xfce 4.16 Support [PPA Available]

Xfce 4.16 was released a few days ago. Since it uses GTK 3 and has some new functions, third-party applications like Whisker Menu has to refactor their code for the Xfce 4.16 code.

Whisker Menu is an application launcher for Xfce desktop environment. It is not part of the Xfce package itself. It’s one of the additional tools that you can use to customize Xfce desktop.

Whisker Menu has released version 2.5.0 with Xfce 4.16 support among several other changes. Let’s see what has changed here.

Whisker Menu 2.5.0: What’s new?

Here are the highlights of this release:

Add option to show all applications by default
Rearrange sidebar buttons to match default category
Show panel button title as tooltip in icon-only mode
Always sort top-level categories
Vertically center contents of header
New Xfce action icons
New desktop ids for default programs
Hide menu on focus out
Use new Xfce functions
Updated translations for several languages

Installing Whisker Menu 2.5 on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions

Good news for the users of Ubuntu-based distributions is that an official PPA is available. With this, you can easily install the latest stable release of Whisker Menu. If you are new to it, please learn more on the concept of PPA in Ubuntu.

Again, Whisker Menu is for Xfce desktop only. So please make sure that you are using Xfce desktop environment.

Open a terminal and use the following command to add the PPA repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gottcode/gcppa

Ubuntu automatically refreshes the repository list but you may need to do it manually on some other distributions.

sudo apt update

Now run the following command to install Whisker Menu 2.5:

sudo apt install xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin

If you already had Whisker Menu installed, it should update the existing version.

Uninstall Whisker Menu 2.5:

To remove the application installed via the PPA, use the following commands one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:gottcode/gcppa

I hope you have some sort of application launcher on your system. You may remove it this way then:

sudo apt remove xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin

What about other distributions?

The new version should be available in the AUR for Arch Linux users. Please check if there are third-party repositories for Whisker Menu 2.5 for Fedora Linux.

Stay tuned for more Linux news.