Quoting: Penguin

Quoting: Caldathras

Quoting: PenguinFor reference: the Mint team updated their Xfce flavor (from 4.16 to 4.18) in Mint 21.2.

Uhm... I have Mint 21.3 XFCE currently. It ships with Xfce 4.16. The update actually happened with Mint 22.0. We likely won't see Xfce 4.20 until Mint 23 comes out.

As @AsciiWolf pointed out, it has to do with the base version of Ubuntu they rely on. The only exception is Cinnamon, which the Mint Team manages themselves.

Well, I was eagerly waiting for the (back then) new Xfce clock plugin, which was delivered in Mint 21.2 with Xfce 4.18, and I remember it well. Just to be sure I'm not crazy, I did some research, and you can read more about the Mint 21.2 release here:

https://9to5linux.com/linux-mint-21-2-victoria-is-slated-for-release-on-june-2023-heres-what-to-expect [External Link]

In the article it says:

"Most notably here, the Xfce edition will be based on the latest Xfce 4.18 desktop environment."

😮

Well, I'll be ... I could have sworn that Mint 21.3 was on Xfce 4.16! But, here I am on that very laptop, and sure enough ... neofetch says it is running on Xfce 4.18. I had the ISO for Mint 21.2, so I checked that too -- you are absolutely right!

I knew that Mint 22.0 was on Xfce 4.18 and one of the reasons I rolled back was because of some formatting bugs in the system tray that strangely do not appear in Mint 21.3. I just assumed it was because of a version upgrade on Xfce and never bothered to check once I was back on Mint 21.3.

I apologize for contradicting you. Now that I know, I share your sentiments ... but it looks like we will have to wait until a version of Mint based on Ubuntu 25.04 or later (or use the Xubuntu Experimental PPA -- I'll wait).