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Xfce Wayland Development Roadmap

239 points by LaSombra 3y ago

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
I'm glad to see there's a transition Roadmap in place. This is more than Cinnamon DE has at the moment. You know you're behind the curve when even Xfce is ahead of you.
pjmlp 3y ago
XFCE has become my go to desktop environment after Ubuntu dropped Unity, so it is nice to see an updated roadmap.
ducktective 3y ago
Xfce, the "Just Works" of Linux desktop environments not only the DE itself but also its suite of apps like Thunar. They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.
- donkeybeer 3y ago
  gtk4 is not good. They have been killing more features and forcing more ui wierdness like overlay scrollbars, etc https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 I think 4 plans to kill theming too.
  - CuteDinosaur 3y ago
    I don't understand most of this decisions.
    - rglullis 3y ago
      Think of it as the product of the new generation of techies who had their first contact with computers after Mac OSX was released, and now all they can/want to do is emulate Apple and their HIG.
      - robinsonb5 3y ago
        It's more than that - it's a new generation of techies who grew up in a "mobile first" world, and view the mouse as an archaic input device.
        rglullis 3y ago
        I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's hard to me to believe that all these kids went to college (or got some type of computer training) only by working with their phones/tablets.
        robinsonb5 3y ago
        It's not that they only use their phones/tablets, it's that the phone/tablet is the first tool they reach for, the default device, and UI conventions from that space feel correct and natural to them, just as they feel clumsy and jarring to me. (How old am I? Old enough that I still use an opto-mechnical mouse with a ball, because I still like the extra weight and inertia it has over a pure optical mouse!)
        bitwize 3y ago
        How can you prefer that? Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
        bitwize 3y ago
        The youngest had to be taught, as part of intro to CS, how files and directories worked. Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
      - smoldesu 3y ago
        GNOME is primarily about making Free Software that is highly accessible. The desktop and GTK toolkit both predate OSX, so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the comparison is.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sprash 3y ago
      It's sabotage.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop, I had only experienced it because it's easy and resource light to set up for VNC. It's cool to see people singing its praises. It was always definitely adequate for my 'remote development with desktop GUI' needs. Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices. I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences. I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on. An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    > I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way. Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations! XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic. > I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)
- suprjami 3y ago
  Last I checked (6 months ago) there was no plan or capacity to move off the GTK3 version they're currently using. If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.
luciusdomitius 3y ago
XFCE is frankly the last full featured Desktop Environment, truly focusing on responsiveness and zero-lag SGI-style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvbiBncmFwaGljcyBjb21tZXJjaWFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvb... MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying. Really hope that Wayland integration works well for them.
- pjerem 3y ago
  Cinnamon is also in this ballpark. Each have their strengths and weaknesses but both are awesome. Both are pretty dumb when it comes to Hi-DPI support although Cinnamon does an acceptable job at staying coherent when configured with bigger fonts so it’s a workaround. XFCE manages bigger fonts very badly so I have big hopes that real Hi-DPI support will be better with wayland.
  - luciusdomitius 3y ago
    You tell me. My biggest pain with XFCE is multi-monitor support. Like having the menu bar also on the second display and not have two of them when you switch back to single-monitor.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying. Wobbly Windows are amazing and never get old. It's been years, and I still get joy from them. I'm sure there are other nice effects too, but I don't feel that strongly about them - Wobbly Windows are the hill I'd die on.
- circuit10 3y ago
  As long as the animations are done right (subtle and short) they make the experience feel smoother without slowing you down or annoying you. At least that’s my experience, it’s probably not the same for everyone
- prmoustache 3y ago
esarbe 3y ago
Not an XFCE user (I'm comfortably satisfied with the simplicity that is Gnome) but I'm very happy to see XFCE's concrete plans to move towards Wayland!
bradley13 3y ago
I've been using Xubuntu for years - it just works, with no clutter. Absolutely my only complaint are the very thin window borders - this is a setting you cannot individually adjust. However, one quickly gets used to (alt + right-click + drag).
- kreddor 3y ago
  Seems to be a major problem in many desktop environments. I use the "super + right-click" in Gnome for the same reason (Ubuntu).
  - Vinnl 3y ago
    On GNOME you should be able to click in the area near the window borders (e.g. in the drop shadow) to select them and be able to resize the windows.
- anon____ 3y ago
  Alt+space brings up the window menu. Press R to resize, or M to move the window with either the arrow keys or by moving the mouse pointer. Finalize with Enter, cancel with Escape.
  - bmacho 3y ago
    Can you resize a window with only the arrow keys? For example hit r+up and raise the upper border upward, then s+left, and shrink the window by moving the right border leftward, or something like that?
    - anon____ 3y ago
      Yes. After pressing Alt+space then R, the first pressing of an arrow key selects the border you want to move, let's say the left. You can then move that with the left/right arrows. If you press up or down in this state, it will, again, select the corresponding border to work on.
