21 ms·

Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

370 points by pantalaimon 9mo ago

hu3 9mo ago
I've been using Xfce as a daily driver in one machine for about a decade now. Great to know there's work on the wayland support front. Also, writing it in Rust should help bring more contributors to the project. If you use Xfce I urge you to donate to their Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/xfce https://opencollective.com/xfce https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu
- kaijia 9mo ago
  I've been using xfce for about five years. I just setup my monthly donation last month and saw this good news today:)
jchw 9mo ago
I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it. To me the reasoning is solid: Wayland appears to be the future, and Rust is a good way to help avoid many compositor crashes, which are a more severe issue in Wayland (though it doesn't necessarily need to be fatal, FWIW.) Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Of course, if they made the right choice, it should be apparent in relatively short order, so I wish them luck.
- coldpie 9mo ago
  > Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unless they are bored and enjoy arguing about random junk on some web forum. Wayland has the momentum behind it, and while there will be some justified grumbling because change is always annoying, the transition will happen and will be fairly painless as native support for it continues to grow. The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehards; some weird minority that likes to scream about the good old days on web forums but really no one cares about. There are good reasons to switch to Wayland, and I trust the XFCE team to handle the transition well. Great news from the XFCE team here, I'm excited for them to pull this off.
  - graemep 9mo ago
    I used XFCE for a long time and I very much agree. it just works, and is lightweight. I use KDE these days but XFCE would be my second choice. > The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehard I hope you are not conflating anti-systemD people with SysV init diehards? As far as I can see very few people want to keep Sysv init, but there are lots who think SystemD init is the wrong replacement, and those primarily because its a lot more than an init system. In many ways the objects are opposite. People hate system D for being more than init, people hate Wayland for doing less than X. Edit: corrected "Wayland" to "XFCE" in first sentence!
    - LeFantome 9mo ago
      It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible. Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular. Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.
      - graemep 9mo ago
        I do not have a strong opinion about Xorg vs Wayland. My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs but that seems to be being dealt with. I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved. I do dislike System D for two reasons. One is exactly because it s a monolith and, in effect, an extension of the OS. The other is the attitude of the developers which becomes very evident if you browser the issues.
        kelnos 9mo ago
        > My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs Our OpenBSD packager has already said in our Matrix channel that he'll be testing here and there in order to keep me honest ;)
        ethanpailes 9mo ago
- ok123456 9mo ago
  Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to support the system, and it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. The mantra of "it's a protocol" isn't very comforting when it lacks so many features that necessitate workarounds, leading to fragmentation and general incompatibility. There are plenty of complicated, bad protocols. The ones that survive are inherently "simple" (e.g., SMTP) or "trivial" (e.g., TFTP). Maybe there will be a successor to Wayland that will be the SMTP to its X400, but to me, Wayland seems like a past compromise (almost 16 years of development) rather than a future.
  - justin66 9mo ago
    It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.
    - simoncion 9mo ago
      > It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out. [0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.
      - ok123456 9mo ago
        They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
- poulpy123 9mo ago
  Afaik there exists only X11 and Wayland, and X11 is dying if not dead. And for rust I don't see why a desktop user would be concerned by the language used as long as it is good enough.
- thisislife2 9mo ago
  Yeah, I am staunch proponent of "don't try to fix what is not broken". Current XFCE is fast, light-weight, usable and works fine without major issues. While I don't fully understand the advantages / disadvantages of XFCE using Wayland instead of X, if, as someone else pointed out here on HN, running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower, it means these developers will be crippling one of XFCE's strongest feature. In that case other minor advantages seems pointless to users like me.
  - happymellon 9mo ago
    > running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower Citation. None of the other desktops have slowed with Wayland, and gaming is as fast as, if not marginally faster on KDE/Gnome with Wayland vs LXDE on X. https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming
    - thisislife2 9mo ago
      I based it on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901
      - jchw 9mo ago
        Latency and throughput are very different things. However, it's worth noting that the comparison here is with and without compositing. If you were using compositing already on X11 (I believe XFCE offers it with "Desktop Effects" or something to that tune) then you've already been eating compositing latency, and you should actually get less latency in some situations. But as far as it performing worse overall, I don't think that would be expected. Compositing itself does lean more on hardware acceleration to provide a good experience, though, so if you compare it on a machine that has no hardware accelerated graphics with compositing disabled, then it really would be worse, yeah.
        mrktf 9mo ago
        Little misconception here (beware i'm using xlibre and causal user). On X11 you can find two mechanisms which can be called compositor : 1st: "enable display compositing" option - this one increases latency as every window draw need go though compositor application (in nutshell it exchanging opengl textures - only synchronization messages goes over "wire") 2nd: the Xserver rendering pipeline compositor, this one goes with modesetting (intel, amdgpu) driver TearFree option - almost everything inside X11 server in OpenGL textures and compositor perform direct blending to screen (including direct scanout). What I want to tell, on modern X (there are merge requests for Xorg server to modesetting driver, amdgpu have this code) with TearFree enabled you by default optimal hardware acceleration - there comes lower latency
- bufio 9mo ago
  Then the future is full of high latency.
- davidgerard 9mo ago
  Long-time XFCE user here. We care that stuff works the same, we appreciate how much work it is to achieve that when the world is changing out from under you, and we appreciate that XFCE understands this and cares about it. Being in Rust is not a concern.
- jeroenhd 9mo ago
  My watch from 8 years ago runs Wayland. Nothing written in Rust as far as I can tell, though. With that knowledge, I'm certain that XFCE will remain lightweight. It can be done, so I feel confident that the XFCE folks will get it done.
- dlcarrier 9mo ago
