Xfce's Xfwm4 Sees Wayland Port With Wlroots

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce's Xfwm4 Sees Wayland Port With Wlroots

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-Xfway-wlroots-Wayland

[reba]

While I'm not a user of Xfce I think that's an amazing project and increases the lifetime for Xfce/Xfway.

Choosing wlroots as a wayland backend is also a wise choice as I get the impression wlroots's implementation of the Wayland protocol is not only one of the mayor three implementations but also the one which receives (at least publicy) the most recent developments and is in a good shape: because of the many projects which use it, it gets a nice code test coverage, whereas kwin/mutter(?) only have one customer...

[Alexmitter]

Wlroots is a great choice, and I can't wait for when it lands as it will be a great choice for a minimal Wayland Desktop you can base automated equipment on where Sway is just too cumbersome due to its weird control nature.

[Shiba]

I'm so glad they decided against libmutter.

[user1]

I'm so glad they decided against libmutter.

Could you explain why?
I actually thought that choosing Mutter is the more practical approach because then they already have a complete Wayland compositor that is also the most mature. This way they would've had less work to do.

[kylew77]

Could you explain why?
I actually thought that choosing Mutter is the more practical approach because then they already have a complete Wayland compositor that is also the most mature. This way they would've had less work to do.

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.

[qlum]

Could you explain why?
I actually thought that choosing Mutter is the more practical approach because then they already have a complete Wayland compositor that is also the most mature. This way they would've had less work to do.

I don't think mutter is generalized enough to work easily, considering cinnamon also forked mutter instead of using it directly, it could take more effort to adapt mutter than to implement wlroots which is more generalized.

[reba]

Could you explain why?
I actually thought that choosing Mutter is the more practical approach because then they already have a complete Wayland compositor that is also the most mature. This way they would've had less work to do.

As a product, stay away from anything Gnome, regardless how shiny it currently is - in the end it will only hurt you when you get dumped and left behind. Gnome couldn't care less about your wants and needs.

[Anux]

Ah yes, there we go. Doing it the Xfway, funny name choice.

Beeing a long term XFCE user I know very well that from now till this gets really usable will be a lloooonnngg time. But thats fine, current XFCE works pretty well for me.

[fahrenheit]

Could you explain why?
I actually thought that choosing Mutter is the more practical approach because then they already have a complete Wayland compositor that is also the most mature. This way they would've had less work to do.

From the Xfce 4.18 Wayland support wiki:

Topics under discussion

• Use libmutter as a compositor library to show desktop and panels (similar to gnome-shell, but in plain C)
  • That most likely would require xfdesktop and xfce4-panel to be merged into a single component
  • The idea would be to not fork, but to just use libmutter
    • libmutter-7-0 seems to depend on libgnome-desktop-3-19 (debian bullseye). Can we drop that dependency somehow?
  • A big pro would be that ofourdan who is also a Gnome developer contributing to mutter
• Using wlroots instead would enable us to keep xfdesktop and xfce4-panel as separate components
  • Possibility to exchange only xfdesktop or xfce4-panel, but not the other.
  • Other implications? What would need to be done to use wlroots?
  • Downsides ?
• Which plugin system to use for panel plugin if GtkSocket/GtkPlug will not work any more?
• What about X11 backward compatibility?
  • As long as Nvidia does not support Wayland (by providing open drivers), it would be good to keep X11 backward compatibility (nouveau driver usually is slower)
  • Wayland compositors which were written from scratch like Weston or sway will never run as a x11 window manager. But others which started as x11 window managers such as kwin or mutter still keep their x11 window management code
  • We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor
  • FreeBSD provides https://hikari.acmelabs.space, not sure what is the situation for OpenBSD (possibly libinput missing?)