11 ms·

XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

264 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

hawski 2y ago
I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it. I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much simpler than Gnome at the time. Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling, don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go to desktop for simplicity and reliability.
- serf 2y ago
  >My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. same. why? they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click, they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work. p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.
IntelMiner 2y ago
XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked" I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key
- dev_snd 2y ago
  Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
  - bogwog 2y ago
    > I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry. What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding? I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)
    - o11c 2y ago
      I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015. Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.
    - infamia 2y ago
      I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time. edit: typos
      - iso8859-1 2y ago
        Laptops with loud fans makes it really easy to find inefficient software. Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your sacrifice, thank you.
w4rh4wk5 2y ago
Do I understand correctly that they are building on top of wlroots? If so, I am pretty happy about this development as I might get to enjoy the solidity of XFCE apps in other WMs / compositors like Sway or River.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Yes, eventually anyway. I've done a little work on xfwm4, using wlroots, but it'll be another year or more before that's usable. For the desktop components that work on Wayland, we've mostly tested on wlroots-based compositors.
jmclnx 2y ago
If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.
  - linguae 2y ago
    I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites. I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts). I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years. I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-bauhaus/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
qwerty456127 2y ago
Why should old WMs/DEs add support for Wayland, why not just write new for Wayland specifically?
- talldayo 2y ago
  In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently. Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and Wayland users.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years. The only component that requires major changes is the WM. Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing platform specific quirks. (Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for our panel to use, but... yeah.)
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so inclined, however.
fb03 2y ago
In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.
- jrm4 2y ago
  Ditto. In terms of other stuff, I'm thinking about x2go, which I still use religiously? I'm curious, is Wayland anywhere on this?
- treve 2y ago
  I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every application had to add explicit support, but I've had no problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.
  - hackyhacky 2y ago
    Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
    - sweeter 2y ago
      There's really nothing that can be said then but I personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at home. its basically `ssh -x` https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.en.html https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.e...
    - sanqui 2y ago
      Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.
kelnos 2y ago
To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer. 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.
- sweeter 2y ago
  Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to know what your opinion is on the matter.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    It's not so much a change as it is (well, will be) an option. We're not abandoning X11, and I expect it will be a couple more major releases before we have feature parity on Wayland with what we have in X11. But yes, some people are excited, some don't care, some are worried. But there won't be a switch. If users want to keep running it on X11, they can do that. I can't promise that will be the case forever, but it's not (won't be) that hard to support both with how things are currently.
- agumonkey 2y ago
  Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point you forget it's there.
  - indyjoenz 2y ago
    XFCE has been my preferred Unix desktop for like 20 years. Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of use, and good taste. I also thank the devs.
stefantalpalaru 2y ago
[dead]
dingdingdang 2y ago
Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.
- IWeldMelons 2y ago
  KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    Source?
    - ahoka 2y ago
      It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
      - BanazirGalbasi 2y ago
        I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
        johnisgood 2y ago
        Xubuntu was lighter than Ubuntu (when it had Gnome), at least that is how I remember it.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
roomey 2y ago
Xfce all day every (work) day. I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)! Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag. It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it! Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical. By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!
ehutch79 2y ago
I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos, mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space, ugh. Does anyone a cleaner article?
olliej 2y ago
Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver? [editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension] I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount of work involved that’s clearly not the case? (It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X development, and so I’ve paid literally no attention to the details)
- kelnos 2y ago
  Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11. X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.
  - olliej 2y ago
    Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?) But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs? I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .
      - bitwize 2y ago
        Weston has (for the time being) an X11 backend.
fbritoferreira 2y ago
Should the project be renamed to WFCE?
- severine 2y ago
  No, not anymore: Xfce is pronounced “ecks-eff-see-ee”. The name Xfce originally stood for “XForms Common Environment”, but since then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn't use the XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as “XFCE” and is no longer an abbreviation for anything (although suggestions have been made, such as “X Freakin' Cool Environment”).
guilhas 2y ago
Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland, which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything unusable every other month
- bitwize 2y ago
  Most projects will eventually remove the X code path. The long-term solution is to switch to Wayland.
- kelnos 2y ago
  That's the plan, anyway. And I expect Wayland won't be usable for most as a daily driver until 4.22 or even 4.24, so obviously X11 will remain a high priority. And even after then, the X11 code paths will still work. Most of the difference is handled inside GDK anyway; the work we've done for Wayland support is mainly where GDK doesn't handle what we want to do, and where we've had to write libX11 code.
darren0 2y ago
The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.
- tristan957 2y ago
  CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a UX problem when it doesn't do it right.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.
    - sweeter 2y ago
      On Wayland, the compositor can either let windows draw their own borders, or it can disallow it. On X11, if a window want's to draw its own decorations... it will just do it, and you won't be able to do anything about it. Pretty much every single Wayland compositor follows this except for GNOME, who refuse to do so. It causes problems with windows like Davinci Resolve who don't draw their own decos. This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. But this is a tangent and purely a GNOME problem.
      - HKH2 2y ago
        > This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. Don't all WMs have shortcut keys anyway?
rurban 2y ago
Getting back to XFCE, and being able to leave gnome would be a godsend. I didn't dare to try KDE yet.
FloatArtifact 2y ago
My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts. Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.
- bitwize 2y ago
  If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.
  - FloatArtifact 2y ago
    > If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny. Linux is fine with X11 per my requirements above. The biggest problem is the fragmentation caused by Wayland. I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments much less, the features needed. If Wayland was left and X11 was right the community needs something in the middle paradigm.
    - consteval 2y ago
      > I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments I highly recommend Qt for this purpose. Gtk has been a hot mess for the past few years with Gtk4 and libadwaita shenanigans. However, Qt has continued to evolve incrementally without dropping any backwards functionality. It's incredibly full-featured and has amazing tooling. In addition to Qt Creator you also have the CLI tools for packaging and whatnot and KDE has Kirigami for components. The nice thing is that Qt applications look pretty good in native environments like plasma, but they also look pretty good in Gtk environments, including older Gtk-3 desktops and newer Gtk-4 desktops. So you cover all your bases. You also get Mobile and Windows/Mac, if anybody cares. The two real downsides are: - GPL - C++ only (ish). There's other bindings but they will not have the same level and quality of tooling. Gtk has less tooling overall, but MUCH more high-quality bindings.
emilfihlman 2y ago
Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny. Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard Ubuntu. The way Wayland is done is a mistake.
valeg 2y ago
Xfce is not perfect but pretty close (in *nix realm); it is a stable WIMP desktop environment. Everything where you expect it to be, no excessive feature creep, stable. It is like a tool, I love it. I wish it had a better brand. Too nerdy.
- Aachen 2y ago
  For anyone else not in the know > In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer" —https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
aussieguy1234 2y ago
Ive got a hybrid XFCE/i3 setup as my main desktop. The panel is killed on startup. This could get me looking into sway/Wayland.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
btreecat 2y ago
This is great news! I have switched my machines over to KDE for Wayland support and a bit better overall XP but still love XFCE for what it is.