  I don't think this will be a quick transition. Wayland has lots of potential, but it's far from ready to replace X11, especially in multitasking environments. XFCE is taking their time, because their community is more very concerned stability. I predict that XFCE will default to X11 until Wayland has reached broad feature parity, then default to Wayland but keep X11 support until the last vestages of incompatibility are delt with. There's no reason that this wouldn't be accepted by their community, and it should be lighter weight, in the end.
- internet_points 9mo ago
  Long-time xfce fan here, I trust the team to make the right decisions of what to do with their copious spare time and insane amounts of funding </s> (Instead of seeing this as "xfce jumps on bandwagon", I'm seeing it more as "bandwagon finally stable enough for xfce".)
- einr 9mo ago
  I am an XFCE user since many years, and am pretty decidedly in the "traditional and conservative about technologies" camp, and I think this is neat and just fine and dandy -- as long as they're not in a hurry to depreciate X11. Whenever I eventually have to go Wayland I would like to continue to use XFCE, so thumbs up for doing the work.
tasn 9mo ago
Very interesting that they opted for a rewrite in Rust instead of adjusting the existing codebase. I wonder how long it'll take them writing a compositor from scratch.
- andreldm 9mo ago
  Not the whole codebase, only the window manager (compositor is the Wayland equivalent). Other components are written in C and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Those components gained Wayland support in the last couple of years, you can try Xfce in a labwc session, there are of course several things to improve, but the compositor is the last big piece missing.
  - tasn 9mo ago
    Thanks for the context!
- kelnos 9mo ago
  (xfwl4 author here.) I spent a month or so in 2024 attempting to refactor xfwm4 so it could serve dual purpose as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor, and ended up abandoning the idea. It was just getting ugly and hard to read and understand, and I wasn't confident that I could continue to make changes without introducing bugs (crashers, even). We want X11 users to be unaffected by this, and introducing bugs in xfwm4 wouldn't achieve that goal. Note that we don't have to rewrite all of Xfce: xfce4-session, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop, etc. will all run on Wayland just fine (there are some rough edges that need to be ironed out for full Wayland support, but they're already fairly usable on wlroots-based compositors). This is just (heh, "just") building a compositor and porting xfwm4's WM behavior and UI elements over to it. Not a small task, to be sure, but much smaller than "rewriting all of Xfce".
bergutman 9mo ago
FYI, you can currently use most wlroots-based compositors with XFCE. I myself am running Hyprland + XFCE on Gentoo. https://github.com/bergutman/dots https://github.com/bergutman/dots
- nix0n 9mo ago
  I like the retro theme. Could you expand on why you describe Hyprland and XFCE4 as "a cursed combination"? Might provide some insight as to why the official XFCE project decided to create their own compositor.
rawxtl 9mo ago
If wayland support was there already I would be using xfce. I truly admire it, it's great to see this happening and I hope the project continues in great speed. With DE's requiring hard system-d support, I would rather have something like xfce
fragmede 9mo ago
i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for greetd. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!
- fragmede 9mo ago
  in the time it took me to complain about xfce4, three other complaints popped up! so I guess I'm not alone
- hagbard_c 9mo ago
  If you're just trying to run Linux you're better off either using one of the many read-made distributions or going with X11 since that works just about everywhere and has done so for decades.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    THanks for the encouragement. I'm trying to get Debian Linux to run on a Chromebook and it's been no shortage of frustration, especially because ChromeOS is Linux and ostensibly open source, but just getting the kernel booted was an ordeal and a half. I'm currently stuck at suspend not working because something something EC, for which ChromeOS has a userland program to coax it into working right.
    - hagbard_c 9mo ago
      ChromeOS and devices it was made for are not the best start in Linux-land since it is Linux just like Android is, i.e. it is based on a Linux kernel but for the rest quite different from 'standard' (GNU-) Linux distributions like Debian + derivatives, Arch, Fedora etc. Maybe you can get that userland tool from ChromeOS to work in Debian, maybe not. Even though you're trying to get Debian installed on the thing I'd also refer to the Arch wiki for information on how to get things working right: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices Arch being what it is it has attracted a host of knowledgeable users who have collected their information about how to get things working on different systems in an organised and usually comprehensive way on that wiki. Much if not most of what is written there is also applicable to getting non-Arch distributions running on those systems.
throw0101a 9mo ago
Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?
- mghackerlady 9mo ago
  Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago
- torstenvl 9mo ago
  Yes, but still kind of WIP. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
- ux266478 9mo ago
  It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.
  - throw0101a 9mo ago
    > It depends on what you mean by send. Currently I can: $ ssh -X somehost xeyes and get a window on macOS.
    - NoGravitas 9mo ago
      Today you would do: `$ waypipe ssh somehost foot` You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.
    - gf000 9mo ago
Ciantic 9mo ago
I've used Smithay's Rust client toolkit for a few months now. For making apps it is still sometimes have unsafe wrappers disguised as safe. It has a lot of internals wrapped in Arc<>, but in my tests, the methods are not safe to call from different threads anyhow, you will get weird crashes if done so. I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
mghackerlady 9mo ago
I love XFCE, with the move to wayland I hope they start thinking about abandoning GTK though
- WD-42 9mo ago
  If you are wishing they used QT instead the fact that they chose Rust only makes that less likely.
- torstenvl 9mo ago
  Why do you hope they abandon GTK? What would you have them replace it with?
  - Gualdrapo 9mo ago
    Enlightenment. No, really. If they ever move away from GTK (due to the GNOME shenanigans GNOME-izing GTK) I wish Englightenment and Xfce were together a single thing. But that's if I could ask the Tux genie three wishes.
    - mghackerlady 9mo ago
      Hell I wish EFL was more used in general. I was thinking QT (mainly because I forgot about EFL) but that's much better
    - torstenvl 9mo ago
      GTK4 is still pretty usable without libadwaita and all its Gnome-isms. But frankly I think forking and maintaining GTK3 is preferable to moving to EFL or Qt. GIMP is still on GTK3. MATE is still on GTK3. Inkscape is still on GTK3 (but GTK4 work is in progress). Evolution is still on GTK3. I think GTK3 will be around for a long time.
      - silon42 9mo ago
        +1...
  - 9mo ago
prima-facie 9mo ago
Am I the only one who's not buying into the Wayland hype? I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair, as I see nothing wrong with it.
- pantalaimon 9mo ago
