Xfce 4.12 landed in February 2015 after nearly three years of development, and if you were running Xubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 at the time, the official repositories were not going to hand it to you — those releases shipped with Xfce 4.10 and Canonical’s policy meant they stayed there. This guide covers the full upgrade process using the Xubuntu development team’s PPA, what changed between 4.10 and 4.12 that made the effort worthwhile, and how to handle the handful of things that can go sideways during a desktop environment upgrade on a stable release. We have done this on both Xubuntu installs and plain Ubuntu boxes with xfce4 added after the fact, and the process is the same either way. If you are new to managing packages from the command line, our CLI Basics reference covers apt fundamentals that apply here.
What Changed in Xfce 4.12
The 4.10 to 4.12 jump was not a radical redesign — Xfce has never been about radical redesigns — but it addressed real pain points that accumulated over the years. The most visible change was the window manager (xfwm4), which gained proper support for client-side decorations, improved tiling behaviour (drag a window to the left or right edge and it snaps to half-screen, which GNOME and KDE users had enjoyed for ages), and better multi-monitor handling. If you ran dual displays on Xfce 4.10, you know how frustrating panel-per-monitor configuration could be.
The panel itself picked up intelligent hiding improvements, better vertical panel support, and a reworked items dialog that made reordering plugins less of an exercise in patience. The power manager (xfce4-power-manager) moved from a standalone systray icon to a proper panel plugin, which sounds minor but eliminated the persistent “two battery icons” bug that plagued some configurations.
Under the hood, the Thunar file manager received bookmark and sidebar improvements, and xfce4-settings gained a revamped display dialog — finally making it possible to configure monitor positions, resolutions, and primary display selection from a single, usable GUI.
Before You Start: Back Up Your Configuration
Desktop environment upgrades through PPAs usually preserve your settings, but “usually” is not “always.” Spend sixty seconds protecting yourself:
cp -r ~/.config/xfce4 ~/.config/xfce4-backup-$(date +%F)
cp -r ~/.local/share/xfce4 ~/.local/share/xfce4-backup-$(date +%F)
This copies your panel layout, keyboard shortcuts, session settings, and desktop wallpaper configuration. If anything looks wrong after the upgrade, you can restore these directories and log out/in to get back to your previous state.
Also note your currently installed Xfce version for reference:
xfce4-session --version
You should see something like xfce4-session 4.10.x. Write that down — you will want to confirm it changes after the upgrade.
Step-by-Step Upgrade Process
Step 1: Add the Xubuntu Xfce 4.12 PPA
The Xubuntu development team maintained an official PPA for backporting Xfce 4.12 to 14.04 and 14.10. Add it:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xubuntu-dev/xfce-4.12
Press Enter when prompted to confirm the PPA addition. This imports the signing key and adds the repository source file to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.
Step 2: Update Your Package Lists
sudo apt-get update
Watch the output for any errors related to the new PPA. If you see a GPG key error, the key import in the previous step may have failed — run sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys <KEY_ID> with the missing key ID shown in the error.
Step 3: Perform the Upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Using dist-upgrade rather than upgrade is important here. A regular upgrade will not install new packages or remove existing ones — and the 4.12 transition introduces some new packages (like the power manager panel plugin) and may replace others. Review the list of packages to be installed, upgraded, and removed. The core packages you expect to see upgraded include xfwm4, xfce4-panel, xfce4-session, xfce4-settings, thunar, and xfce4-power-manager.
Confirm with Y and let it run. On a reasonably fast connection, the download takes a couple of minutes; the configuration and unpacking phase is quick.
Step 4: Log Out and Log Back In
Xfce components are session processes — the panel, window manager, and settings daemon are all running from your current session and will not update in place. Log out of your Xfce session entirely (do not just lock the screen), then log back in. On login, the session manager will launch the newly installed 4.12 versions.
Step 5: Verify the Upgrade
xfce4-session --version
You should now see xfce4-session 4.12.x. Check the window manager too:
xfwm4 --version
Test the new features: drag a window to a screen edge to verify tiling works, open Settings > Display to see the new monitor configuration dialog, and right-click the panel to confirm the updated “Panel Preferences” dialog loads.
Common Pitfalls
Panel plugins disappear after upgrade. Third-party plugins compiled against Xfce 4.10 libraries (particularly libxfce4panel-1.0) may fail to load against the 4.12 versions. Check if the PPA includes updated versions of your plugins. If not, you may need to remove and reinstall them. The most commonly affected plugins were xfce4-weather-plugin and xfce4-indicator-plugin — both had updated versions in the PPA, but they were not always pulled in automatically.
Screen tearing on Nvidia GPUs. Xfwm4 4.12’s compositor defaults did not always play well with the Nvidia proprietary driver. If you notice tearing, open Settings > Window Manager Tweaks > Compositor and toggle “Enable display compositing” off and on. If that does not resolve it, try switching the VSync method — xfwm4 supports GLX, XPresent, and no sync. For Nvidia, GLX usually gives the best results.
Power manager icon duplication. Because the power manager transitioned from a systray applet to a panel plugin, some users ended up with both. If you see two battery icons after the upgrade, right-click the panel, go to Panel Preferences > Items, and remove the old “Notification Area” entry for the power manager (or remove the duplicate power manager plugin entry if both appear there).
PPA conflicts with other Xfce PPAs. If you had previously added other PPAs providing Xfce components — such as ppa:shimmerproject/ppa for Greybird themes or other Xfce-related PPAs — there may be version conflicts. Symptoms include apt-get refusing to upgrade certain packages due to dependency mismatches. The fix is usually to temporarily disable the conflicting PPA, complete the 4.12 upgrade, then re-enable it and run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade to let the dependencies settle.
Login loop after upgrade. Rare, but it happens — usually caused by a corrupted session cache. If you get stuck at the login screen, switch to a TTY with Ctrl+Alt+F1, log in, and clear the session cache:
rm -rf ~/.cache/sessions/*
Then switch back to the graphical login with Ctrl+Alt+F7 and try again.
Is It Worth It?
If you were running Xubuntu 14.04 as a daily driver and planned to stay on the LTS for its full support lifecycle, the Xfce 4.12 upgrade was one of the most impactful quality-of-life improvements you could make without changing your base system. The tiling support, improved multi-monitor handling, and reworked power management addressed the most common complaints about 4.10. It was not flashy, but it was solid — which is exactly what Xfce has always been about.
For those approaching this from a historical perspective or running older hardware where Xubuntu 14.04 is still the practical choice, the PPA packages remain installable and functional. Just keep in mind that no further security updates are being published for either the base system or the PPA packages.