Xfce 4.18 Planning Begins With An Eye On Wayland Application Support

[oiaohm]

Something like wlroots is really necessary, yes! What is it for a bad way to keep the number of DEs and WMs small or focusing everthing on Gnome by complicating the
development process or bring it back to the 80s? Even big projects need years to support Wayland. One solution, take it or die is everything against what OSS stands for.

Take it or die has been the x.org X11 server or the Xfree86 X11 server before it. Video card vendors have not been putting up drivers to support multi development of display servers.

The past prove a bad way too. Noone have a idea in which way Gnome will change Mutter in future. Maybe they find out windows are too complicated for users? They proved they are ready to do radical steps and ignore input from users or other projects. I would they forks of Gnome have much more users as Gnome themself, thats say all.

This here ignore that a lot of open source items exist to suit the developer/funding parties needs. Redhat targets enterprise based customers in that market a univerial do everything desktop does not have to be there. Think using a mouse with a car entertainment system.

[camel_case]

from reading up on history of wayland, this appears to have been the biggest fear. it was going to kill off the large, DE and WM ecosystem of linux because it requires everyone to have their own "compositor / xserver" in their DE / WM. no basic library system everyone can tap into. reading up on sway, its the reason why they wrote wlroots. to try to make a common shared library others can use to get up and running without having to do the leg work themselves.
.

Something like wlroots is really necessary, yes! What is it for a bad way to keep the number of DEs and WMs small or focusing everthing on Gnome by complicating the
development process or bring it back to the 80s? Even big projects need years to support Wayland. One solution, take it or die is everything against what OSS stands for.

with regards to xfce, i would kinda like them to go with mutter because they are gtk based. if they're going to adopt client side decorations like they said they are, and already started with 4.16, they might as well go mutter. and it will probably make moving over to gtk4 easier. as long as xfce keeps the "classic" desktop environment interface and customization then i'll be happy regardless if they go wlroots or mutter.

The past prove a bad way too. Noone have a idea in which way Gnome will change Mutter in future. Maybe they find out windows are too complicated for users? They proved they are ready to do radical steps and ignore input from users or other projects. I would they forks of Gnome have much more users as Gnome themself, thats say all.

[CTown]

Seems DEs have a lot work to implement their own Window Managers for Wayland from scratch. Many detail work need to be done. While X11 is a protocol too there exists
Xlib or XCB and a matured driver infrastructur around what make it more easy to build a DE an top of it. Wayland have its protocol, libinput and with Weston reference implementation.

Maybe the big DEs shoult create something like Xlib/XCB for Wayland to unify the base for Linux desktops. The current situation is bad because all DEs invest much time for very basic stuff instead of cool features and smaller projects can not handle it.

It would be cool to see a fleshed out wlroots based non-tiling window manager. Otherwise, Mir and KwinFT are not part of any desktop enviroments. I tired KWinFT for the first time three days ago: Plasma did not crash once. However, KWinFT crashed twice on me but the windows came back exactly how they were before dissapearing. (I did not submit bugs due to traveling the next day.)

[fafreeman]

Seems DEs have a lot work to implement their own Window Managers for Wayland from scratch. Many detail work need to be done. While X11 is a protocol too there exists
Xlib or XCB and a matured driver infrastructur around what make it more easy to build a DE an top of it. Wayland have its protocol, libinput and with Weston reference implementation.

Maybe the big DEs shoult create something like Xlib/XCB for Wayland to unify the base for Linux desktops. The current situation is bad because all DEs invest much time for very basic stuff instead of cool features and smaller projects can not handle it.

from reading up on history of wayland, this appears to have been the biggest fear. it was going to kill off the large, DE and WM ecosystem of linux because it requires everyone to have their own "compositor / xserver" in their DE / WM. no basic library system everyone can tap into. reading up on sway, its the reason why they wrote wlroots. to try to make a common shared library others can use to get up and running without having to do the leg work themselves.

with regards to xfce, i would kinda like them to go with mutter because they are gtk based. if they're going to adopt client side decorations like they said they are, and already started with 4.16, they might as well go mutter. and it will probably make moving over to gtk4 easier. as long as xfce keeps the "classic" desktop environment interface and customization then i'll be happy regardless if they go wlroots or mutter.

[Mez']

I like this idea. My main gripe about Budgie is how you need so many GNOME dependencies, to the point where I might as well just use GNOME.
XFCE moving to Wayland will basically just make it E, since the FC has been irrelevant years ago and X is a step toward obsolescence. It's bad enough having initials with no acronym, but it's worse when almost none of the letters mean anything anymore.
So, merge with Budgie and keep the Budgie name, where both can benefit from each other.

I was personally not talking about them merging. You can get basically any layout with Budgie, as it's super flexible, sure, but I still think XFCE has enough personality and traction to remain independent.
I was just suggesting that they implement a common compositor to make the best use of their own limited resources against being dependent of Gnome devs and their very unforeseeable decisions (without taking any feedback from any other project), giving them more work tomorrow because Mutter has randomly broken compatibility for them and they'll need to make up for it.
From what I understood, Budgie devs would prefer to freeze everything on Budgie to take 2 years to create their own compositor, rather than to deal with all the issues Mutter brings them. This could go much faster if they were to cooperate.

[kvuj]

Switching to wlroots sounds awesome. We already have a proof of concept that you can build a production shell with GTK/wlroots (phoc/phosh) and it is quite efficient, since it runs excellent on the Librem 5 (extremely weak compared to a modern laptop, yet is very smooth).

Only problem is to be that in order for any wlroots based compositor to switch to GTK4, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-..._requests/2992 will have to be resolved and it seems to be ignored by the GTK devs.

[ed31337]

While I do miss the Xfce4 panel, Wayfire has been a very adequate window manager/compositor for my Wayland uses. I really do not miss Xfwm4 all that much. Wayfire is way faster and maybe even uses less memory.

[schmidtbag]

They should pool their resources with Budgie (also GTK) as they intend to get rid of the horrible mutter and go for their own compositor. Also, it's better to rely on anything Gnome as little as possible.

I like this idea. My main gripe about Budgie is how you need so many GNOME dependencies, to the point where I might as well just use GNOME.
XFCE moving to Wayland will basically just make it E, since the FC has been irrelevant years ago and X is a step toward obsolescence. It's bad enough having initials with no acronym, but it's worse when almost none of the letters mean anything anymore.
So, merge with Budgie and keep the Budgie name, where both can benefit from each other.

[Mez']

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"

They should pool their resources with Budgie (also GTK) as they intend to get rid of the horrible mutter and go for their own compositor. Also, it's better to rely on anything Gnome as little as possible.

[camel_case]

Seems DEs have a lot work to implement their own Window Managers for Wayland from scratch. Many detail work need to be done. While X11 is a protocol too there exists
Xlib or XCB and a matured driver infrastructur around what make it more easy to build a DE an top of it. Wayland have its protocol, libinput and with Weston reference implementation.

Maybe the big DEs shoult create something like Xlib/XCB for Wayland to unify the base for Linux desktops. The current situation is bad because all DEs invest much time for very basic stuff instead of cool features and smaller projects can not handle it.