Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

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.

>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?

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.

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-eu

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

So will it be renamed to Wfce in the end?

Rust is not GNU

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

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.

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!