The developer working on Xfwl4, the Wayland compositor for Xfce, has published the new compositor’s very first alpha release. Considering it’s only been six months or so of work, it’s impressive to see the effort reach this state already.
The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there’s a difference. In reality, of course, it won’t be quite that seamless, and there’s still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least.
↫ Brian Tarricone
Being the very first alpha release, it won’t surprise you there’s a few things missing or broken at this point. Still, if you’re brave, you can download and build the release and try it out.
I have been running this for a couple weeks on Chimera Linux and have not run into any problems. It has been very stable. This is a machine I use for dev so it gets pushed pretty hard but I have not been doing video meetings or much else that may show cracks in the Wayland protocol support. It is possible I have not triggered Xwayland either (though I know that is supported). Still, I have been impressed.
It needs a couple of pre-release XFCE libraries to build but otherwise I am running it with the rest of the XFCE 4.20 components. It is basically just the released version of XFCE but on Wayland. I would say that xfwl4 is already a better way to run XFCE on Wayland than using labwc or something like that.
Glad to see a release so that more people will try it out. It would be great to see it in XFCE 4.22 at the end of the year.
After ignoring it for most of my linux life, as I was using MATE, Cinnamon, or Budgie, a couple of years ago I realized XFCE is the closest to the Win95 interface I like. So it has been my default since then.
kwanbis,
I’ve rotated between many different desktops as well. If you don’t care about eye candy, XFCE has been a really good consistent desktop, which is big pro in my book. I like that they sit back while others chase the latest trends.. The constant change for change’s sake that other desktops go through gets tiresome.
100% agree. And after the abomination GNOME3 is, thanks devs for XFCE.