264 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it. I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much simpler than Gnome at the time. Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling, don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go to desktop for simplicity and reliability.

serf 2y ago
>My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. same. why? they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click, they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work. p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.

IntelMiner 2y ago

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked" I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key

dev_snd 2y ago
Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
- bogwog 2y ago
  > I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry. What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding? I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)
  - o11c 2y ago
    I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015. Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.
  - infamia 2y ago
    I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time. edit: typos
    - iso8859-1 2y ago
      Laptops with loud fans makes it really easy to find inefficient software. Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your sacrifice, thank you.

w4rh4wk5 2y ago

Do I understand correctly that they are building on top of wlroots? If so, I am pretty happy about this development as I might get to enjoy the solidity of XFCE apps in other WMs / compositors like Sway or River.

kelnos 2y ago
Yes, eventually anyway. I've done a little work on xfwm4, using wlroots, but it'll be another year or more before that's usable. For the desktop components that work on Wayland, we've mostly tested on wlroots-based compositors.

jmclnx 2y ago

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.

hggigg 2y ago
Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.
- linguae 2y ago
  I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites. I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts). I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years. I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-bauhaus/ https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.

qwerty456127 2y ago

Why should old WMs/DEs add support for Wayland, why not just write new for Wayland specifically?

talldayo 2y ago
In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently. Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and Wayland users.
kelnos 2y ago
Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years. The only component that requires major changes is the WM. Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing platform specific quirks. (Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for our panel to use, but... yeah.)
EasyMark 2y ago
Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so inclined, however.

fb03 2y ago

In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.

jrm4 2y ago
Ditto. In terms of other stuff, I'm thinking about x2go, which I still use religiously? I'm curious, is Wayland anywhere on this?
treve 2y ago
I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every application had to add explicit support, but I've had no problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.
- hackyhacky 2y ago
  Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    There's really nothing that can be said then but I personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at home. its basically `ssh -x` https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.en.html https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.e...
  - sanqui 2y ago
    Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.

kelnos 2y ago

To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer. 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.

sweeter 2y ago
Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to know what your opinion is on the matter.
- kelnos 2y ago
  It's not so much a change as it is (well, will be) an option. We're not abandoning X11, and I expect it will be a couple more major releases before we have feature parity on Wayland with what we have in X11. But yes, some people are excited, some don't care, some are worried. But there won't be a switch. If users want to keep running it on X11, they can do that. I can't promise that will be the case forever, but it's not (won't be) that hard to support both with how things are currently.
agumonkey 2y ago
Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point you forget it's there.
- indyjoenz 2y ago
  XFCE has been my preferred Unix desktop for like 20 years. Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of use, and good taste. I also thank the devs.

