Xfce's Wayland Roadmap Updated

[Monsterovich]

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

Oh, no way. How surprising!

[Estranged1906]

Thanks, but I'm going to stick to XFree86 4.8.0.

[avis]

You keep coming back to '...15 years after its inception' argument. What relevance does it truly have? I could start composing a song in my twenties, but not truly commit to finishing it prior to my late 30s; what exactly did we gleam from it? Xorg is functional, yet not optimal. The general consensus from the developer base is that Wayland is the future, and it inherently solves developmental bottlenecks present in Xorg: (wasted)time is money [and a headache].

Wayland is the bad inevitable future until we have a common Wayland graphics server all the Linux DEs can build upon. We have none.

People for decades now have advocated for code reuse, shared libraries, a split of function, yet Wayland necessitates a ton of code for every DE which implements it. It's truly insane.

Wayland advocates continue to scream (while shutting their ears of course) that it's how it's meant to be except it's not how it's worked or been implemented in any successful OS so far. Not a single major successful OS requires to rewrite a graphics server over and over. The fact that XFCE, the third most popular DE (and more popular that Gnome or KDE in some countries) has been struggling to support Wayland is a nothingburger of course and again it's just "how it's meant to be". Everything which is completely fucked up about Wayland is totally fine.



Wake me up when the IceWM developer picks up Wayland or when XFCE's Wayland session is feature complete.

Wayland is fucking amazing. Of course not a single proponent of Wayland uses XFCE, that's for sure. All talk and no walk

With that, I'm done here.

[avis]

X was designed for when applications asked the display server to draw 2d widgets for them, print for them etc, as it was considered that the user at the time would remote into a more powerful computer and stream a session.

This is not how things ultimately turned out, we use 3D APIs to render widgets into textures and then composite them onto the display. Every other modern operating system does this (Mac, iOS, Android etc). Windows is a weird one but simplified it does this.

Wayland is built for this model, there's nothing to "be outdated" because it's effectively a wrapper on how GPUs these days are built to work (passing around buffers/surfaces). Where as X had all the legacy baggage (drawing, fonts, 2d apis, printing etc) and was built for a different hardware model.

This is how compositing in Wayland is "passive", where applications are sending directly to the compositor/display server (which in some cases can use hardware planes to get no-copy outputs onto the display), where in X the compositor has to fetch the contents of each window from the display server, composite it, then send it back to the display server.

X11 was designed to be vector, exactly how Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS graphics stacks function.

Wayland is 100% raster. There's no concept of DPI. Your application doesn't support scaling internally? Well, get fucked. So much for being forward looking.

[V1tol]

X11 was designed to be vector, exactly how Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS graphics stacks function.

Wayland is 100% raster. There's no concept of DPI. Your application doesn't support scaling internally? Well, get fucked. So much for being forward looking.

And I am looking forward for this future. As an app developer I want to decide - scale myself or not, implement something or not. And not like in Windows when you launch some highly critical app (like car diagnostics scanner) and it does not draw launch and stop buttons. Because system scaling is set to 125% for full HD screen on 13" laptop and this destroyed app layout. Thank you for this past, never want to turn back to X11 anymore.

[dragon321]

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.

That is no longer true. wlroots makes writing compositor much easier and provides enough interfaces for things like panels to allow building proper desktop.

Wayfire, probably the most featureful of them all, doesn't even include systray support.

Wayfire is just compositor. It's not supposed to give you any UI. If you run Openbox or twm without anything on X11 then you won't get systray either. On wlroots compositors you can easily use waybar with tray plugin to get systray.

Wayland is the bad inevitable future until we have a common Wayland graphics server all the Linux DEs can build upon. We have none.

No, going back to huge blob that tries to do everything but not everything good enough would be huge step backwards for Wayland. I don't know why you still post your issue, you got explanation there why your points doesn't make any sense. And don't even try to say that X11 is doing everything fine. If it would be then we wouldn't discuss about its successor.

[ezst036]

The fact that we are still discussing Wayland's usability and applicability 15 years after its inception.....

We aren't. Even you aren't.

We are discussing XFCE's Wayland usability. This is an XFCE news article, with a corresponding XFCE discussion. You are pointing to and talking to others about an XFCE commit log. We are discussing XFCE's Wayland usability. You are discussing XFCE's Wayland usability.

I don't just post unsubstantiated BS.....

You just did. XFCE needs to be ported. This does not reflect on Wayland in any way. It's just simply tech debt. Tech debt is neither good nor bad, properly handled. And XFCE is handling it. So tech debt simply is, it simply exists.

[billyswong]

May anyone provide some insight or update in the issue describe in https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland...-screenshooter ?

The "Currently (Feb 2020)" wording means that section has stalled for 3 years. And...

xdg-desktop-portal-kde
xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

Currently (Feb 2020) both API's will give screenshots of the whole screen to any client. So far the user has not to approve a screenshot / give permission to specific applications (like e.g. on android). So the security is comparable to the X-Server.

This sounds like all the fuss of "Wayland is more secure" has become a joke.

[muncrief]

I don't care at all about Wayland. I just want a desktop that is simple, efficient, and works.

And the only popular one remaining is XFCE.

Everyone else is simply trying to emulate the atrocious Windows 10/11 GUI, sometimes with even more fragmentation, inefficiency, and colorful spinning blocks and other extraneous nonsense.

So if XFCE ever adopts Wayland, and it actually works for everything, that will be fine. Otherwise, like I said, I simply don't care.

[Gusar]

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.

Of course I have. Everything works as I described. There's several clipboard managers available (but I don't need more than is provided by wl-clipboard), also several screenshooters using the wlr-screencopy protocol (just plain grim is enough for me, which is the equivalent to scrot in X), haven't tried display forwarding but there's waypipe and wayvnc, systray support is in sfwbar at least which is the panel I went with.