  > I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair Are you also willing to maintain it?
  - superkuh 9mo ago
    Are you willing to write accessibility support for the new xfce only wayland compositor? How will you get every other wayland compositor to support your non-'wayland core' accessibility extension? People like to frame things like the waylands are some sort of default and nothing is being lost and no one is being excluded.
    - zamalek 9mo ago
      Everyone has settled on an accessibility standard (Matt Campbell's). So it's not "your" accessibility protocol, it's already "the" accessibility protocol. This is working as intended IMO: allow things to compete and future in the wild and then pick the fittest.
      - superkuh 9mo ago
        Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter, and GNOME's DE's userland as of this last 6 months. I would very happy to hear about even this extension supported under other wayland compositors and software. Do you know of any? Since you seem informed perhaps you can clear something up for me, when Cambpell says "push full accessibility tree to trusted clients" does that mean you get the entire desktop tree, or only for that application? Because if you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is highly incompatible with existing solutions. They say it is compatible because application developers can create a new virtualized thing themselves. But that's not compatible. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user I am someone. I am a human being. And Campbell's assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by arguments informed from problems that don't even apply generally. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children
slackfan 9mo ago
So will it be renamed to Wfce in the end?
- lern_too_spel 9mo ago
  It was originally named XFce after the XForms library. As of Xfce 3, it uses GTK though, so it could be called GTKce, but renaming the project every time you change widget toolkits is probably not a good idea.
  - slackfan 9mo ago
    And what was XForms named after?...
lombasihir 9mo ago
daily drive xfce4, best DE ever, simple and complete.
sylware 9mo ago
Until I can still compile xfce with an small and simple C compiler or even a simpler SDK.
justabrowser 9mo ago
[flagged]
- coldpie 9mo ago
  I know, I know! Change is hard and scary. To be honest, while I am glad they're finally tackling this, I'm also expecting to have a pretty annoying couple of weeks whenever they ship this support and I finally decide to make the switch. There will be things to learn and new behaviors to understand and, yes, new bugs and annoyances to learn to work around. But I think if we both put our big boy pants on, keep a positive and friendly attitude, and help each other out, we can make it through these difficult times and come out the other side with proper high DPI support, sane multi-monitor handling and hot-swapping, and maybe even some wild new stuff like high color depth options.
  - justabrowser 9mo ago
    [flagged]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Fiveplus 9mo ago
>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does... I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence? As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model. This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?
- simoncion 9mo ago
  > ...or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland? I think I know what "frame perfect" means, and I'm pretty sure that you've been able to get that for ages on X11... at least with AMD/ATi hardware. Enable (or have your distro enable) the TearFree option, and there you go. I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that this adds a frame of latency.
  - wtallis 9mo ago
    > I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that this adds a frame of latency. True triple buffering doesn't add one frame of latency, but since it enforces only whole frames be sent to the display instead of tearing, it can cause partial frames of latency. (It's hard to come up with a well-defined measure of frame latency when tearing is allowed.) But there have been many systems that abused the term "triple buffering" to refer to a three-frame queue, which always does add unnecessary latency, making it almost always the wrong choice for interactive systems.
justabrowser 9mo ago
[flagged]
spicyusername 9mo ago
Great to see xfce continue on into the next age. I've been using popos for a while, but xfce will always have a place in my heart. If it had tiling support I'd probably use it still. Being so lightweight is a massive boon.
la1n 9mo ago
Rust is not GNU
- clircle 9mo ago
  Neither is xfce
lizknope 9mo ago
I started off using twm / olwm / vtwm in 1991. Then FVWM and Afterstep / WindowMaker. I've been using XFCE since around 2007. As long as it functions similarly I'll be happy.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Can relate, however I had Unity in between, and some Enlightment as well. GNOME was cool during the sawfish days.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
justabrowser 9mo ago
[flagged]
- simoncion 9mo ago
  You -uh- need to learn to troll better, my dude. Kids these days... trolling used to require what's now called effortposts.
- estimator7292 9mo ago
  Aren't you a little young to be on here? Do your parents know you're online?
poulpy123 9mo ago
Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad
- adzm 9mo ago
  What about systemd?
  - MrFurious 9mo ago
    Systemd was easy for me. All things worked in transition and have the big advantage that don't need shell scripts for create services. Wayland..., is slow, buggy, applications close without reason...
    - gf000 9mo ago
      How on earth would Wayland be slow? Like it's literally an IPC on top of the lowest level Linux kernel API (DRM), displaying buffers. It was partially made for car infotainment systems that are knowingly weak hardware.
      - jeroenhd 9mo ago
        Fully-featured DEs like Gnome and KDE work a lot worse when doing everything in software rendering. If you're working on a device with subpar/nonexistent GPU driver support (i.e. Nvidia hardware for years on end), the experience is absolutely awful. Nvidia's driver do something weird on Wayland when my laptop is connected to HDMI, probably something funky with the iGPU<->dGPU communication. Everything works, but at the whims of Nvidia an update reduces the maximum FPS I can achieve over HDMI to about 30-45fps. Jittery and painful, even on a monitor that supposedly supports VRR. That's not really Wayland's fault of course, but in the same way Linux is broken because Photoshop doesn't work on it, Wayland is broken for many users because their desktop is weird on it.
    - mnw21cam 9mo ago
      I still want my /var/log/messages back. The new system just doesn't seem to work correctly.
petra 9mo ago
As someone that is sensitive to displays, one of the best features of XFCE, unlike others desktops, is that it doesn't cause eye strain, probably because it doesn't play tricks - a pixel at a certain color is stable, and not dithered(if you choose) and higher level primitives are also stable and don't play time/frequency based games. I hope XFCE preserves this, it is a killer feature in today's world.
parrellel 9mo ago
So long as I can windowshade things and it doesn't end up making things a blurry mess, cool. Now the last 3 times I tried Wayland everything ended up a blurry mess and some windows just ended up the wrong size, so. I suppose I'll just keep holding out hope.
LeFantome 9mo ago
In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now). But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