stefantalpalaru 2y ago

[dead]

dingdingdang 2y ago

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

IWeldMelons 2y ago
KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  Source?
  - ahoka 2y ago
    It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
    - BanazirGalbasi 2y ago
      I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        Xubuntu was lighter than Ubuntu (when it had Gnome), at least that is how I remember it.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]

roomey 2y ago

Xfce all day every (work) day. I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)! Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag. It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it! Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical. By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!

ehutch79 2y ago

I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos, mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space, ugh. Does anyone a cleaner article?

olliej 2y ago

Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver? [editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension] I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount of work involved that’s clearly not the case? (It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X development, and so I’ve paid literally no attention to the details)

kelnos 2y ago
Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11. X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.
- olliej 2y ago
  Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?) But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs? I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .
    - bitwize 2y ago
      Weston has (for the time being) an X11 backend.

fbritoferreira 2y ago

Should the project be renamed to WFCE?

severine 2y ago
No, not anymore: Xfce is pronounced “ecks-eff-see-ee”. The name Xfce originally stood for “XForms Common Environment”, but since then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn't use the XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as “XFCE” and is no longer an abbreviation for anything (although suggestions have been made, such as “X Freakin' Cool Environment”).

guilhas 2y ago

Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland, which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything unusable every other month

bitwize 2y ago
Most projects will eventually remove the X code path. The long-term solution is to switch to Wayland.
kelnos 2y ago
That's the plan, anyway. And I expect Wayland won't be usable for most as a daily driver until 4.22 or even 4.24, so obviously X11 will remain a high priority. And even after then, the X11 code paths will still work. Most of the difference is handled inside GDK anyway; the work we've done for Wayland support is mainly where GDK doesn't handle what we want to do, and where we've had to write libX11 code.

darren0 2y ago

The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.

tristan957 2y ago
CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a UX problem when it doesn't do it right.
- cwillu 2y ago
  The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.
  - sweeter 2y ago
    On Wayland, the compositor can either let windows draw their own borders, or it can disallow it. On X11, if a window want's to draw its own decorations... it will just do it, and you won't be able to do anything about it. Pretty much every single Wayland compositor follows this except for GNOME, who refuse to do so. It causes problems with windows like Davinci Resolve who don't draw their own decos. This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. But this is a tangent and purely a GNOME problem.
    - HKH2 2y ago
      > This leaves some windows without any controls at all lol. Don't all WMs have shortcut keys anyway?

rurban 2y ago

Getting back to XFCE, and being able to leave gnome would be a godsend. I didn't dare to try KDE yet.

FloatArtifact 2y ago

My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts. Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.

bitwize 2y ago
If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.
- FloatArtifact 2y ago
  > If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny. Linux is fine with X11 per my requirements above. The biggest problem is the fragmentation caused by Wayland. I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments much less, the features needed. If Wayland was left and X11 was right the community needs something in the middle paradigm.
  - consteval 2y ago
    > I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments I highly recommend Qt for this purpose. Gtk has been a hot mess for the past few years with Gtk4 and libadwaita shenanigans. However, Qt has continued to evolve incrementally without dropping any backwards functionality. It's incredibly full-featured and has amazing tooling. In addition to Qt Creator you also have the CLI tools for packaging and whatnot and KDE has Kirigami for components. The nice thing is that Qt applications look pretty good in native environments like plasma, but they also look pretty good in Gtk environments, including older Gtk-3 desktops and newer Gtk-4 desktops. So you cover all your bases. You also get Mobile and Windows/Mac, if anybody cares. The two real downsides are: - GPL - C++ only (ish). There's other bindings but they will not have the same level and quality of tooling. Gtk has less tooling overall, but MUCH more high-quality bindings.

emilfihlman 2y ago

Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny. Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard Ubuntu. The way Wayland is done is a mistake.

valeg 2y ago

Xfce is not perfect but pretty close (in *nix realm); it is a stable WIMP desktop environment. Everything where you expect it to be, no excessive feature creep, stable. It is like a tool, I love it. I wish it had a better brand. Too nerdy.

Aachen 2y ago
For anyone else not in the know > In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer" —https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)

aussieguy1234 2y ago

Ive got a hybrid XFCE/i3 setup as my main desktop. The panel is killed on startup. This could get me looking into sway/Wayland.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

btreecat 2y ago

This is great news! I have switched my machines over to KDE for Wayland support and a bit better overall XP but still love XFCE for what it is.