The Xfce Wayland road-map on the project’s Wiki has been updated a few times over the past two weeks, namely around the desktop panel plug-ins and applications support for Wayland. There still isn’t a firm timeline or release where they expect to have a complete Xfce Wayland transition complete, but ultimately are aiming to have a native Wayland experience that doesn’t depend at all on XWayland and will be using wlroots as part of its compositor. Many Xfce panel plug-ins are working under Wayland as are a number of Xfce’s own applications.
Do note, though, that there’s no certainty at all yet that Xfce will transition to Wayland completely. As the roadmap clearly states:
It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all).
So, the future of Xfce on Wayland is not yet set in stone – but with X.org having effectively been abandoned, I doubt Xfce will have much say in the matter.
I think al, the desktops should useWlroots as a core.
I use Xfce on my private computer and all engineering workstations at work. When dealing with other companies, I can see Xfce being currently the most popular desktop for workstations. X11 support is a must (that was the reason SW vendors switched to Linux in the first place) and the last thing I would like to see is to have it eroded when adding support for Wayland. It is reassuring to see Xfce developers continue their balanced, wait-and-see approach to ecosystem changes.
I don’t plan using Wayland myself (at home) until it gets standardised and multiple implementations agree with each other on how to handle desktop features. As it is now, it is all big mess and it will end up harming, not benefiting Linux desktop. We are getting dangerously close to having 4 (X11, Gnome, KDE, wlroots) incompatible operating systems. Hopefully a common standard and a reference implementation emerges before that happens.
You know what happens to abandoned software, right?
I hope they never do. Forcing people to use Wayland when it is not stable, and not even close to feature complete when compared to Xorg, is just stupid. I love x11 forwarding, and until Wayland is a suitable replacement for xorg, they can pry it out of my cold dead hands