- yason 9mo ago
  Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate. Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has become hurried and lacking control. Anything reminiscent of a bigger and more comprehensive project is in initial stages at best. If Wayland has been coming on for about ten years now I'll give it another ten years until we have some kind of established, consistent desktop API for Linux again. X11 did offer some very basic features for a desktop environment so that programs using different toolkits could work together, and enough hooks you could implement stuff in window managers etc. Yet there was nothing like the more complete interfaces of the desktops of other operating systems that tied everything together in a central, consistent way. So, Linux desktop interface was certainly in need for a rewrite but the way it's happening is just disheartening.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
    Nobody has a user-space stick big enough to force things in the Linux world. When Apple dropped the old audio APIs of classic macOS and introduced CoreAudio, they pissed off a lot of developers, but those developers had no choice. In the GUI realm, they only deprecated HIKit for a decade or two before removing it (if they've even done that), but they made it very clear that CoreFoo was the API you should be using and that was that. In Linux-land, nobody has that authority. Nobody can come up with an equivalent to Core* for Linux and enforce its use. Consequently, you're going to continue to see the Qt/GTK/* splits, where the only commonality is at the lowest level of the window system (though, to Qt's credit, optionally also the event loop).
clircle 9mo ago
I resisted Wayland for a longtime, but I'm sold now that I see how well it does on old hardware. I have an old Thinkpad. Firefox on X is slow and scrolls poorly. On wayland, the scrolling is remarkably smooth for 10 y/o hardware, and the addition of touchpad gestures is very nice. Yes, there's more configuration overhead for each compositor, but I'm now accepting this trade.
KeybInterrupt 9mo ago
This is great news! If anyone from the Team reds these comments, Thank you people so much for XFCE4!
uecker 9mo ago
Wow, this is annoying. I really like Xfce, but there are plenty of minor things which would need improvements. Instead of fixing all these minor things, they waste a lot of their donations on a rewrite for Wayland / Rust - apparently for exactly the same reason as all the other Wayland stuff and Rust reworks. Developers like to write new code more than actually maintaining / improving fixing existing things and finds some excuses to do this.
- kelnos 9mo ago
  (xfwl4 author here.) That's a fair criticism sometimes, but, frankly, if you want things the way you want them, learn to code and dig in. Otherwise it's not really fair of you to complain about stuff that people have built for you for free, in their spare time. In this particular case, it's not fully a "new and shiny, must play!" situation. I personally am not even a big fan of Wayland, and I'm generally highly critical of it. But Xorg is more or less unmaintained, and frankly, if we don't have a Wayland compositor, we'll become obsolete eventually. That's just the way the wind is blowing.
  - uecker 9mo ago
    I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time. If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain. I am complaining about a) the justifications given which I think are all nonsense IMHO and rationalizations for something which some likes to do, and b) the use of donations which should be better used to improve the software instead of creating more rewrites. I also do not agree with the Wayland is inevitable sentiment. There are non-systemd distros, there will also be non-Wayland distros. The idea is that only those things survive which are pushed into the ecosystem by the cooperate bullies is wrong, otherwise Linux would not exist. The Linux desktop was essentially fine already two decades ago and instead of the needed refinements, bug fixing, and polishments, we get random changes in technology after the other, so nothing ever really improves but we incrementally lose applications which do not keep up, break workflows, sometimes even regress in technology (network transparency), and discourage people from investing into applications because the base is not stable. My hope was that Xfce4 is different, but apparently this was unfounded.
trebligdivad 9mo ago
I suspect many of us still using X, are xfce users waiting for an alternative; I've heard very mixed things about current Fedora xfce wayland setups from different people.
rcarmo 9mo ago
I certainly hope they support themes. I have been using a Mac OS 7 Platinum theme on all my XFCE desktops for years and I want to keep doing so :)
BrenBarn 9mo ago
I see the words "feature parity". I hope those words are taken seriously. I feel like most Wayland advocates would do well to take those words seriously.
- kelnos 9mo ago
  (xfwl4 author here.) Absolutely seriously. To me, a big part of what makes Xfce is xfwm4's behavior. Even though most of the other Xfce components will run decently well on wlroots-based compositors, I don't really have an interest in using them, as that's not "Xfce" to me. But it's not going to be perfect, though, as some things that we take for granted on x11 still just do not have Wayland protocols to enable them. This will take a long time. Alex's blog post says a developer preview around the middle of this year, and I expect I can deliver on that, and maybe (maybe!) even a stable release by next year (maybe!), but full feature parity will take years.
asciimov 9mo ago
I’ll switch to Wayland as soon as I can use xscreensaver with it, preferably as the screen locker.
tsoukase 9mo ago
As an Xfce4 user my priorities for a WM are in diminishing importance: - speed - memory consumption - simplicity to use - customisability - if it's X11 or Wayland If everything above the last remains the same in the Wayland version, I stay, else there is LXDM.
dlcarrier 9mo ago
This bullet point from the reason to chose one library over another is a prime example of what I love about XFCE: • smithay has great documentation. Not only are they considering it, but they're expressly calling it out. I'm convinced that the publication of the Agile Manifesto was an exercise in Cunningham's Law, and to that end the XFCE team has produced something great by doing the opposite.
sylware 9mo ago
It seems I will require a microsoft rust compiler and won't be able to use a small alternative plain and simple C compiler for xfce. The beginning of the end, or are there plain and simple alternative microsoft rust compilers? Is microsoft rust syntax at least as simple than C? Or the right way will be to use an alternative wayland compositor with the rest of xfce?
neuroblaster 9mo ago
I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4. I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it. If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust. Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.
nazgulsenpai 9mo ago
My response to the Wayland/X11 nonsense bickering has always been that I'll switch to Wayland when xfce does. I usually eyeroll when I see "in Rust" but the developers writeup in the linked article and their comments here are very reassuring and I look forward to their success!
SodachiSuperFan 9mo ago
The more wayland compositors the better. It will force developers to actually abide by the specification instead of creating single implementation hacks like in the webbrowser ecosystem.
spl757 9mo ago
what no fuckin xbindkeys?

