Xfce 4.18 Planning Begins With An Eye On Wayland Application Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xfce 4.18 Planning Begins

Now that Xfce 4.16 has been out for a while after successfully hitting its one-year release cycle goal and some maintenance updates to Xfce 4.16 have been made, planning for Xfce 4.18 is beginning...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xfce-4.18-Planning-Begins

[chromer]

Features that Affect the Entire Xfce Core

• Explore Wayland support in applications (where it is easily possible)

Finally Wayland is coming to XFCE...

[birdie]

The most important yet omitted link: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

The most damning yet honest part of it which says it all about the "wonderful" state of the Wayland ecosystem:

We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor

Finally Wayland is coming to XFCE...

No, it's not, not in time for 4.18 release at least.

[JackLilhammers]

The most important yet omitted link: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

The most damning yet honest part of it which says it all about the "wonderful" state of the Wayland ecosystem:

As long as Wayland "works" for the "default" desktop who cares, right?

[juxuanu]

Then use an existing compositor. (?)

[Alexmitter]

Then use an existing compositor. (?)

They either want to use Mutter or upgrade their existing compositor with wlroots.

[juxuanu]

They either want to use Mutter or upgrade their existing compositor with wlroots.

Nice, I think that it is a good idea.

Do you have any source for that? I'd like to read what the devs say.

[r_a_trip]

The most damning yet honest part of it which says it all about the "wonderful" state of the Wayland ecosystem:

"We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor"

To be honest, they also don't have the resources to maintain their own X-server. Either way, they will need to do something. X.org is undead. it might go a long time, but no new developments. Obsolescence lurks in the future. Better to build on an existing Wayland solution than fade into irrelevance as an X desktop that couldn't make the jump.

You might not like the demise of X, but the people doing the work have decided. We better get with the program.

[schmidtbag]

Finally. We don't have enough lightweight feature-complete Wayland-compatible desktop environments.

[acobar]

Xfce used to be my second DE.

There were two situations when I had to resort to it frequently:
- when KDE config files were using dynamically generated signatures for config files preferences, and after some break-up it would not load properly (this must be one of the stupidest use of signatures in the history of computing);
- when Qt changed that way sub-process signals were handled, breaking vlc, octave and other qt-based applications under linux/KDE. For some time I had to run Octave under Xfce until a workaround was used (it was another stupid decision).

I still like it, even though I fire it only occasionally. Hopefully, it will skip mutter and will have a solution based on wlroots or Mir.

Wish the current developers crop the best.