Dear Guido.
I've packaged the current unstable development releases of Xfce packages. The packages are available in the X11:xfce:Next project on OBS, the project is self-contained and can be added on top of openSUSE 13.1 or Factory. If you want to try it out, just run
zypper ar --refresh obs://X11:xfce:Next/openSUSE_(13.1|Factory) X11-xfce-Next zypper dup
Don't do this on a production machine though, the updated packages are in a pre-Beta/RC stage and the code is still under development. Note that there is no fixed release date for Xfce 4.12, it will be released depending on when the components are considered ready and the developers have time. libxfce4ui and xfce4-panel 4.11 support GTK 3 so it is possible to write GTK 3-based Xfce applications and panel plugins, however a migration of the core components to GTK 3 is not planned for Xfce 4.12.
The X11:xfce:Next project contains the following updates:
First, thanks for the packaging. I have tried the packages from the repository and noticed that the panel icon is no longer scaled correctly. I have created a new bugreport on that: https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10865 and a screenshot, showing the old and the new version: http://bug-attachment.xfce.org/attachment.cgi?id=5467 Greets Marcus