XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

https://ostechnix.com/xfce-4-20-aims-to-bring-preliminary-wayland-support/

by alexzeitler • 2 years ago

264 200 2 years ago

hawski2• 2 years ago

I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it.

I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much simpler than Gnome at the time.

Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling, don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go to desktop for simplicity and reliability.

serf• 2 years ago

My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce.

same.

why?

they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click, they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work.

p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.

IntelMiner3• 2 years ago

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago

When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland

After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked"

I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key

dev_snd• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

bogwog• 2 years ago

I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.

What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding?

I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of maintenance, but KDE is fine too.

zekica• 2 years ago

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

lottin• 2 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or in any other situation.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.

IntelMiner3• 2 years ago

I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube defaulted to unaccelerated playback

pjmlp• 2 years ago

It never worked on my (now dead) Asus netbook, although Chrome could do it.

w4rh4wk5• 2 years ago

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

kelnos23• 2 years ago

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

jmclnx• 2 years ago

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE.

But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.

hggigg4• 2 years ago

Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.

linguae2• 2 years ago

I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites.

I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts).

I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years.

I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.

jmspring• 2 years ago

When I've had servers with a desktop env, it's always been FreeBSD and XFCE.

talldayo2• 2 years ago

Don't look now: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

exe342• 2 years ago

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.

panick21_5• 2 years ago

X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves.

It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.

The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.

The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.

badgersnake2• 2 years ago

Sway works fine on FreeBSD.

I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?

bitwize8• 2 years ago

This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off now.

AlienRobot6• 2 years ago

I used Windows 7 until Steam stopped working. The band-aid stays on.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 2 years ago

Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise people are going to keep using the thing that works.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

GPUs live in desktops and phones, but apps live in remote datacenters, so the future seems to be sending rendering commands to Javascript frontends on end users' browsers.

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

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

talldayo2• 2 years ago

In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently. Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and Wayland users.

kelnos23• 2 years ago

Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years.

The only component that requires major changes is the WM. Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing platform specific quirks.

(Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for our panel to use, but... yeah.)

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so inclined, however.

fb032• 2 years ago

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

treve• 2 years ago

I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every application had to add explicit support, but I've had no problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.

hackyhacky• 2 years ago

Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.

OvbiousError• 2 years ago

I'm on wayland, have had no issue screen-sharing over teams. Webcam works for me, but only if it was plugged in before teams started.

badgersnake2• 2 years ago

I’ve got whole screen sharing working in sway, and I don’t dare touch it. Not sure if individual window / tab sharing is even a thing.

fb032• 2 years ago

It is, but with a whole slew of tweaks to pull it off. It's a mess.

...I get it that Wayland is the future and all, that it has features we need as an OS to get to the next level, but I feel there should be no rush to do it, and I feel a strong push for Wayland in distros right now, even with all these little broken things all over the place.

jrm4• 2 years ago

Ditto. In terms of other stuff, I'm thinking about x2go, which I still use religiously? I'm curious, is Wayland anywhere on this?

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

wayland screen sharing has been solved like 4 years ago and would work already at the time with workarounds.

I remember when we got confined and were sent home, I could not screen share in MS teams on chrome out of the box but a few minutes of search gave me the chrome flags to enable and I just created a new local desktop file to start it up with the right flags

Since then the only things that have been missing is HDR support and color calibration. It sucks to not have them ready but they are only really used by a tiny fraction of the users so for 99.9% of the users wayland works fine.

kelnos23• 2 years 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.

sweeter6• 2 years 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.

kelnos23• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

fractal618• 2 years ago

Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce?

Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!

kelnos23• 2 years 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.

akdor11542• 2 years 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?

kelnos23• 2 years 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.

LeFantome• 2 years ago

System76 is using Rust and Iced to create the COSMIC desktop. It is not GTK anymore. That drags in a lot of dependencies for a project like XFCE.

sylware2• 2 years 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...

kelnos23• 2 years 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.

dingdingdang• 2 years ago

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

IWeldMelons5• 2 years ago

KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

Source?

bombela• 2 years ago

Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.

mikae13• 2 years ago

And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.

LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.

tankenmate• 2 years ago

But unfortunately KDE is Wayland only now, so no way to turn the compositor off.

kelnos23• 2 years ago

Lighter I won't entirely disagree with: I think a default install of KDE will still be heavier than Xfce, but GTK3 isn't the lightest toolkit, and you can slim KDE down without losing much functionality.

But I don't get the HiDPI point? Certainly 4.16 had issues with HiDPI, but in 4.18 you can set the UI scaling factor, and I believe shortly before and/or after initial release, we fixed up all the issues of blurry image rendering. I have a HiDPI screen and it's worked very well for me, and looks nice.

EasyMark9• 2 years ago

definitely my go to for VM's and VNC for lightweight no need to fiddle installs.

pjerem2• 2 years ago

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen.

And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».

It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

Hmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens.

Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen.

The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.

wkat42423• 2 years ago

KDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24" screen and it looks amazing

Adverblessly• 2 years ago

I actually prefer XFCE's scaling via setting a font DPI to e.g. KDE/Gnome's scaling which increases everything in size and not just fonts.

First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).

Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.

Rapzid• 2 years ago

HiDPI pushed me to run Mint for a while, then multi-monitor issues with hiDPI finally pushed me to WSL.

Been using WSL full time for over a year and have no plans to go back..

kelnos23• 2 years ago

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen.

How so? We support setting GTK's UI scaling to 2x, and (as of 4.18) I believe all the bugs around blurry icon rendering have been fixed.

What exactly becomes ugly for you?

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

If you really want a just working and actually lightweight (instead of pretending like XFCE), you choose icewm.

hnisoss• 2 years ago

apples and oranges tho. you can use icewm instead of XFWM

roomey• 2 years ago

Xfce all day every (work) day.

I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)!

Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag.

It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it!

Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical.

By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!

ehutch79• 2 years ago

I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos, mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space, ugh.

Does anyone a cleaner article?

olliej2• 2 years ago

Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver?

[editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension]

I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount of work involved that’s clearly not the case?

(It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X development, and so I’ve paid literally no attention to the details)

kelnos23• 2 years ago

Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11.

X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.

olliej2• 2 years ago

Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?)

But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs?

I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?

hawski2• 2 years ago

A desktop environment in X11 is leaning on the X server. One on Wayland has to have libs for most of the things. There is no window manager. A compositor is like a server and a window manager in one. There are libs, but the process is much more involved and the API is much more tight so not everything is easy to get as in X.

p_l• 2 years ago

The core wayland does not even implement the idea of a window, to show how far the differences go.

Based on experiences of an acquaintance writing from scratch support for wayland for an UI framework that shares absolutely zero code with any of the major ones, the differences in even basic things like how to implement drop-down menu are staggering.

Funnily enough, said acquaintances needs would have been fully covered by slightly more capable XRender and a way to synchronize to VSync that does not depend on GLX.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 2 years ago

The oversimplified answer is that a Wayland compositor must include all the functionality of an X window manager and the Xorg display server. There are libraries to help implement all that, but it's still a big lift.

fbritoferreira• 2 years ago

Should the project be renamed to WFCE?

severine• 2 years ago

No, not anymore:

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

guilhas• 2 years ago

Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable

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

bitwize8• 2 years ago

Most projects will eventually remove the X code path.

The long-term solution is to switch to Wayland.

kelnos23• 2 years ago

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

darren0• 2 years ago

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

tristan9572• 2 years ago

CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.

yjftsjthsd-h4• 2 years ago

The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a UX problem when it doesn't do it right.

cwillu3• 2 years ago

The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.

kelnos23• 2 years ago

CSD has nothing to do with UX.

Sure it does. Allowing windows to draw their own decorations, often in different ways and with different styles and themes, and not respecting the settings in xfwm4 as to what window-control buttons should be drawn (and where)... that's a huge UX issue.

braiamp• 2 years ago

What has this to do with wayland or XFCE? The only major DE that is using client side decorations is gnome. This has been true since 2018:

I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing CSD. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. That’s of course not the case. Nothing in Wayland enforces CSD. Wayland itself is as ignorant about this as X11. [...] In fact we created a protocol (supported by GTK) that allows to negotiate with the Wayland compositor whether to use CSD or SSD.

From https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-d...

Wayland is agnostic, and it's up to the compositor and application to decide what to do while operating under wayland.

kelnos23• 2 years ago

The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD)

Not really. The GNOME/GTK folks were already on the CSD bandwagon well before Wayland. Wayland compositors are free to draw their own decorations (and xfwm4 will indeed continue doing that once it's a Wayland compositor), and one of the actually neat things about Wayland is that there is a protocol that allows the compositor to tell applications not to draw their own decorations. (Whereas on X11 an app can tell the WM it will draw CSDs and the WM can't do a thing about it.)

Certainly GNOME has gone all the way to CSDs (IIRC if an app on GNOME doesn't draw CSDs, they get no decorations at all), but that has nothing to do with Wayland.

rurban• 2 years ago

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

FloatArtifact3• 2 years ago

My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts.

Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.

bitwize8• 2 years ago

If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.

FloatArtifact3• 2 years ago

If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.

Linux is fine with X11 per my requirements above. The biggest problem is the fragmentation caused by Wayland. I cant develop software that targets any reasonable range of desktop environments much less, the features needed. If Wayland was left and X11 was right the community needs something in the middle paradigm.

tristan9572• 2 years ago

Global shortcuts are managed by the XDG Desktop Portal.

tuna74• 2 years ago

It is probably much better if the compositor implements parts of the accessibility functionality. Then you can have other parts as libraries and in the toolkits, but the integration should probably be in the compositor.

urlwolf2• 2 years ago

I had a simillar take until I found keyd:

https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd

emilfihlman• 2 years ago

Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny.

Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard Ubuntu.

The way Wayland is done is a mistake.

valeg• 2 years ago

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

Aachen2• 2 years ago

For anyone else not in the know

In human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows, icons, menus, pointer" —https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)

aussieguy1234• 2 years ago

Ive got a hybrid XFCE/i3 setup as my main desktop.

The panel is killed on startup.

This could get me looking into sway/Wayland.

btreecat• 2 years ago

This is great news!

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

XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

Related Stories