Xfce's Xfwm4 Sees Wayland Port With Wlroots

[Danielsan]

I receive weekly the mailing list from the XFCE Dev, the project is alive and in good shape, despite the few devs and few resources. Using wlroots as base for the future adoption of waylind is a wise choice, there is not need to rush and if I should use another DE/WM probably I would use WMaker...

[JPFSanders]

Speaking of XFCE: it's nearly dead. There's some activity here and there but not much else. This project is external to XFCE, basically run by a single person I guess.

As always Birdie enlightening us with his presence and in-depth wisdom.

XFCE is not dead, all XFCE components receive updates with relative frequency, XFCE is not as large as Gnome and KDE, it doesn't suffer the barrage of constant nonsensical changes that Gnome does, nor the avalanche of broken functionality KDE receives on a weekly basis.

XFCE serves my purposes perfectly, I don't want effects, I want as few bugs as possible I need to run tons of what idiots call "legacy" applications along with many bleeding edge tools and XFCE does so like a champ, it is the DE that over the years has crashed for me the least and allows me to work.

I earn my living with Linux my computer has to work and XFCE as a DE is perfect for my needs, and as I mentioned above its components receive updates often:

[user@XXXX-arch ~]$ grep -i xfce /var/log/pacman.log
[2021-09-06T14:01:39+0100] [ALPM] upgraded libxfce4ui (4.16.0-1 -> 4.16.1-1)
[2021-09-22T13:52:00+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (2.5.3-1 -> 2.6.0-1)
[2021-10-06T19:55:57+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-cpugraph-plugin (1.2.3-1 -> 1.2.4-1)
[2021-10-23T15:17:45+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-cpugraph-plugin (1.2.4-1 -> 1.2.5-1)
[2021-10-23T15:17:45+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (2.6.0-1 -> 2.6.1-1)
[2021-11-19T11:39:16+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-sensors-plugin (1.4.1-1 -> 1.4.2-1)
[2021-11-19T11:39:16+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (2.6.1-1 -> 2.6.2-1)
[2021-11-26T20:29:19+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (2.6.2-1 -> 2.7.0-1)
[2021-12-26T10:21:53+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin (2.7.0-1 -> 2.7.1-1)
[2022-02-01T20:49:32+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-cpufreq-plugin (1.2.5-1 -> 1.2.6-1)
[2022-02-05T17:14:18+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-cpufreq-plugin (1.2.6-1 -> 1.2.7-1)
[2022-02-05T17:14:18+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-cpugraph-plugin (1.2.5-1 -> 1.2.6-1)
[2022-02-05T17:14:18+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-sensors-plugin (1.4.2-1 -> 1.4.3-1)
[2022-02-12T13:01:51+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-notifyd (0.6.2-2 -> 0.6.3-1)
[2022-02-20T12:35:00+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-panel (4.16.3-2 -> 4.16.3-3)
[2022-03-04T14:05:17+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-diskperf-plugin (2.6.3-1 -> 2.7.0-1)
[2022-03-07T10:27:19+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-screenshooter (1.9.9-2 -> 1.9.10-1)
[2022-03-23T16:14:44+0000] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin (0.4.3-1 -> 0.4.3-2)
[2022-04-03T20:20:23+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-screenshooter (1.9.10-1 -> 1.9.10-2)
[2022-04-03T20:20:23+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-terminal (0.8.10-2 -> 1.0.0-1)
[2022-04-06T23:26:28+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-eyes-plugin (4.5.1-1 -> 4.6.0-1)
[2022-04-13T19:14:21+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-taskmanager (1.4.2-1 -> 1.5.2.201.g58cf9b2-1)
[2022-04-19T13:20:31+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-panel (4.16.3-3 -> 4.16.4-1)
[2022-04-19T13:20:31+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-terminal (1.0.0-1 -> 1.0.1-1)
[2022-04-21T13:07:54+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-terminal (1.0.1-1 -> 1.0.2-1)
[2022-04-27T00:42:01+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-settings (4.16.2-1 -> 4.16.2-2)
[2022-05-13T13:11:54+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-terminal (1.0.2-1 -> 1.0.3-1)
[2022-05-24T19:32:40+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-taskmanager (1.5.2.201.g58cf9b2-1 -> 1.5.3-1)
[2022-05-24T19:32:40+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-terminal (1.0.3-1 -> 1.0.4-1)
[2022-05-26T13:25:28+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-taskmanager (1.5.3-1 -> 1.5.3-2)
[2022-06-02T15:26:03+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-taskmanager (1.5.3-2 -> 1.5.4-1)
[2022-06-15T13:40:33+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-wavelan-plugin (0.6.2-1 -> 0.6.3-1)
[2022-07-06T14:02:18+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-settings (4.16.2-2 -> 4.16.3-1)
[2022-07-15T20:54:49+0100] [ALPM] upgraded xfce4-xkb-plugin (0.8.2-1 -> 0.8.3-1)

[Toggleton]

Wasn't Xfce experimenting with a Mir-based compositor originally? I thought I remembered reading about that a few years ago.
Whatever happened to that effort and was there any conclusions reached, or was it just abandoned?
Has Wlroots surpassed Mir in the core functionality that matters most, or is it just Wlroots has more people and all the momentum, now.
Just curious.

I guess you mean MATE https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...land-Mir-Video They did work on a wayland version with MIR but no idea how that project is moving.

[Anux]

Yep, I just did a pacman -Syu and got a new xfce4-settings-4.16.3-1 that stuff is regularly updated, far away from being dead. They just don't spit out new Majors every week. Things that work well don't necessarily need to be changed.
I don't know why you always need to exaggerate so much birdie. You don't seem interested in healthy discussions?

[dragon321]

I like the decision to use wlroots. Not only wlroots is useful for smaller desktops that don't have to write their own compositors from scratch but also it's good for Wayland ecosystem. The fact that Xfce works on Wayland support is also good news for me. It's one of my favorite desktops because it's lightweight, configurable and stable. I use GNOME on my main desktop but on other devices and virtual machines I often choose Xfce.

[Monsterovich]

Unexpected, of course. A word or two about xfce. The killing of xfce started with the switch to gtk3. Now xfce4 is no longer a lightweight environment, although it's a bit lighter than GNOME. Also, f*ck CSD. Moving to Wayland is a futile effort. Wayland was designed so that mega-DE (GNOME specifically) would rule on the desktop, and the rest were ditched because of the difficulty of maintaining it. There is a lot more to xfce that needs special attention.

[aufkrawall]

If people tipped me I'd make a proper Linux based comparison between DEs RAM consumption in Linux.

You want to be tipped for something easy that takes only a couple of minutes?
You really don't belong into FOSS world, why not just go away...

[theriddick]

This is nice; also allows it to use some of those handy wlroots hacks such as gamma display tuning and such which atm are still not possible on Gnome or Plasma......

[grok]

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

Because it's unremarkable maybe.
Its competitors went KDE3 > KDE4 > KDE5 and Gnome 2 > Gnome 3 > Gnome 40 while Xfce has stayed as Xfce 4.

[grok]

You want to be tipped for something easy that takes only a couple of minutes?
You really don't belong into FOSS world, why not just go away...

Like, all these people who boot to desktop and run the "free" command in a terminal? This is not entirely useless, but it sucks. What about : browse a directory, read pdf, write a file in text editor, open a picture. bonus : cycle through 100 or so pictures (picture viewers are stupid and don't deallocate RAM)