- izoow 3y ago
rwmj 3y ago
Can Wayland run programs remotely yet?
- pluijzer 3y ago
  I thought this was specifically not part of Wayland, am I wrong?
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    Sort of. The foundational issue here is the longstanding premise "Wayland can replace X!". The problem is that Wayland can't replace X, only Wayland plus a bunch of other components - or as I like to call it, Wayland++. So Wayland++ can provide network transparency, but whenever a W++ feature has issues and those issues are criticized, Wayland advocates will just motte-and-bailey the issue by saying "but that's not part of Wayland!", which is technically true but irrelevant. "Wayland" can mean Wayland++ or just Wayland-core, depending on what's convenient.
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      outsourcing the responsibility that is.
      - dathinab 3y ago
        not putting complexity into places it doesn't belong to leading to sub-par outcomes for everyone that is
        wing-_-nuts 3y ago
        bah. the sub-par outcome is they broke compatibility with everyone and then claimed it was every man / DE for themselves.
        dathinab 3y ago
        x11 was (development) dead long before wayland was relevant x11 had long time become unsustainable in multiple ways braking changes where inevitable all of the most relevant DE had somewhat already gutted out X11 leaving nothing behind then the interfaces so the replacement being defined by interfaces and "every DE for themself" was just natural, for the large DEs it was already the case anyway and for the other DEs you could say wlroot is now the common core they need because they don't have the will/time to implement everything by themself
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
I used to use XFCE (specifically XUbuntu), but found that its handling of hi-dpi displays on laptops etc. wasn't very good, so switched to Plasma/KDE which seems to work better. Still have issues with certain flatpak apps not scaling properly though.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  If scaling is off, there's a good chance the application is using GTK. GTK4 doesn't support fractional scaling but I believe GTK5 might. If applications are written in GTK2/3/4, fractional scaling won't work well and lead to blurry windows. Integer scaling (1x, 2x, 4x) should work just fine, but fractional scaling isn't implemented consistently across GUI frameworks. Hopefully Wayland will fix the inconsistencies between implementations, though GTK and some other GUI frameworks will likely remain broken for a while.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    The constant GTK rewrites are a disaster. Why should applications even bother starting with GTK(n) if it will be obsolete and incompatible when GTK(n+1) comes around?
    - dvdkon 3y ago
      You're exaggerating. GTK2 came out in 2002, GTK3 in 2011 and GTK4 in 2020. That' s almost a decade for each version, and you have to consider that GTK2 was maintained for a long time after 3's release and that current Linux distros still package it. And the GTK3 to 4 transition required some changes, but far from a rewrite. If you need multi-decade support from your GUI layer, I can recommend raw Win32 or VT100 terminal codes. There's hardly any other API with that kind of backwards compatibility.
      - j16sdiz 3y ago
        It's the downstream projects. It take 2-3 years to iron out the bugs. Non-gnome downstream take another 3 years to adopt and stabilise. By the time the adoption is finished, another major version emerges. We don't have any good way to maintain compatibility that long.
dathinab 3y ago
> As long as Nvidia does not support Wayland AFIK this problem was solved ~2 years ago when Nvidia added support for GBM in version 495.44 (https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en-us/ https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...)
- jadbox 3y ago
  I'm running KDE Wayland on Nvidia. It's mostly just fine. There's minor quirks with some apps, but the DE does feel smoother to me.
  - kldx 3y ago
    Can confirm the desktop and my web browser are a whole lot snappier on Wayland
- ankurdhama 3y ago
  This is not a solved problem until they support DMA-BUF import (i.e on laptops with iGPU and Nvidia GPU, your external monitor connected to Nvidia will be very sluggish as the compositor will have to copy the framebuffer - rendered on the iGPU - to nvidia GPU using CPU instead of directly importing it to Nvidia GPU using DMA-BUF)
  - dathinab 3y ago
    This doesn't add DMA-BUF import but it does mitigate the issue for the use case of many dGPU/iGPU laptops when an external monitor is used (independent of weather they are Nvidia laptops): https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-wlroots-Secondary https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-wlroots-Secondar...
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    nvidia already supports EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import
- charcircuit 3y ago
  And even before that the EGL_KHR_stream EGL extension could have been used.
nava_nmr 3y ago
When I use AWS workspace in X11, The clipboard contents can be shared across host and guest VMs. In wayland, the clipboard is not syncing with AWS VM. Is it the way like this? is there any workaround? Could someone please enlighten me?
- csdreamer7 3y ago
  How do you connect to AWS Workspace? Never used it before. Have you tried opening a bug with them to see if just got broke in your display manager?
  - nava_nmr 3y ago
    I have not opened the ticket. I though I should understand bit more. Is it a bug/feature-request to be opened (Sharing clipboard with guest VM)? How it should be handled? any thoughts?
- Bright_Machine 3y ago
  Only GNOME supports clipboard sharing with guests, because GNOME unifies X11 and Wayland clipboards in the compositor. None of the other Wayland DEs are supporting it since it requires special handling in their respective compositors.
lizknope 3y ago
I've been using XFCE for the last 15 years. Before that it was vtwm, fvwm, afterstep, but I could never get into GNOME or KDE. XFCE just does everything I need and I don't see any reason to switch.
Nursie 3y ago
