Xfce 4.16 Released With Numerous Improvements To This Lightweight GTK3 Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce 4.16 Released With Numerous Improvements To This Lightweight GTK3 Desktop

Xfce 4.16 managed to ship in 2020 as one of the original goals for this release after the much delayed Xfce 4.14 series. Xfce 4.16 comes with many incremental improvements to this GTK3 desktop environment...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-4.16-Released

[TheOne]

I wonder how hard it would be to support wayland on XFCE...

[flower]

I wonder how hard it would be to support wayland on XFCE...

after their transition to gtk3 (which is not yet completed) they need to write a new window manager. xfwm just wont work.
so i'd guess it'll take around two years

[kpedersen]

after their transition to gtk3 (which is not yet completed) they need to write a new window manager. xfwm just wont work.
so i'd guess it'll take around two years

Not just a window manager. An entire wayland compositor. Duplicating loads of work and adding tonnes of boilerplate code. Yep, about 2 years sounds about right. This of course will be developer time which is probably better spent elsewhere.

[lectrode]

after their transition to gtk3 (which is not yet completed)

This version completely drops support for gtk2. What is left to complete?

[flux242]

This version completely drops support for gtk2. What is left to complete?

.gtk4

[curfew]

after their transition to gtk3 (which is not yet completed) they need to write a new window manager. xfwm just wont work.
so i'd guess it'll take around two years

They should just use Mutter. In fact all GTK-based projects should swiftly switch over to Mutter. Collaborate with the Gnome people to make it happen. The single largest threat for the success of Wayland is fragmentation and half-assed compositor implementations, which we must avoid by any means necessary.

I traced the dependencies for Mutter on Arch via its native package manager. It's got two gnome-prefixed deps: gnome-desktop and gnome-settings-daemon. The first package seems to be merely a meta package for some generic stuff not actually strictly Gnome-specific, but the gnome-settings-daemon package seems problematic. While it's got minimal Gnome bindings, too, it loads quite a bunch of random crap such as a library for accessing weather information...

Maybe these dependencies can be gotten rid of via compilation options, I don't know, but does not seem like a major task for refactoring stuff to make Mutter a generic, desktop-agnostic service.

[curfew]

P.S. I think it's wrong to talk about "compositors" when talking about implementing the core functionality for a desktop environment on Wayland. Compositors don't do drag 'n' drop, they don't do clipboards, they fucking don't do screen recording. Maybe window managers do that. The problem is that people *think* compositors should do that, because they suck at software design and cannot come up with a viable solution where a compositor only does compositing and not sound management and clipboards.

People with mindset like this aren't much better at their jobs than the folks who had a god damn web browser built into an OS kernel some 20 years back.

[foobaz]

The screenshots look fantastic. It's great to see all their hard work finally coming together.

[DanL]

curfew Guess what the Xfce founder is doing these days?

Do you need to point this out in every xfce thread? We don't care. Someone ban this troll.