370 points by pantalaimon 9mo ago

hu3 9mo ago

I've been using Xfce as a daily driver in one machine for about a decade now. Great to know there's work on the wayland support front. Also, writing it in Rust should help bring more contributors to the project. If you use Xfce I urge you to donate to their Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/xfce https://opencollective.com/xfce https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu

kaijia 9mo ago
I've been using xfce for about five years. I just setup my monthly donation last month and saw this good news today:)

jchw 9mo ago

I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it. To me the reasoning is solid: Wayland appears to be the future, and Rust is a good way to help avoid many compositor crashes, which are a more severe issue in Wayland (though it doesn't necessarily need to be fatal, FWIW.) Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Of course, if they made the right choice, it should be apparent in relatively short order, so I wish them luck.

coldpie 9mo ago
> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unless they are bored and enjoy arguing about random junk on some web forum. Wayland has the momentum behind it, and while there will be some justified grumbling because change is always annoying, the transition will happen and will be fairly painless as native support for it continues to grow. The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehards; some weird minority that likes to scream about the good old days on web forums but really no one cares about. There are good reasons to switch to Wayland, and I trust the XFCE team to handle the transition well. Great news from the XFCE team here, I'm excited for them to pull this off.
- graemep 9mo ago
  I used XFCE for a long time and I very much agree. it just works, and is lightweight. I use KDE these days but XFCE would be my second choice. > The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehard I hope you are not conflating anti-systemD people with SysV init diehards? As far as I can see very few people want to keep Sysv init, but there are lots who think SystemD init is the wrong replacement, and those primarily because its a lot more than an init system. In many ways the objects are opposite. People hate system D for being more than init, people hate Wayland for doing less than X. Edit: corrected "Wayland" to "XFCE" in first sentence!
  - LeFantome 9mo ago
    It is refreshing to see somebody else notice that the complaints about systemd and Wayland are philosophically incompatible. Systemd is creating the same kind of monolith monoculture that Xorg represented. Wayland is far more modular. Regardless of your engineering preferences, rejecting change is the main reason to object to both.
    - graemep 9mo ago
      I do not have a strong opinion about Xorg vs Wayland. My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs but that seems to be being dealt with. I do like being able to use X over the nextwork but that is a problem that can be solved. I do dislike System D for two reasons. One is exactly because it s a monolith and, in effect, an extension of the OS. The other is the attitude of the developers which becomes very evident if you browser the issues.
      - kelnos 9mo ago
        > My only real concern is that it might make it harder for the BSDs Our OpenBSD packager has already said in our Matrix channel that he'll be testing here and there in order to keep me honest ;)
      - ethanpailes 9mo ago
ok123456 9mo ago
Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to support the system, and it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. The mantra of "it's a protocol" isn't very comforting when it lacks so many features that necessitate workarounds, leading to fragmentation and general incompatibility. There are plenty of complicated, bad protocols. The ones that survive are inherently "simple" (e.g., SMTP) or "trivial" (e.g., TFTP). Maybe there will be a successor to Wayland that will be the SMTP to its X400, but to me, Wayland seems like a past compromise (almost 16 years of development) rather than a future.
- justin66 9mo ago
  It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.
  - simoncion 9mo ago
    > It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out. [0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.
    - ok123456 9mo ago
      They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
poulpy123 9mo ago
Afaik there exists only X11 and Wayland, and X11 is dying if not dead. And for rust I don't see why a desktop user would be concerned by the language used as long as it is good enough.
thisislife2 9mo ago
Yeah, I am staunch proponent of "don't try to fix what is not broken". Current XFCE is fast, light-weight, usable and works fine without major issues. While I don't fully understand the advantages / disadvantages of XFCE using Wayland instead of X, if, as someone else pointed out here on HN, running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower, it means these developers will be crippling one of XFCE's strongest feature. In that case other minor advantages seems pointless to users like me.
- happymellon 9mo ago
  > running XFCE on Wayland is going to make it slower Citation. None of the other desktops have slowed with Wayland, and gaming is as fast as, if not marginally faster on KDE/Gnome with Wayland vs LXDE on X. https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming https://www.phoronix.com/review/ubuntu-2504-x11-gaming
  - thisislife2 9mo ago
    I based it on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901
    - jchw 9mo ago
      Latency and throughput are very different things. However, it's worth noting that the comparison here is with and without compositing. If you were using compositing already on X11 (I believe XFCE offers it with "Desktop Effects" or something to that tune) then you've already been eating compositing latency, and you should actually get less latency in some situations. But as far as it performing worse overall, I don't think that would be expected. Compositing itself does lean more on hardware acceleration to provide a good experience, though, so if you compare it on a machine that has no hardware accelerated graphics with compositing disabled, then it really would be worse, yeah.
      - mrktf 9mo ago
        Little misconception here (beware i'm using xlibre and causal user). On X11 you can find two mechanisms which can be called compositor : 1st: "enable display compositing" option - this one increases latency as every window draw need go though compositor application (in nutshell it exchanging opengl textures - only synchronization messages goes over "wire") 2nd: the Xserver rendering pipeline compositor, this one goes with modesetting (intel, amdgpu) driver TearFree option - almost everything inside X11 server in OpenGL textures and compositor perform direct blending to screen (including direct scanout). What I want to tell, on modern X (there are merge requests for Xorg server to modesetting driver, amdgpu have this code) with TearFree enabled you by default optimal hardware acceleration - there comes lower latency
bufio 9mo ago
Then the future is full of high latency.
davidgerard 9mo ago
Long-time XFCE user here. We care that stuff works the same, we appreciate how much work it is to achieve that when the world is changing out from under you, and we appreciate that XFCE understands this and cares about it. Being in Rust is not a concern.
jeroenhd 9mo ago
My watch from 8 years ago runs Wayland. Nothing written in Rust as far as I can tell, though. With that knowledge, I'm certain that XFCE will remain lightweight. It can be done, so I feel confident that the XFCE folks will get it done.
dlcarrier 9mo ago
I don't think this will be a quick transition. Wayland has lots of potential, but it's far from ready to replace X11, especially in multitasking environments. XFCE is taking their time, because their community is more very concerned stability. I predict that XFCE will default to X11 until Wayland has reached broad feature parity, then default to Wayland but keep X11 support until the last vestages of incompatibility are delt with. There's no reason that this wouldn't be accepted by their community, and it should be lighter weight, in the end.
internet_points 9mo ago
Long-time xfce fan here, I trust the team to make the right decisions of what to do with their copious spare time and insane amounts of funding </s> (Instead of seeing this as "xfce jumps on bandwagon", I'm seeing it more as "bandwagon finally stable enough for xfce".)
einr 9mo ago
I am an XFCE user since many years, and am pretty decidedly in the "traditional and conservative about technologies" camp, and I think this is neat and just fine and dandy -- as long as they're not in a hurry to depreciate X11. Whenever I eventually have to go Wayland I would like to continue to use XFCE, so thumbs up for doing the work.