I really love XFCE. I used it on and off on low-resource machines since the late 00s, and then moved to it for my main desktop when the Gnome3 thing happened. I've never looked back (though I'll admit I'm also a macbook user!). What do I like? It's never forced me to change the way I work. That's up to me. So if Wayland is the future, then I look forward to using XFCE on Wayland somewhere down the line too.
jcarrano 3y ago
By far the best thing with XFCE is that it does not change, it merely improves. Other DEs and applications radically change the UI between releases. I have my XFCE desktop working as I want now and I don't want to change it or having to learn where buttons are located after an update. With Gnome and Windows I feel like a lab rat for their UI experiments.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  Not sure about that. XFCE started as a clone of CDE. Now compare original CDE with XFCE and it is not really the same thing. Sure, Gnome change from v2 to v3 was a major change in UI, but mostly for the better and Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.
  - reidrac 3y ago
    Surely is more about slow evolution than revolution.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      But Gnome did only a revolution once and since then it is the same. I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately and Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly for those looking for a gnome classic evolution that no one was really forced into using gnome 3.
      - Nursie 3y ago
        > I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately Yeah it did. They announced gnome 3 and deprecated 2 on the same day, and seemed to have made the deliberate choice to not allow them to coexist. As soon as your distro moved, bam, you were done. > Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly After some months. This stuff was not there on day 1. In the mean time, those of us who did not want to work the way Gnome 3 decided we should, had to find an alternative. And when we found a good one (Xfce for me), we stuck with it.
toastal 3y ago
The march to Wayland hopefully doesn’t complete until color management & DisplayLink are merged. I had to go back to X11 because of missing features.
- bandrami 3y ago
  At which point, inevitably, a new generation of devs will look at the now-huge wayland codebase and say "what is all this cruft?! who wants color management in what should just be a display protocol? let's start over and This Time We'll Get It Right™", and the circle of life will continue.
  - toastal 3y ago
    Luckily they’re both WIP at this time. That said, the color management, just the spec, has been in the works for what feels like ever—to the point that some of the window managers are going around them in implement their own spec.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Actually, I would expect that it will be a separate protocol, so the next generation will instead ask why you would ever leave color management out of the core protocol and proceed to immediately bake it in.
throwaway914 3y ago
There are a couple reasons I can only back Gnome at this point, even though I loved/miss XFCE. Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling (I think XFCE has some/all of this?) We're just playing catchup to MacOS for over a decade, and soon enough Linux will have to compete with 3d desktop environments (Apple Vision Pro interface). I think we're almost to the point where the DE will be just a physics simulator (game engine) to help augment your reality. Anyway, I still use XFCE on resource-limited hardware but Gnome has been the only option for a while because progress isn't being made by other DEs on these critical things (color, refresh, alpha-composition, and some wayland protocols missing in wlroots). I'm just glad Gnome isn't the dependency hell it used to be, and has slimmed down. I really love what they've done with GJS but I believe there's a competing KDE bindings project. </naive>
- prmoustache 3y ago
  xfce isn't even useful on resource limited hardware, you are better of using a much lighter weight wm like icewm , openbox or fluxbox + a lightweight launcher and a lighter set of file managers and viewers [1]. [1] even window maker could do it, I saw it was recently updated.
- rkangel 3y ago
  > Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling The move to Wayland is interesting to observe. On first glance it seems that moving to Wayland provides a load of burden on DEs that they never had before - and not just because of the work required to transition. And that obviously this is all Wayland's fault. What I think is actually going on though is that we expect quite a rich feature set from a modern DE - exactly as you have listed. We could never do most of this stuff on X, but Wayland enables it and then follows a load of work to get it all going. In an ideal world there would be a nice clean abstraction boundary between compositor and DE so that this underlying work was shared between DEs. Maybe that is possible, but people who know what they're talking about seem to agree that the Wayland approach is the right way to go and I don't know enough to disagree. Plus, it makes some intuitive sense that your DE should know how windows share rendering space.
not_your_vase 3y ago
Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here. I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Python 3 at least worked immediately. Wayland still has tons of issues.
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    For GNOME user, it is starting to become usable recently Not so luck for non-GNOME user
    - gryn 3y ago
      Wayland on sway has been a smooth sailing for me, the only thing that made be go back was barriers KVM not working and not finding an open source alternative that works for both Linux and windows.
    - bogwog 3y ago
      I’ve been using it with KDE on my laptop and desktop (which has an Nvidia GPU). The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug. Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)
      - coderedart 3y ago
        > Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least) IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues. Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers
igtztorrero 3y ago
XCFE is they best, please keep it simple. I have used it for 7 years and I love it ! May God keep away animations from XCFE allways !
joseluis 3y ago
