While the two major open source desktop environments get most of the airtime – and for good reason, since they’re both exceptionally good – there’s a long tail of other desktop environments out there catering to all kinds of special workflows and weird niches. I think we can all agree that Xfce leads this long tail of more niche desktop environments, without really being niche itself. Xfce may not be as popular as KDE or GNOME, but it’s an amazing full-featured desktop environment that offers a slightly more traditional, less fast-paced desktop for those that desire so.
Xfce, too, is moving to Wayland, which can mean significant efforts in certain places, not the least of which is the window manager. Xfce originally planned to adapt its venerable xfwm4 to support both X11 and Wayland at the same time, but this turned out to be too complex for a variety of reasons, which all more or less caused by differences between X11 and Wayland. On top of that, this approach would risk introducing new bugs to the X11 side of things, and the Xfce project does not want to subject its X11 users to that.
As such, they’ve decided to develop a Wayland compositor from scratch: xfwl4.
The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does, or as much as possible considering the differences between X11 and Wayland. Using xfwl4 should feel just like using xfwm4 on X11. We even plan to reuse the existing xfwm4 configuration dialogs and xfconf settings to ensure a seamless transition.
Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building blocks.
↫ The Xfce development team
This project also includes related tasks like rearchitecting session-startup to support Wayland, implementing support for the xdg-session-management protocol, and adding support for XWayland. This is obviously anything but a small effort, but it seems like a practical solution. Xfce users generally seem to choose Xfce exactly because it’s a stable environment that does not move fast(er) and break (some) things. As such, keeping the X11 window manager separate and stable, without Wayland work possibly breaking it, seems like the kind of thing the average Xfce user can get behind.
Personally, I can’t wait for Xfce to become a full Wayland desktop, as dealing with X11’s nonsense feels decidedly retro to me now, and I don’t see Xfce as a retro environment at all. It’s going to take some time, of course, but thanks to countless generous donations to Xfce, longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone will be paid to work on this project. Excellent news for everyone involved.
You can already run XFCE on Wayland using another compositor like LabWC and some distros ship it this way. Budgie decided to go Wayland-only without making their own compositor. But I think it makes sense for a desktop environment to define its own compositor behaviour and so it is great to see XFCE taking this on
The work it takes to write a Wayland compositor is dropping as the support libraries mature. Given that this will be the work of primarily one person, expecting a dev release in a few months is not too bad (mid-year is only 5 months from now). Smithay is the same foundation used for COSMIC and Niri so it will continue to improve though it already supports most protocols as the article says.
This is starting to show the benefits of the Wayland architecture in my view. XFCE has multiple Wayland frameworks to choose from and was able to pick the one with the features and language support they liked best. There are already smithay, wlroots, aquamarine, louvre, mutter, kwin, swc, and others. There will be more and writing a compositor is only going to get easier.
The part that seems like a waste of time for compositors these days is direct Xwayland support. Not because support for X11 apps is not important but because solutions like xwayland-satellite work so well.
https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite
But now that XFCE is going to end up with both xfwm4 and xfwl4 they are going to face the same dilemma as Budgie, GNOME, and KDE did. Do they maintain them both long term? Or will this lead to xfwm4 going away? I hope that xfwm4 sticks around.
I’m glad they are approaching this with caution and being mindful of X11 holdouts who, for various reasons, can’t make the move to Wayland yet. If it’s not obvious, I’m one of those holdouts. I know that Wayland is the future of desktop Linux, but I don’t just run Linux on the desktop, I also use FreeBSD and OpenBSD where Wayland won’t be a real solution any time soon. Also, while a lot of progress has been made with remote desktop use under Wayland, it’s still not 100% there and so I’m forced to continue to use X11 for real work.
I’m happy to wait for it to mature enough to be usable daily and do what X11 does for me now: just work and stay out of the way. That’s how all desktop components should be in my opinion, just do your damn job and don’t let me know you exist (by crashing or otherwise misbehaving).