tasn 9mo ago

Very interesting that they opted for a rewrite in Rust instead of adjusting the existing codebase. I wonder how long it'll take them writing a compositor from scratch.

andreldm 9mo ago
Not the whole codebase, only the window manager (compositor is the Wayland equivalent). Other components are written in C and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Those components gained Wayland support in the last couple of years, you can try Xfce in a labwc session, there are of course several things to improve, but the compositor is the last big piece missing.
- tasn 9mo ago
  Thanks for the context!
kelnos 9mo ago
(xfwl4 author here.) I spent a month or so in 2024 attempting to refactor xfwm4 so it could serve dual purpose as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor, and ended up abandoning the idea. It was just getting ugly and hard to read and understand, and I wasn't confident that I could continue to make changes without introducing bugs (crashers, even). We want X11 users to be unaffected by this, and introducing bugs in xfwm4 wouldn't achieve that goal. Note that we don't have to rewrite all of Xfce: xfce4-session, xfce4-panel, xfdesktop, etc. will all run on Wayland just fine (there are some rough edges that need to be ironed out for full Wayland support, but they're already fairly usable on wlroots-based compositors). This is just (heh, "just") building a compositor and porting xfwm4's WM behavior and UI elements over to it. Not a small task, to be sure, but much smaller than "rewriting all of Xfce".

bergutman 9mo ago

FYI, you can currently use most wlroots-based compositors with XFCE. I myself am running Hyprland + XFCE on Gentoo. https://github.com/bergutman/dots https://github.com/bergutman/dots

nix0n 9mo ago
I like the retro theme. Could you expand on why you describe Hyprland and XFCE4 as "a cursed combination"? Might provide some insight as to why the official XFCE project decided to create their own compositor.

rawxtl 9mo ago

If wayland support was there already I would be using xfce. I truly admire it, it's great to see this happening and I hope the project continues in great speed. With DE's requiring hard system-d support, I would rather have something like xfce

fragmede 9mo ago

i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for greetd. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!

fragmede 9mo ago
in the time it took me to complain about xfce4, three other complaints popped up! so I guess I'm not alone
hagbard_c 9mo ago
If you're just trying to run Linux you're better off either using one of the many read-made distributions or going with X11 since that works just about everywhere and has done so for decades.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  THanks for the encouragement. I'm trying to get Debian Linux to run on a Chromebook and it's been no shortage of frustration, especially because ChromeOS is Linux and ostensibly open source, but just getting the kernel booted was an ordeal and a half. I'm currently stuck at suspend not working because something something EC, for which ChromeOS has a userland program to coax it into working right.
  - hagbard_c 9mo ago
    ChromeOS and devices it was made for are not the best start in Linux-land since it is Linux just like Android is, i.e. it is based on a Linux kernel but for the rest quite different from 'standard' (GNU-) Linux distributions like Debian + derivatives, Arch, Fedora etc. Maybe you can get that userland tool from ChromeOS to work in Debian, maybe not. Even though you're trying to get Debian installed on the thing I'd also refer to the Arch wiki for information on how to get things working right: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chrome_OS_devices Arch being what it is it has attracted a host of knowledgeable users who have collected their information about how to get things working on different systems in an organised and usually comprehensive way on that wiki. Much if not most of what is written there is also applicable to getting non-Arch distributions running on those systems.

throw0101a 9mo ago

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

mghackerlady 9mo ago
Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago
torstenvl 9mo ago
Yes, but still kind of WIP. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
ux266478 9mo ago
It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.
- throw0101a 9mo ago
  > It depends on what you mean by send. Currently I can: $ ssh -X somehost xeyes and get a window on macOS.
  - NoGravitas 9mo ago
    Today you would do: `$ waypipe ssh somehost foot` You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.
  - gf000 9mo ago

Ciantic 9mo ago

I've used Smithay's Rust client toolkit for a few months now. For making apps it is still sometimes have unsafe wrappers disguised as safe. It has a lot of internals wrapped in Arc<>, but in my tests, the methods are not safe to call from different threads anyhow, you will get weird crashes if done so. I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

mghackerlady 9mo ago

I love XFCE, with the move to wayland I hope they start thinking about abandoning GTK though

WD-42 9mo ago
If you are wishing they used QT instead the fact that they chose Rust only makes that less likely.
torstenvl 9mo ago
Why do you hope they abandon GTK? What would you have them replace it with?
- Gualdrapo 9mo ago
  Enlightenment. No, really. If they ever move away from GTK (due to the GNOME shenanigans GNOME-izing GTK) I wish Englightenment and Xfce were together a single thing. But that's if I could ask the Tux genie three wishes.
  - mghackerlady 9mo ago
    Hell I wish EFL was more used in general. I was thinking QT (mainly because I forgot about EFL) but that's much better
  - torstenvl 9mo ago
    GTK4 is still pretty usable without libadwaita and all its Gnome-isms. But frankly I think forking and maintaining GTK3 is preferable to moving to EFL or Qt. GIMP is still on GTK3. MATE is still on GTK3. Inkscape is still on GTK3 (but GTK4 work is in progress). Evolution is still on GTK3. I think GTK3 will be around for a long time.
    - silon42 9mo ago
      +1...
- 9mo ago

prima-facie 9mo ago

Am I the only one who's not buying into the Wayland hype? I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair, as I see nothing wrong with it.

