Xfce's Wayland Roadmap Updated

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce's Wayland Roadmap Updated

Xfce 4.18 released last December with some strides on the Wayland front for this lightweight GTK-based desktop environment, but more work remains before Xfce will be fully compatible with Wayland and its own robust compositor. The Xfce Wayland road-map was recently updated to reflect the latest work on this major undertaking...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Xfce-Wayland-Roadmap-2023

[avis]

There's not too much to celebrate, XFWM4's Wayland port appears to be abandoned or completely dormant: https://github.com/adlocode/xfwm4/tree/wayland

Wayland continues to prove it's appropriate only for major projects such as Gnome and KDE.

[JEBjames]

@Michael

Wording

"There still isn't a firm timeline or release where they expect to have a complete Xfce Wayland transition complete, but ultimately are aiming to have a native Wayland experience that doesn't depend at all on XWayland and will be using wlroots as part of its compositor."

Double complete. Maybe remove the second one.

[skeevy420]

There's not too much to celebrate, XFWM4's Wayland port appears to be abandoned or completely dormant: https://github.com/adlocode/xfwm4/tree/wayland

Wayland continues to prove it's appropriate only for major projects such as Gnome and KDE.

So something that only gets a few commits every 4-6 months not having a commit in 3 months means it's abandoned? Jeez, dude. SMH.

I thought it being ported to use wlroots instead of Mutter/libmutter and them not trying to depend on GNOME technologies throughout the XFCE ecosystem was worth being celebrated.

[Gusar]

Wayland continues to prove it's appropriate only for major projects such as Gnome and KDE.

Actually, there's lots of small compositors available nowadays. Most of them with tiling window managers, but there's some floating window managers as well. And there's several panels you can choose from independently of the compositor. Also several other small tools, like for notifications and such, that can also be chosen independently of the compositor or panel. All possible thanks to wlroots and their protocols, most notably wlr-layer-shell and wlr-foreign-toplevel-management.

The wayland world is much bigger than Gnome or KDE, with wlroots being the de facto standard that provides interoperability. Well, except with Gnome which exists in a universe of its own. But KDE/kwin does support wlr protocols.

[Danny3]

Wow, even XFCE it's getting Wayland support, congrats to them for working on it!
Again, I wonder WTF is Linux Mint doing with their flagship Cinnamon and with all those money from donations?
By now, after Gnome and KDE Plasma, Cinnamon should've already had Wayland support.
At this rate even the one that Pop OS is developing will get Wayland support before Cinnamon.

[user1]

I thought it being ported to use wlroots instead of Mutter/libmutter and them not trying to depend on GNOME technologies throughout the XFCE ecosystem was worth being celebrated.

But they still depend on GTK, which is still ultimately developed by Gnome devs, so I don't see being dependent on one less piece of Gnome tech is something worth being celebrated. I actually see it impractical that they didn't simply choose to base the Xfce Wayland session on Mutter (which btw they considered this before making the final decision of going the wlroots route). Imagine how much of their scarce resources would've been saved if the simply adopted a ready-to-use Wayland compositor.

[skeevy420]

But they still depend on GTK, which is still ultimately developed by Gnome devs, so I don't see being dependent on one less piece of Gnome tech something is worth being celebrated. I actually see it impractical that they didn't simply choose to base the Xfce Wayland session on Mutter (which btw they considered this before making the final decision of going the wlroots route). Imagine how much of their scarce resources would've been saved if the simply adopted a ready-to-use Wayland compositor.

They were using GTK way back when it was GIMP Tool Kit and not the meme GNOME Tool Kit so it's hard to hold that one against them.

You also have to look at it from the other way by considering how much of their scarce resources would be saved by implementing a more feature complete Wayland compositor over Mutter. wlroots gets a lot of stuff before Mutter does and it's probably easier to wrangle in something developed generically that expects to be embedded/implemented/used as a base versus choosing something developed with GNOME specifically in mind.

GNOME Tool Kit Harington -- because they're both known for looking nice while coming up short

[avis]

Actually, there's lots of small compositors available nowadays. Most of them with tiling window managers, but there's some floating window managers as well. And there's several panels you can choose from independently of the compositor. Also several other small tools, like for notifications and such, that can also be chosen independently of the compositor or panel. All possible thanks to wlroots and their protocols, most notably wlr-layer-shell and wlr-foreign-toplevel-management.

The wayland world is much bigger than Gnome or KDE, with wlroots being the de facto standard that provides interoperability. Well, except with Gnome which exists in a universe of its own. But KDE/kwin does support wlr protocols.

Have you tried working in those "small" compositors? I have. They are basically unusable unless you simply wanna run apps and do nothing else, i.e. using clipboard, screenshoting/screencasting, display forwarding, etc. etc. etc. Wayfire, probably the most featureful of them all, doesn't even include systray support.

Xorg + TWM (a few kilolines of code) is vastly more usable than all the mentioned compositors combined.

[avis]

So something that only gets a few commits every 4-6 months not having a commit in 3 months means it's abandoned? Jeez, dude. SMH.

I thought it being ported to use wlroots instead of Mutter/libmutter and them not trying to depend on GNOME technologies throughout the XFCE ecosystem was worth being celebrated.

Have you checked the commit log, sir? Please do. I don't just post unsubstantiated BS, I check stuff before making major claims like this.

The fact that we are still discussing Wayland's usability and applicability 15 years after its inception is the best proof how completely misdesigned it has turned out to be.

Did people discuss Xfree86 to Xorg transition? Wait, no one did, it was a nothingburger.

Did people discuss a brand new graphics stack in Windows Vista? Well, they did, but only because GPU vendors were slow to add proper support to it. All the applications before Vista worked in Vista just fine.