alt Hacker News>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?
Replies
> ...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.
> 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?
well, the answer is just no, wayland has been consistently slower than X11 and nothing running on top can't really go around that
At least they are honest regarding the reasons, not a wall of text to justify what bails down to "because I like it".
Naturally these kinds of having a language island create some attrition regarding build tooling, integration with existing ecosystem and who is able to contribute to what.
So lets see how it evolves, even with my C bashing, I was a much happier XFCE user than with GNOME and GJS all over the place.