My favorite combination is Mint + Xfce + openbox as the window manager which leaves the CPU at 0% when not doing anything, and is very responsive and versatile. I had to setup separate dark themes for each one but now it looks good. The only thing I don't like is thunar freezing often when doing long blocking IO operations...
izoow 3y ago
I've recently been giving Xfce a try again on one of my machines, and even though I still prefer KDE on my main machine, I've been quite enjoying it. Especially the SPEED of it has been astonishing. Everything is just absolutely instant. I also really like the "spartan" feel of it. Probably the main thing I'm missing from KDE is being able fo use Super+Number to switch between windows, i.e. Super+1 switches to the window at the first position in the taskbar, etc.. I've been searching around, but haven't found anything that'd be 100%. Would anyone happen to have a solution by any chance?
- mxmlnkn 3y ago
  You can define shortcuts for that: nth=1; wmctrl -i -a $( wmctrl -l | awk '$2 == "0" { print $1 }' | sed -n "${nth}p" ) I guess you would need 9 shortcuts and you would set nth to the number associated with that shortcut. Works for me at least. You might have to define the shortcut to "bash -c " followed by the above oneliner with some appropriate quoting and escaping of inner quotes.
  - izoow 3y ago
    This is what I'm doing right now, but the issue is that it'll only work as long as the order in the taskbar and the window manager list stay consistent. I like to manually reorder my windows in the taskbar and that makes this approach break.
    - mxmlnkn 3y ago
      You could use wmctrl -l -p to also get the pids and then get the start times for each PID with ps -p $$ -o lstart. Then you could sort by start time and only then choose the nth window. There still might be multiple windows belonging to the same pid, though. And if you close windows, the list might still change. You could also hardcode win+1-9 to specific programs, then they would even be consistent over restarts. Then again, the docklike plugin mentioned in the other answer might be similar to that.
- curved_columns 3y ago
mnmalst 3y ago
I hope this will be a slow transition but I am pretty sure it will since that's how xfce usually works. I switched to xfce not so long ago after almost 15 years of using KDE for that slow pace exactly. I had small problems and annoyances with KDE on nvidia for a long time but it got worse over time and reached a breaking point lately. Not even talking about Wayland. Anyways, I am happy to have a rock solid and stable alternative like xfce.
aknfxb3m 3y ago
These days I can't be bothered to deviate from the happy path anymore as I've already spent too much time in my life customizing my desktops. I just use whatever GNOME offers and maybe 1-2 extensions. A few months ago I switched from Fedora to Debian 12 and barely noticed it. Thanks to GNOME and systemd, which I hate independently for various reasons. I do feel like a sellout (but not getting paid).
- Nursie 3y ago
  That's how I feel about Xfce. Gnome made me deviate from the happy path with 3, I switched to where I was happy again, and haven't looked back since. :shrug:
tuananh 3y ago
i run xfce combine with i3. pretty happ with the setup https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w
sprash 3y ago
The most important points: - It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all). - We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor This should tell you everything. Since the Wayland ecosystem is extremely developer hostile it cements the KDE/GNOME duopoly and eliminates the long tail. XFCE might maybe make the push to Wayland but after that that's it. The rest of the tail is dead.
- sho_hn 3y ago
  This has already proven to be wrong, imho. There's numerous Wayland versions of popular niche X11 WMs, for example the way sway is a Wayland implementation of i3, and some exciting new experiments (like scrolling tiling WMs) that never really existed on X11. It's usually a lot easier to make a compositor/WM with unusual or innovative behavior on the Wayland stack than it was with X11 in general, as far less behavior is presumed/baked-into either the display server or the existing applications. For example, apps not being able to introspect or manipulate their global coordinates also means the compositor can arrange them however it wants without breaking app assumptions, which enables fancy new layouts. There's prominent libraries that make compositor development easier, for example wlroots and QtWayland -- XFCE is also using wlroots. "Punt it to a library" isn't radically different from "punt it to Xorg", even if the slicing is a little different. The tail looks alive and well.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > "Punt it to a library" isn't radically different from "punt it to Xorg", even if the slicing is a little different. That's a reasonable expectation, but it turns out the slicing does matter. For example: With Xorg, setxkbmap will always work to change the keyboard layout on the fly. Now, wlroots does support configuring the keyboard layout, but it turns out the compositor has to actually hook that functionality up, so if I try out a new compositor that looks neat, I can quickly discover that there's actually literally no way to change the keyboard layout because the developer hasn't gotten around to adding that yet. This is not a hypothetical example.
totallywrong 3y ago
Just want to show massive appreciation for Xfce. Best DE ever. I'm currently forced to use macOS in the work laptop and I miss Xfce every second. It'd be amazing to have a Wayland version so we can enjoy it for many more years to come. Thanks to the developers of this fantastic piece of software.
Lowstack 3y ago
You guys' work is highly appreciated!
endorphine 3y ago
Tangentially, what does xfce (or any other DE for that matter) bring to the table if I already use i3 and have i3 status bar configured to fit my needs? I mean, I do have NetworkManager, Blueman, Nautilus (file explorer), so why would I need a DE? I'm wondering if I'm missing something. (Honest question)
- deelowe 3y ago
  Probably nothing. Xfce isn't a timing manager so these two aren't really comparable. Xfce is a lightweight alternative to gnome and kde. Probably the main competitor is lxde and from that perspective, xfce is more of a complete desktop environment than lxde is.

