4 ms·

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

by 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.
  - MadnessASAP 2y ago
    Before I went all in on i3 then Sway, XFCE was the cats pyjamas. Still is the dogs boxers as far as I am aware.
fractal618 2y ago
Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce? Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!
- kelnos 2y ago
  Compiz is an X11 compositor that can be used with Xfce if you disable xfwm4's builtin compositor. A Wayland compositor is a completely different beast, and that's what we have to build.
akdor1154 2y ago
(uninformed outsider) have you considered reaching out to the System76 folks? They are also setting out doing a Wayland compositor for a (decreasingly) gtk-based desktop and are reasonably far along on this goal. I wonder if their compositor would suit your needs?
- kelnos 2y ago
  To me, at least, xfwm4's window management behavior is a big part of what makes Xfce... well, Xfce. So no, I don't think I'd consider using someone else's compositor.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    To add a bit, hours later: I've been testing my Wayland support for the other components using Wayfire and Labwc, and honestly I find their window management incredibly frustrating. Part of it is just lack of familiarity, I'm sure, but honestly I just don't like how they do things. A lot of xfwm4's behavior is windowing-independent, or fairly easy to put the windowing-specific calls behind interfaces. There's some of it that turns out to be pretty hard to untangle, which is where the real work is, but I think it's worthwhile work to take on.
    - akdor1154 2y ago
      Sure, the xfwm4 behaviour is absolutely something you'd need to be able to own in a technical and organisation sense. However all the other stuff around building a Wayland compositor is... big. Sharing portals, XWayland support, high dpi and mixed low/high dpi, display management as a whole, and that's just the stuff I know about.. I love xfce, I don't use it anymore though because I wanted Wayland support. As a (past and potentially future) user, I want to see a healthy xfce, not one that is burning out its devs with the giant task of maintaining a Wayland compositor. :)
      - kelnos 2y ago
        Yes, I'm well aware it's big. I've already written some toy compositors to play around with, and have even written an embedded compositor library. But it's worth doing here. And wlroots does so much heavy lifting that it becomes a lot more manageable. Most of the code in xfwm4 will still be window management code, as it should be. I've worked on Xfce on and off for 20 years (mostly off, I suppose; probably a total of ~7 years in that time), so I get what these big things are like, and what maintainership means. We're also a very small team of volunteers who have other jobs and other things going on in our lives. But that's fine; Xfce does just fine with that level of work, and will continue to do just fine.
sylware 2y ago
Until wlroots is statically linked into xfce compositor... you know, if we could avoid the mess of the bazillion of x11 libs all over again...
- kelnos 2y ago
  Not sure what you mean. Hopefully I'll be basing it on a released version of wlroots (or at least a non-released version that that will be released by the time I'm ready), which will be dynamically linked just like everything else. And even if it isn't, and it's statically linked, so what? RAM is cheap and plentiful in most places these days, and if you're really upset about it you can build it yourself with --disable-wayland or whatever. Anyway, the negativity is quite unnecessary and tiresome.
  - sylware 2y ago
    Because putting everything in shared libs is what made the mess of the bazillion of x11 libs, even though x11 is a IPC protocol. If I am upset about something, it is wlroots does not manage properly its symbol namespaces with the C preprocessor, that to reduce to near 0 the possibility to have symbol collision while static linking. The great thing is finally xfce is going to have its wayland compositor. And there, there is not negativity, only positivity, because the real core of wayland is orders of magnitude simpler than x11 core, and wayland is getting its way on mobile, which means with vulkan3d, dude, the future looks bright, not grim, cheer up.

by kelnos 2y ago

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.
- MadnessASAP 2y ago
  Before I went all in on i3 then Sway, XFCE was the cats pyjamas. Still is the dogs boxers as far as I am aware.

fractal618 2y ago

Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce? Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!

kelnos 2y ago
Compiz is an X11 compositor that can be used with Xfce if you disable xfwm4's builtin compositor. A Wayland compositor is a completely different beast, and that's what we have to build.

akdor1154 2y ago

(uninformed outsider) have you considered reaching out to the System76 folks? They are also setting out doing a Wayland compositor for a (decreasingly) gtk-based desktop and are reasonably far along on this goal. I wonder if their compositor would suit your needs?

kelnos 2y ago
To me, at least, xfwm4's window management behavior is a big part of what makes Xfce... well, Xfce. So no, I don't think I'd consider using someone else's compositor.
- kelnos 2y ago
  To add a bit, hours later: I've been testing my Wayland support for the other components using Wayfire and Labwc, and honestly I find their window management incredibly frustrating. Part of it is just lack of familiarity, I'm sure, but honestly I just don't like how they do things. A lot of xfwm4's behavior is windowing-independent, or fairly easy to put the windowing-specific calls behind interfaces. There's some of it that turns out to be pretty hard to untangle, which is where the real work is, but I think it's worthwhile work to take on.
  - akdor1154 2y ago
    Sure, the xfwm4 behaviour is absolutely something you'd need to be able to own in a technical and organisation sense. However all the other stuff around building a Wayland compositor is... big. Sharing portals, XWayland support, high dpi and mixed low/high dpi, display management as a whole, and that's just the stuff I know about.. I love xfce, I don't use it anymore though because I wanted Wayland support. As a (past and potentially future) user, I want to see a healthy xfce, not one that is burning out its devs with the giant task of maintaining a Wayland compositor. :)
    - kelnos 2y ago
      Yes, I'm well aware it's big. I've already written some toy compositors to play around with, and have even written an embedded compositor library. But it's worth doing here. And wlroots does so much heavy lifting that it becomes a lot more manageable. Most of the code in xfwm4 will still be window management code, as it should be. I've worked on Xfce on and off for 20 years (mostly off, I suppose; probably a total of ~7 years in that time), so I get what these big things are like, and what maintainership means. We're also a very small team of volunteers who have other jobs and other things going on in our lives. But that's fine; Xfce does just fine with that level of work, and will continue to do just fine.

sylware 2y ago

Until wlroots is statically linked into xfce compositor... you know, if we could avoid the mess of the bazillion of x11 libs all over again...

kelnos 2y ago
Not sure what you mean. Hopefully I'll be basing it on a released version of wlroots (or at least a non-released version that that will be released by the time I'm ready), which will be dynamically linked just like everything else. And even if it isn't, and it's statically linked, so what? RAM is cheap and plentiful in most places these days, and if you're really upset about it you can build it yourself with --disable-wayland or whatever. Anyway, the negativity is quite unnecessary and tiresome.
- sylware 2y ago
  Because putting everything in shared libs is what made the mess of the bazillion of x11 libs, even though x11 is a IPC protocol. If I am upset about something, it is wlroots does not manage properly its symbol namespaces with the C preprocessor, that to reduce to near 0 the possibility to have symbol collision while static linking. The great thing is finally xfce is going to have its wayland compositor. And there, there is not negativity, only positivity, because the real core of wayland is orders of magnitude simpler than x11 core, and wayland is getting its way on mobile, which means with vulkan3d, dude, the future looks bright, not grim, cheer up.