pantalaimon 9mo ago
> I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair Are you also willing to maintain it?
- superkuh 9mo ago
  Are you willing to write accessibility support for the new xfce only wayland compositor? How will you get every other wayland compositor to support your non-'wayland core' accessibility extension? People like to frame things like the waylands are some sort of default and nothing is being lost and no one is being excluded.
  - zamalek 9mo ago
    Everyone has settled on an accessibility standard (Matt Campbell's). So it's not "your" accessibility protocol, it's already "the" accessibility protocol. This is working as intended IMO: allow things to compete and future in the wild and then pick the fittest.
    - superkuh 9mo ago
      Right. The push based accessibility that is only supported by GNOME's compositor, mutter, and GNOME's DE's userland as of this last 6 months. I would very happy to hear about even this extension supported under other wayland compositors and software. Do you know of any? Since you seem informed perhaps you can clear something up for me, when Cambpell says "push full accessibility tree to trusted clients" does that mean you get the entire desktop tree, or only for that application? Because if you don't get the entire window tree, because you only get the single windows information when that application provides it, it is highly incompatible with existing solutions. They say it is compatible because application developers can create a new virtualized thing themselves. But that's not compatible. And beyond that, it is a "solution" that prevents me from controlling my own computer. I understand GNOME is targeting everyone not just power users. But as a power user I am someone. I am a human being. And Campbell's assertions that push is more performant than pull and full tree are being backed by arguments informed from problems that don't even apply generally. GTK 4 broke this, not GTK 3. It's not a push versus pull thing. It's wayland architecture focused Gtk4 causing the problem when things are fine in X11 focused GTK 3. ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6269 a11y: No API for supporting a11y Selection interface , https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6204 a11y AT-SPI: get_child_count implementation iterating over all children causes freeze for objects with many a11y children

slackfan 9mo ago

So will it be renamed to Wfce in the end?

lern_too_spel 9mo ago
It was originally named XFce after the XForms library. As of Xfce 3, it uses GTK though, so it could be called GTKce, but renaming the project every time you change widget toolkits is probably not a good idea.
- slackfan 9mo ago
  And what was XForms named after?...

lombasihir 9mo ago

daily drive xfce4, best DE ever, simple and complete.

sylware 9mo ago

Until I can still compile xfce with an small and simple C compiler or even a simpler SDK.

justabrowser 9mo ago

[flagged]

coldpie 9mo ago
I know, I know! Change is hard and scary. To be honest, while I am glad they're finally tackling this, I'm also expecting to have a pretty annoying couple of weeks whenever they ship this support and I finally decide to make the switch. There will be things to learn and new behaviors to understand and, yes, new bugs and annoyances to learn to work around. But I think if we both put our big boy pants on, keep a positive and friendly attitude, and help each other out, we can make it through these difficult times and come out the other side with proper high DPI support, sane multi-monitor handling and hot-swapping, and maybe even some wild new stuff like high color depth options.
- justabrowser 9mo ago
  [flagged]

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Fiveplus 9mo ago

>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does... I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence? As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model. This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?

simoncion 9mo ago
> ...or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland? I think I know what "frame perfect" means, and I'm pretty sure that you've been able to get that for ages on X11... at least with AMD/ATi hardware. Enable (or have your distro enable) the TearFree option, and there you go. I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that this adds a frame of latency.
- wtallis 9mo ago
  > I read somewhere that TearFree is triple buffering, so -if true- it's my (perhaps mistaken) understanding that this adds a frame of latency. True triple buffering doesn't add one frame of latency, but since it enforces only whole frames be sent to the display instead of tearing, it can cause partial frames of latency. (It's hard to come up with a well-defined measure of frame latency when tearing is allowed.) But there have been many systems that abused the term "triple buffering" to refer to a three-frame queue, which always does add unnecessary latency, making it almost always the wrong choice for interactive systems.

justabrowser 9mo ago

[flagged]

spicyusername 9mo ago

Great to see xfce continue on into the next age. I've been using popos for a while, but xfce will always have a place in my heart. If it had tiling support I'd probably use it still. Being so lightweight is a massive boon.

la1n 9mo ago

Rust is not GNU

clircle 9mo ago
Neither is xfce

lizknope 9mo ago

I started off using twm / olwm / vtwm in 1991. Then FVWM and Afterstep / WindowMaker. I've been using XFCE since around 2007. As long as it functions similarly I'll be happy.

pjmlp 9mo ago
Can relate, however I had Unity in between, and some Enlightment as well. GNOME was cool during the sawfish days.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

justabrowser 9mo ago

[flagged]

simoncion 9mo ago
You -uh- need to learn to troll better, my dude. Kids these days... trolling used to require what's now called effortposts.
estimator7292 9mo ago
Aren't you a little young to be on here? Do your parents know you're online?

poulpy123 9mo ago

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

adzm 9mo ago
What about systemd?
- MrFurious 9mo ago
  Systemd was easy for me. All things worked in transition and have the big advantage that don't need shell scripts for create services. Wayland..., is slow, buggy, applications close without reason...
  - gf000 9mo ago
    How on earth would Wayland be slow? Like it's literally an IPC on top of the lowest level Linux kernel API (DRM), displaying buffers. It was partially made for car infotainment systems that are knowingly weak hardware.
    - jeroenhd 9mo ago
      Fully-featured DEs like Gnome and KDE work a lot worse when doing everything in software rendering. If you're working on a device with subpar/nonexistent GPU driver support (i.e. Nvidia hardware for years on end), the experience is absolutely awful. Nvidia's driver do something weird on Wayland when my laptop is connected to HDMI, probably something funky with the iGPU<->dGPU communication. Everything works, but at the whims of Nvidia an update reduces the maximum FPS I can achieve over HDMI to about 30-45fps. Jittery and painful, even on a monitor that supposedly supports VRR. That's not really Wayland's fault of course, but in the same way Linux is broken because Photoshop doesn't work on it, Wayland is broken for many users because their desktop is weird on it.
  - mnw21cam 9mo ago
    I still want my /var/log/messages back. The new system just doesn't seem to work correctly.

petra 9mo ago

As someone that is sensitive to displays, one of the best features of XFCE, unlike others desktops, is that it doesn't cause eye strain, probably because it doesn't play tricks - a pixel at a certain color is stable, and not dithered(if you choose) and higher level primitives are also stable and don't play time/frequency based games. I hope XFCE preserves this, it is a killer feature in today's world.

parrellel 9mo ago

So long as I can windowshade things and it doesn't end up making things a blurry mess, cool. Now the last 3 times I tried Wayland everything ended up a blurry mess and some windows just ended up the wrong size, so. I suppose I'll just keep holding out hope.