239 points by LaSombra 3y ago

I'm glad to see there's a transition Roadmap in place. This is more than Cinnamon DE has at the moment. You know you're behind the curve when even Xfce is ahead of you.

pjmlp 3y ago

XFCE has become my go to desktop environment after Ubuntu dropped Unity, so it is nice to see an updated roadmap.

ducktective 3y ago

Xfce, the "Just Works" of Linux desktop environments not only the DE itself but also its suite of apps like Thunar. They recently moved to gtk4 (or are planning to?). I wonder what would be the difference between gtk3 and gtk4 apps in terms of latency and performance.

donkeybeer 3y ago
gtk4 is not good. They have been killing more features and forcing more ui wierdness like overlay scrollbars, etc https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790677#c6 I think 4 plans to kill theming too.
- CuteDinosaur 3y ago
  I don't understand most of this decisions.
  - rglullis 3y ago
    Think of it as the product of the new generation of techies who had their first contact with computers after Mac OSX was released, and now all they can/want to do is emulate Apple and their HIG.
    - robinsonb5 3y ago
      It's more than that - it's a new generation of techies who grew up in a "mobile first" world, and view the mouse as an archaic input device.
      - rglullis 3y ago
        I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's hard to me to believe that all these kids went to college (or got some type of computer training) only by working with their phones/tablets.
        robinsonb5 3y ago
        It's not that they only use their phones/tablets, it's that the phone/tablet is the first tool they reach for, the default device, and UI conventions from that space feel correct and natural to them, just as they feel clumsy and jarring to me. (How old am I? Old enough that I still use an opto-mechnical mouse with a ball, because I still like the extra weight and inertia it has over a pure optical mouse!)
        bitwize 3y ago
        How can you prefer that? Not having to periodically scrape the crud off the rollers has been such a boon to me.
        bitwize 3y ago
        The youngest had to be taught, as part of intro to CS, how files and directories worked. Such a person may have used a desktop, but desktops are foreign to them.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      GNOME is primarily about making Free Software that is highly accessible. The desktop and GTK toolkit both predate OSX, so I'm not really sure what the purpose of the comparison is.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sprash 3y ago
    It's sabotage.
keepamovin 3y ago
I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop, I had only experienced it because it's easy and resource light to set up for VNC. It's cool to see people singing its praises. It was always definitely adequate for my 'remote development with desktop GUI' needs. Funny how with anything on the internet there's always Ayes and Nays. It's almost hilarious to me about humans that "the market always segments" into all these trivial seeming (but decidedly important if you have skin in the game) choices. I'm not questioning at all the importance of UI and UX in any way. It's fundamental. These visual virtual environments are the primary tools we humans use every day for our information manipulation snow-shoveling knowledge work. They have to be refined and have exquisite ergonomics tailored to our every whim. That's undeniable and it's not surprising at all that people have strong preferences. I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Example from my business: we build a remote browser that has a kind of real time streaming optimized for adapting many bandwidth conditions to reduce lag (which often occurs by trading away raw framerate). For some people (normally the security conscious crowd), this is perfect. For other people (the app virtualization crowd) this is terrible: they want silky smooth high framerate remote streaming. I suppose people get could lectures about trade-offs, but it really is a kind of enjoyable thing: there's always something to work on. An advantage of being open source is people can tweak it to their needs as much as they want. There's no bottlenecks in the system besides what you want to do, and how much compute and bandwidth you can throw at it. It can be as fast and smooth, or as resource efficient and minimal as you want.
- coldpie 3y ago
  > I didn't know people used xfce as their main desktop Hahaha, really? It's been my desktop since I started using Linux in the 2000s. It's great! It presents windows, has a small set of high quality built in applications (file browser, application launcher, etc), has a big and flexible set of keyboard shortcuts, and other than that, it just gets out of your way. Other DEs like to shove themselves in your way -- put your mouse in the corner of the screen? Something shows up! Hit a wrong keyboard button? Something shows up! Open the application launcher? It's fullscreen, baby! Do something to a window? Here's some jiggly wiggly animations! XFCE just does what it needs to do, quietly, with no fuss. It's fantastic. > I just think it's funny that people can't seem to agree, on anything. The market always segments. Well, I guess I'm just proving your point :)
suprjami 3y ago
Last I checked (6 months ago) there was no plan or capacity to move off the GTK3 version they're currently using. If XFCE ever adopts the GTK4 ugly topbar cancer I'll switch to KDE and the entire K application suite and never run a GTK application again.

luciusdomitius 3y ago

XFCE is frankly the last full featured Desktop Environment, truly focusing on responsiveness and zero-lag SGI-style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvbiBncmFwaGljcyBjb21tZXJjaWFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk&pp=ygUbc2lsaWNvb... MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying. Really hope that Wayland integration works well for them.

pjerem 3y ago
Cinnamon is also in this ballpark. Each have their strengths and weaknesses but both are awesome. Both are pretty dumb when it comes to Hi-DPI support although Cinnamon does an acceptable job at staying coherent when configured with bigger fonts so it’s a workaround. XFCE manages bigger fonts very badly so I have big hopes that real Hi-DPI support will be better with wayland.
- luciusdomitius 3y ago
  You tell me. My biggest pain with XFCE is multi-monitor support. Like having the menu bar also on the second display and not have two of them when you switch back to single-monitor.
Qwertious 3y ago
>MacOS X, Windows and the mainstream Linux DEs have nice animations, but it is fun watching them the first day. After that it is just annoying. Wobbly Windows are amazing and never get old. It's been years, and I still get joy from them. I'm sure there are other nice effects too, but I don't feel that strongly about them - Wobbly Windows are the hill I'd die on.
circuit10 3y ago
As long as the animations are done right (subtle and short) they make the experience feel smoother without slowing you down or annoying you. At least that’s my experience, it’s probably not the same for everyone
prmoustache 3y ago

esarbe 3y ago

Not an XFCE user (I'm comfortably satisfied with the simplicity that is Gnome) but I'm very happy to see XFCE's concrete plans to move towards Wayland!

bradley13 3y ago

I've been using Xubuntu for years - it just works, with no clutter. Absolutely my only complaint are the very thin window borders - this is a setting you cannot individually adjust. However, one quickly gets used to (alt + right-click + drag).

kreddor 3y ago
Seems to be a major problem in many desktop environments. I use the "super + right-click" in Gnome for the same reason (Ubuntu).
- Vinnl 3y ago
  On GNOME you should be able to click in the area near the window borders (e.g. in the drop shadow) to select them and be able to resize the windows.
anon____ 3y ago
Alt+space brings up the window menu. Press R to resize, or M to move the window with either the arrow keys or by moving the mouse pointer. Finalize with Enter, cancel with Escape.
- bmacho 3y ago
  Can you resize a window with only the arrow keys? For example hit r+up and raise the upper border upward, then s+left, and shrink the window by moving the right border leftward, or something like that?
  - anon____ 3y ago
    Yes. After pressing Alt+space then R, the first pressing of an arrow key selects the border you want to move, let's say the left. You can then move that with the left/right arrows. If you press up or down in this state, it will, again, select the corresponding border to work on.
izoow 3y ago

rwmj 3y ago

Can Wayland run programs remotely yet?

