Xfce's Xfwm4 Sees Wayland Port With Wlroots

[Kemosabe]

Never understood how xfwm found enough users.
All I want is awesome.
But no. This planet is just weird.

[Anux]

Never understood how xfwm found enough users.

Thats an easy one, by beeing lightweight, working hassle free and not getting in your way.

All I want is awesome.

Then use install command of your distro followed by awesome. Do you even Linux?

[Delgarde]

Not the original post but Gnome cares about Gnome they don't care if they break another DE. We have seen examples in GTK before if I recall.

Anti-Gnome sentiment aside, the issue is that Mutter is fundamentally a Gnome project — it makes no pretence of being an independent codebase, so while others are free to use it as with any open-source code, their needs will never be a priority.

By contrast, Wlroots is explicitly intended to be a shared building block for anyone that wants to build a Wayland desktop, making it a much better choice for, well, anyone who wants to build a Wayland desktop.

[PunyHulk]

I petition this to rename xfce as wfce

[EvilHowl]

Not the original post but Gnome cares about Gnome they don't care if they break another DE. We have seen examples in GTK before if I recall.

Why would they care? If GNOME uses a non-stable API/ABI for their components and that API/ABI breaks after a major change, there is nothing they can do. I don't think they have the economical resources to mantain every open source project that uses their non-stable API/ABI.

It would be like asking the Linux Foundation to fix every out-of-tree module that breaks after a new kernel release.

They create components for their ecosystem and their desktop. I don't expect the KDE community to care about things outside their control, either.

Libmutter is an internal GNOME component and wlroots is a great library for literally creating desktops. I know it's "cool" to hate GNOME with nonsensical arguments, but come on...

[kvuj]

I wonder how is memory usage. According to this blogpost, xorg itself uses 251 mb of RAM while xfwm4 uses 100 mb.

Desktop Environments Resource Usage Comparison | 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗 (wordpress.com)

EDIT: whoops, fixed 344 -> 251 for the RAM usage. 344 is xorg's size.

[skeevy420]

Never understood how xfwm found enough users.
All I want is awesome.
But no. This planet is just weird.

I switched to XFCE after GNOME went GTK3 and was happy for a long, long time. All I did was move their taskbar to the bottom and change start menus to make it become a 9x/2k-like desktop similar to what I did on GNOME 2 before they switched to the modern GNOME 3 look. It wasn't until XFCE adopted GTK3 that I moved to the dark side -- KDE Plasma. XFCE and XFWM was a great setup if you wanted a floating DE that stayed out of your way, let you configure it your way, and had transparency and other effects so it didn't look dated AF.

I remember back in the day I sometimes used KWin with XFCE because it made a damn fine environment and I thought it was a heck of a lot easier to piggyback KWin's effects and abilities over using Compiz or Emerald/Beryl for the times I wanted a shiner desktop than what XFWM could do by itself. I wonder why they couldn't adopt KWin as their window manager since it works with X11 and Wayland as well as works pretty much seamlessly with XFCE's components in X11 mode (never tried or considered KWin+XFCE on with Wayland until this post so ??? there)? Actually, that's stupid question. I know damn well it's similar to Mutter -- all the Plasma and Qt dependencies that come with KWin and the implications of being dependent on another's codebase.

[Anux]

I guess XFCE isn't about beeing super lightweight (anymore) but beeing well rounded between lightweight, eyecandy and user experience.

Edit: well thats what it says on its main page: https://www.xfce.org/?lang=en

[aufkrawall]

I wonder how is memory usage. According to this blogpost, xorg itself uses 344 mb of RAM while xfwm4 uses 100 mb.

Desktop Environments Resource Usage Comparison | 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗 (wordpress.com)

Wow, those numbers are the most hyperbole I've ever seen.
XServer private bytes is ~30MB, and Plasma Wayland session without Akonadi is perhaps ~300MB of total RAM, probably even less.
What are people doing...

[skeevy420]

Wow, those numbers are the most hyperbole I've ever seen.
XServer private bytes is ~30MB, and Plasma Wayland session without Akonadi is perhaps ~300MB of total RAM, probably even less.
What are people doing...

kvuj

That test is running Baloo on the Plasma session. That's not fair. It should be either turned off or allowed to finish before being rebooted and tested again. Then I noticed this:

The GNOME session is ALSO RUNNING BALOO. It's also running kalendarac and kgpg. Those are all KDE services it probably shouldn't be running. Both the Mate and XFCE sessions are running all the aforementioned KDE stuff that GNOME is running.

Those tests are clearly flawed. And that's just the stuff I noticed at a quick glace as a KDE user. For all I know there are accidental GNOME/Mate/XFCE stuff running in other places as well.

They need to be reran with only one DE installed on the system; not everything installed and then swapped between reboots since there is obvious spillover from that testing method that nulls these results.