LeFantome 9mo ago

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward. On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you. On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now). But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.

yason 9mo ago
Because Wayland only does essential low-level stuff such as display and graphics it forced people to start coming up with a common Linux desktop (programming) interface out of nowhere to basically glue everything together and make programs at least interoperate. Such an effort to rethink Linux desktop alone could've been a major project on its own but as having something was necessitated by Wayland all of it has become hurried and lacking control. Anything reminiscent of a bigger and more comprehensive project is in initial stages at best. If Wayland has been coming on for about ten years now I'll give it another ten years until we have some kind of established, consistent desktop API for Linux again. X11 did offer some very basic features for a desktop environment so that programs using different toolkits could work together, and enough hooks you could implement stuff in window managers etc. Yet there was nothing like the more complete interfaces of the desktops of other operating systems that tied everything together in a central, consistent way. So, Linux desktop interface was certainly in need for a rewrite but the way it's happening is just disheartening.
- PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
  Nobody has a user-space stick big enough to force things in the Linux world. When Apple dropped the old audio APIs of classic macOS and introduced CoreAudio, they pissed off a lot of developers, but those developers had no choice. In the GUI realm, they only deprecated HIKit for a decade or two before removing it (if they've even done that), but they made it very clear that CoreFoo was the API you should be using and that was that. In Linux-land, nobody has that authority. Nobody can come up with an equivalent to Core* for Linux and enforce its use. Consequently, you're going to continue to see the Qt/GTK/* splits, where the only commonality is at the lowest level of the window system (though, to Qt's credit, optionally also the event loop).

clircle 9mo ago

I resisted Wayland for a longtime, but I'm sold now that I see how well it does on old hardware. I have an old Thinkpad. Firefox on X is slow and scrolls poorly. On wayland, the scrolling is remarkably smooth for 10 y/o hardware, and the addition of touchpad gestures is very nice. Yes, there's more configuration overhead for each compositor, but I'm now accepting this trade.

KeybInterrupt 9mo ago

This is great news! If anyone from the Team reds these comments, Thank you people so much for XFCE4!

uecker 9mo ago

Wow, this is annoying. I really like Xfce, but there are plenty of minor things which would need improvements. Instead of fixing all these minor things, they waste a lot of their donations on a rewrite for Wayland / Rust - apparently for exactly the same reason as all the other Wayland stuff and Rust reworks. Developers like to write new code more than actually maintaining / improving fixing existing things and finds some excuses to do this.

kelnos 9mo ago
(xfwl4 author here.) That's a fair criticism sometimes, but, frankly, if you want things the way you want them, learn to code and dig in. Otherwise it's not really fair of you to complain about stuff that people have built for you for free, in their spare time. In this particular case, it's not fully a "new and shiny, must play!" situation. I personally am not even a big fan of Wayland, and I'm generally highly critical of it. But Xorg is more or less unmaintained, and frankly, if we don't have a Wayland compositor, we'll become obsolete eventually. That's just the way the wind is blowing.
- uecker 9mo ago
  I am not complaining about what people do in their spare time. If the blog post said "someone does this because he likes to spend his own time on it", I would not complain. I am complaining about a) the justifications given which I think are all nonsense IMHO and rationalizations for something which some likes to do, and b) the use of donations which should be better used to improve the software instead of creating more rewrites. I also do not agree with the Wayland is inevitable sentiment. There are non-systemd distros, there will also be non-Wayland distros. The idea is that only those things survive which are pushed into the ecosystem by the cooperate bullies is wrong, otherwise Linux would not exist. The Linux desktop was essentially fine already two decades ago and instead of the needed refinements, bug fixing, and polishments, we get random changes in technology after the other, so nothing ever really improves but we incrementally lose applications which do not keep up, break workflows, sometimes even regress in technology (network transparency), and discourage people from investing into applications because the base is not stable. My hope was that Xfce4 is different, but apparently this was unfounded.

trebligdivad 9mo ago

I suspect many of us still using X, are xfce users waiting for an alternative; I've heard very mixed things about current Fedora xfce wayland setups from different people.

rcarmo 9mo ago

I certainly hope they support themes. I have been using a Mac OS 7 Platinum theme on all my XFCE desktops for years and I want to keep doing so :)

BrenBarn 9mo ago

I see the words "feature parity". I hope those words are taken seriously. I feel like most Wayland advocates would do well to take those words seriously.

kelnos 9mo ago
(xfwl4 author here.) Absolutely seriously. To me, a big part of what makes Xfce is xfwm4's behavior. Even though most of the other Xfce components will run decently well on wlroots-based compositors, I don't really have an interest in using them, as that's not "Xfce" to me. But it's not going to be perfect, though, as some things that we take for granted on x11 still just do not have Wayland protocols to enable them. This will take a long time. Alex's blog post says a developer preview around the middle of this year, and I expect I can deliver on that, and maybe (maybe!) even a stable release by next year (maybe!), but full feature parity will take years.

asciimov 9mo ago

I’ll switch to Wayland as soon as I can use xscreensaver with it, preferably as the screen locker.

tsoukase 9mo ago

As an Xfce4 user my priorities for a WM are in diminishing importance: - speed - memory consumption - simplicity to use - customisability - if it's X11 or Wayland If everything above the last remains the same in the Wayland version, I stay, else there is LXDM.

dlcarrier 9mo ago

This bullet point from the reason to chose one library over another is a prime example of what I love about XFCE: • smithay has great documentation. Not only are they considering it, but they're expressly calling it out. I'm convinced that the publication of the Agile Manifesto was an exercise in Cunningham's Law, and to that end the XFCE team has produced something great by doing the opposite.

sylware 9mo ago

It seems I will require a microsoft rust compiler and won't be able to use a small alternative plain and simple C compiler for xfce. The beginning of the end, or are there plain and simple alternative microsoft rust compilers? Is microsoft rust syntax at least as simple than C? Or the right way will be to use an alternative wayland compositor with the rest of xfce?

neuroblaster 9mo ago

I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4. I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it. If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust. Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.

nazgulsenpai 9mo ago

My response to the Wayland/X11 nonsense bickering has always been that I'll switch to Wayland when xfce does. I usually eyeroll when I see "in Rust" but the developers writeup in the linked article and their comments here are very reassuring and I look forward to their success!

SodachiSuperFan 9mo ago

The more wayland compositors the better. It will force developers to actually abide by the specification instead of creating single implementation hacks like in the webbrowser ecosystem.

spl757 9mo ago

what no fuckin xbindkeys?