pluijzer 3y ago
I thought this was specifically not part of Wayland, am I wrong?
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Sort of. The foundational issue here is the longstanding premise "Wayland can replace X!". The problem is that Wayland can't replace X, only Wayland plus a bunch of other components - or as I like to call it, Wayland++. So Wayland++ can provide network transparency, but whenever a W++ feature has issues and those issues are criticized, Wayland advocates will just motte-and-bailey the issue by saying "but that's not part of Wayland!", which is technically true but irrelevant. "Wayland" can mean Wayland++ or just Wayland-core, depending on what's convenient.
  - j16sdiz 3y ago
    outsourcing the responsibility that is.
    - dathinab 3y ago
      not putting complexity into places it doesn't belong to leading to sub-par outcomes for everyone that is
      - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
        bah. the sub-par outcome is they broke compatibility with everyone and then claimed it was every man / DE for themselves.
        dathinab 3y ago
        x11 was (development) dead long before wayland was relevant x11 had long time become unsustainable in multiple ways braking changes where inevitable all of the most relevant DE had somewhat already gutted out X11 leaving nothing behind then the interfaces so the replacement being defined by interfaces and "every DE for themself" was just natural, for the large DEs it was already the case anyway and for the other DEs you could say wlroot is now the common core they need because they don't have the will/time to implement everything by themself

ndsipa_pomu 3y ago

I used to use XFCE (specifically XUbuntu), but found that its handling of hi-dpi displays on laptops etc. wasn't very good, so switched to Plasma/KDE which seems to work better. Still have issues with certain flatpak apps not scaling properly though.

jeroenhd 3y ago
If scaling is off, there's a good chance the application is using GTK. GTK4 doesn't support fractional scaling but I believe GTK5 might. If applications are written in GTK2/3/4, fractional scaling won't work well and lead to blurry windows. Integer scaling (1x, 2x, 4x) should work just fine, but fractional scaling isn't implemented consistently across GUI frameworks. Hopefully Wayland will fix the inconsistencies between implementations, though GTK and some other GUI frameworks will likely remain broken for a while.
- blueflow 3y ago
  The constant GTK rewrites are a disaster. Why should applications even bother starting with GTK(n) if it will be obsolete and incompatible when GTK(n+1) comes around?
  - dvdkon 3y ago
    You're exaggerating. GTK2 came out in 2002, GTK3 in 2011 and GTK4 in 2020. That' s almost a decade for each version, and you have to consider that GTK2 was maintained for a long time after 3's release and that current Linux distros still package it. And the GTK3 to 4 transition required some changes, but far from a rewrite. If you need multi-decade support from your GUI layer, I can recommend raw Win32 or VT100 terminal codes. There's hardly any other API with that kind of backwards compatibility.
    - j16sdiz 3y ago
      It's the downstream projects. It take 2-3 years to iron out the bugs. Non-gnome downstream take another 3 years to adopt and stabilise. By the time the adoption is finished, another major version emerges. We don't have any good way to maintain compatibility that long.

dathinab 3y ago

> As long as Nvidia does not support Wayland AFIK this problem was solved ~2 years ago when Nvidia added support for GBM in version 495.44 (https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en-us/ https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/181274/en...)

jadbox 3y ago
I'm running KDE Wayland on Nvidia. It's mostly just fine. There's minor quirks with some apps, but the DE does feel smoother to me.
- kldx 3y ago
  Can confirm the desktop and my web browser are a whole lot snappier on Wayland
ankurdhama 3y ago
This is not a solved problem until they support DMA-BUF import (i.e on laptops with iGPU and Nvidia GPU, your external monitor connected to Nvidia will be very sluggish as the compositor will have to copy the framebuffer - rendered on the iGPU - to nvidia GPU using CPU instead of directly importing it to Nvidia GPU using DMA-BUF)
- dathinab 3y ago
  This doesn't add DMA-BUF import but it does mitigate the issue for the use case of many dGPU/iGPU laptops when an external monitor is used (independent of weather they are Nvidia laptops): https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-wlroots-Secondary https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Better-wlroots-Secondar...
- charcircuit 3y ago
  nvidia already supports EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import
charcircuit 3y ago
And even before that the EGL_KHR_stream EGL extension could have been used.

nava_nmr 3y ago

When I use AWS workspace in X11, The clipboard contents can be shared across host and guest VMs. In wayland, the clipboard is not syncing with AWS VM. Is it the way like this? is there any workaround? Could someone please enlighten me?

csdreamer7 3y ago
How do you connect to AWS Workspace? Never used it before. Have you tried opening a bug with them to see if just got broke in your display manager?
- nava_nmr 3y ago
  I have not opened the ticket. I though I should understand bit more. Is it a bug/feature-request to be opened (Sharing clipboard with guest VM)? How it should be handled? any thoughts?
Bright_Machine 3y ago
Only GNOME supports clipboard sharing with guests, because GNOME unifies X11 and Wayland clipboards in the compositor. None of the other Wayland DEs are supporting it since it requires special handling in their respective compositors.

lizknope 3y ago

I've been using XFCE for the last 15 years. Before that it was vtwm, fvwm, afterstep, but I could never get into GNOME or KDE. XFCE just does everything I need and I don't see any reason to switch.

Nursie 3y ago

I really love XFCE. I used it on and off on low-resource machines since the late 00s, and then moved to it for my main desktop when the Gnome3 thing happened. I've never looked back (though I'll admit I'm also a macbook user!). What do I like? It's never forced me to change the way I work. That's up to me. So if Wayland is the future, then I look forward to using XFCE on Wayland somewhere down the line too.

jcarrano 3y ago

By far the best thing with XFCE is that it does not change, it merely improves. Other DEs and applications radically change the UI between releases. I have my XFCE desktop working as I want now and I don't want to change it or having to learn where buttons are located after an update. With Gnome and Windows I feel like a lab rat for their UI experiments.

prmoustache 3y ago
Not sure about that. XFCE started as a clone of CDE. Now compare original CDE with XFCE and it is not really the same thing. Sure, Gnome change from v2 to v3 was a major change in UI, but mostly for the better and Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.
- reidrac 3y ago
  Surely is more about slow evolution than revolution.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    But Gnome did only a revolution once and since then it is the same. I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately and Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly for those looking for a gnome classic evolution that no one was really forced into using gnome 3.
    - Nursie 3y ago
      > I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately Yeah it did. They announced gnome 3 and deprecated 2 on the same day, and seemed to have made the deliberate choice to not allow them to coexist. As soon as your distro moved, bam, you were done. > Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly After some months. This stuff was not there on day 1. In the mean time, those of us who did not want to work the way Gnome 3 decided we should, had to find an alternative. And when we found a good one (Xfce for me), we stuck with it.

toastal 3y ago

The march to Wayland hopefully doesn’t complete until color management & DisplayLink are merged. I had to go back to X11 because of missing features.

bandrami 3y ago
At which point, inevitably, a new generation of devs will look at the now-huge wayland codebase and say "what is all this cruft?! who wants color management in what should just be a display protocol? let's start over and This Time We'll Get It Right™", and the circle of life will continue.
- toastal 3y ago
  Luckily they’re both WIP at this time. That said, the color management, just the spec, has been in the works for what feels like ever—to the point that some of the window managers are going around them in implement their own spec.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Actually, I would expect that it will be a separate protocol, so the next generation will instead ask why you would ever leave color management out of the core protocol and proceed to immediately bake it in.

throwaway914 3y ago

There are a couple reasons I can only back Gnome at this point, even though I loved/miss XFCE. Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling (I think XFCE has some/all of this?) We're just playing catchup to MacOS for over a decade, and soon enough Linux will have to compete with 3d desktop environments (Apple Vision Pro interface). I think we're almost to the point where the DE will be just a physics simulator (game engine) to help augment your reality. Anyway, I still use XFCE on resource-limited hardware but Gnome has been the only option for a while because progress isn't being made by other DEs on these critical things (color, refresh, alpha-composition, and some wayland protocols missing in wlroots). I'm just glad Gnome isn't the dependency hell it used to be, and has slimmed down. I really love what they've done with GJS but I believe there's a competing KDE bindings project. </naive>

prmoustache 3y ago
xfce isn't even useful on resource limited hardware, you are better of using a much lighter weight wm like icewm , openbox or fluxbox + a lightweight launcher and a lighter set of file managers and viewers [1]. [1] even window maker could do it, I saw it was recently updated.
rkangel 3y ago
> Wayland multi-seat + idle-inhibition HDR + variable refresh Fractional scaling The move to Wayland is interesting to observe. On first glance it seems that moving to Wayland provides a load of burden on DEs that they never had before - and not just because of the work required to transition. And that obviously this is all Wayland's fault. What I think is actually going on though is that we expect quite a rich feature set from a modern DE - exactly as you have listed. We could never do most of this stuff on X, but Wayland enables it and then follows a load of work to get it all going. In an ideal world there would be a nice clean abstraction boundary between compositor and DE so that this underlying work was shared between DEs. Maybe that is possible, but people who know what they're talking about seem to agree that the Wayland approach is the right way to go and I don't know enough to disagree. Plus, it makes some intuitive sense that your DE should know how windows share rendering space.

not_your_vase 3y ago

Wayland protocol will celebrate its 15th birthday later this month. TFA is great news, but something isn't right here. I really start to think that the X11->Wayland migration is a bigger clusterfuck than Python2->3 was - even if we consider that a compositor migration is much bigger task than Python migration.

School-Cotton 3y ago
Python 3 at least worked immediately. Wayland still has tons of issues.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  For GNOME user, it is starting to become usable recently Not so luck for non-GNOME user
  - gryn 3y ago
    Wayland on sway has been a smooth sailing for me, the only thing that made be go back was barriers KVM not working and not finding an open source alternative that works for both Linux and windows.
  - bogwog 3y ago
    I’ve been using it with KDE on my laptop and desktop (which has an Nvidia GPU). The laptop is flawless, and the desktop only has minor issues with display configuration (order and/or resolution) getting messed up sometimes when waking from sleep. I’m pretty sure that’s an Nvidia driver bug. Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least)
    - coderedart 3y ago
      > Anyways, it is 100% usable. To say otherwise suggests you haven’t actually tried using it within the past 2 years (at least) IDK why, but the way you say it really annoys me. Like disregarding people's experiences because you have not faced the same issues. Anyway, I try to shift to plasma wayland atleast every month. But there's always these weird graphical issues on nvidia (desktop) that ruin my experience, so i switch back to my x11 session. Even KDE has a page detailing the various problems in wayland https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

igtztorrero 3y ago

XCFE is they best, please keep it simple. I have used it for 7 years and I love it ! May God keep away animations from XCFE allways !

joseluis 3y ago

My favorite combination is Mint + Xfce + openbox as the window manager which leaves the CPU at 0% when not doing anything, and is very responsive and versatile. I had to setup separate dark themes for each one but now it looks good. The only thing I don't like is thunar freezing often when doing long blocking IO operations...

izoow 3y ago

I've recently been giving Xfce a try again on one of my machines, and even though I still prefer KDE on my main machine, I've been quite enjoying it. Especially the SPEED of it has been astonishing. Everything is just absolutely instant. I also really like the "spartan" feel of it. Probably the main thing I'm missing from KDE is being able fo use Super+Number to switch between windows, i.e. Super+1 switches to the window at the first position in the taskbar, etc.. I've been searching around, but haven't found anything that'd be 100%. Would anyone happen to have a solution by any chance?

mxmlnkn 3y ago
You can define shortcuts for that: nth=1; wmctrl -i -a $( wmctrl -l | awk '$2 == "0" { print $1 }' | sed -n "${nth}p" ) I guess you would need 9 shortcuts and you would set nth to the number associated with that shortcut. Works for me at least. You might have to define the shortcut to "bash -c " followed by the above oneliner with some appropriate quoting and escaping of inner quotes.
- izoow 3y ago
  This is what I'm doing right now, but the issue is that it'll only work as long as the order in the taskbar and the window manager list stay consistent. I like to manually reorder my windows in the taskbar and that makes this approach break.
  - mxmlnkn 3y ago
    You could use wmctrl -l -p to also get the pids and then get the start times for each PID with ps -p $$ -o lstart. Then you could sort by start time and only then choose the nth window. There still might be multiple windows belonging to the same pid, though. And if you close windows, the list might still change. You could also hardcode win+1-9 to specific programs, then they would even be consistent over restarts. Then again, the docklike plugin mentioned in the other answer might be similar to that.
curved_columns 3y ago

mnmalst 3y ago

I hope this will be a slow transition but I am pretty sure it will since that's how xfce usually works. I switched to xfce not so long ago after almost 15 years of using KDE for that slow pace exactly. I had small problems and annoyances with KDE on nvidia for a long time but it got worse over time and reached a breaking point lately. Not even talking about Wayland. Anyways, I am happy to have a rock solid and stable alternative like xfce.

aknfxb3m 3y ago

These days I can't be bothered to deviate from the happy path anymore as I've already spent too much time in my life customizing my desktops. I just use whatever GNOME offers and maybe 1-2 extensions. A few months ago I switched from Fedora to Debian 12 and barely noticed it. Thanks to GNOME and systemd, which I hate independently for various reasons. I do feel like a sellout (but not getting paid).

Nursie 3y ago
That's how I feel about Xfce. Gnome made me deviate from the happy path with 3, I switched to where I was happy again, and haven't looked back since. :shrug:

tuananh 3y ago

i run xfce combine with i3. pretty happ with the setup https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w https://imgur.com/c0Hzf7w

sprash 3y ago

The most important points: - It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all). - We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor This should tell you everything. Since the Wayland ecosystem is extremely developer hostile it cements the KDE/GNOME duopoly and eliminates the long tail. XFCE might maybe make the push to Wayland but after that that's it. The rest of the tail is dead.

sho_hn 3y ago
This has already proven to be wrong, imho. There's numerous Wayland versions of popular niche X11 WMs, for example the way sway is a Wayland implementation of i3, and some exciting new experiments (like scrolling tiling WMs) that never really existed on X11. It's usually a lot easier to make a compositor/WM with unusual or innovative behavior on the Wayland stack than it was with X11 in general, as far less behavior is presumed/baked-into either the display server or the existing applications. For example, apps not being able to introspect or manipulate their global coordinates also means the compositor can arrange them however it wants without breaking app assumptions, which enables fancy new layouts. There's prominent libraries that make compositor development easier, for example wlroots and QtWayland -- XFCE is also using wlroots. "Punt it to a library" isn't radically different from "punt it to Xorg", even if the slicing is a little different. The tail looks alive and well.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > "Punt it to a library" isn't radically different from "punt it to Xorg", even if the slicing is a little different. That's a reasonable expectation, but it turns out the slicing does matter. For example: With Xorg, setxkbmap will always work to change the keyboard layout on the fly. Now, wlroots does support configuring the keyboard layout, but it turns out the compositor has to actually hook that functionality up, so if I try out a new compositor that looks neat, I can quickly discover that there's actually literally no way to change the keyboard layout because the developer hasn't gotten around to adding that yet. This is not a hypothetical example.

totallywrong 3y ago

Just want to show massive appreciation for Xfce. Best DE ever. I'm currently forced to use macOS in the work laptop and I miss Xfce every second. It'd be amazing to have a Wayland version so we can enjoy it for many more years to come. Thanks to the developers of this fantastic piece of software.

Lowstack 3y ago

You guys' work is highly appreciated!

endorphine 3y ago

Tangentially, what does xfce (or any other DE for that matter) bring to the table if I already use i3 and have i3 status bar configured to fit my needs? I mean, I do have NetworkManager, Blueman, Nautilus (file explorer), so why would I need a DE? I'm wondering if I'm missing something. (Honest question)

deelowe 3y ago
Probably nothing. Xfce isn't a timing manager so these two aren't really comparable. Xfce is a lightweight alternative to gnome and kde. Probably the main competitor is lxde and from that perspective, xfce is more of a complete desktop environment than lxde is.