Xfce 4.20 Aiming For Usable Wayland Support While Maintaining X11 Compatibility

[oiaohm]

The Linux community had no resources/people to maintain a single code base, now suddenly we have the resources to maintain 25 similar in complexity and scope code bases

The reality is the x.org code base was not getting the maintenance i required.

To be correct we have not split that far.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ervers#Wayland this is tip of iceberg.

Your development healthy wayland compositors.

You have your rust based.
https://github.com/Smithay/smithay So Cosmic is healthy because more than 1 party use it backend.

KDE is heathly because there are other compositors using the QT wayland backend so workload is shared.

Sway is healthy again because many parties are using wlroots backend so sharing the load.

Weston is heathly because every party who writes a desktop shell for weston shares the development of weston..

Enlightenment wayland development not healthy. Like who other than Enlightenment uses EPL

Mutter of gnome.... Avis who uses the libmutter library. for wayland other than Mutter.... So its not healthy.

Avis in wayland compositors if you are looking at healthy development speed. A compositor has to be Qt, Wlroots or smithay if you want to do your compositor as a single application or Weston desktop shell .so

Yes that 4 way code base split.

Qt is for those trained in C++ and C++ skills are what you need to maintain it.
Wlroots is C and you need C skills to maintain it.
Smithay is rust and you need rust skills to maintain it.
Weston is restrictive due to be reference compositor and you need C skills to maintain it..

Remember x.org code base is basically pure C. In reality the majority C++ and Rust programmers don't want anything todo with pure C.

Avis something you did not consider is a single code base can only target the developers to maintain it who like the language it coded in. KDE kwin is a Qt compositor so work on KDE and other Qt based compositors comes out of a pool of C++ developers. Cosmic with Smithay/rust the developers work on this come out of the pool of rust developers. Wlroots comes out of the pool of C developers that line up with the possible pool of developers for X11 bare metal server.

Having rust and C++ developers working on Wayland compositors because they have compositors in language they like using this increases the developers working on the Weston core protocols.

Yes Wlroots and weston do compete on developer resources to a point.

The forking equals more developers to review the Wayland core protocols.

Avis it would be a very different matter if the forking was like all C or all C++.... Because this would not be accessing different pools of developers.

One of the problems why X11 protocol development died is that forks of X11 server died.

X.org server what competition did it have avis to compete against. Think gcc before LLVM. Gcc massively improved in features after LLVM appeared once it had solid competition that could show that that X bad performance was in fact a issue with gcc because llvm could do it better.

Avis lack of competition is never a good thing. You are right there can be too much competition the art is getting the correct balance. Part of it is how can you have the biggest possible pool of developers work with core protocols so they can be designed as well as possible..

[mrg666]

I read XFCE is still struggling with development and the same X11 hystericals ... in seven pages ... so far. Have fun people.

[Vistaus]

This release is going to be smokin'!

Yes, because most users are going to burn this release. The GTK 2 to 3 switch was already controversial, but most Xfce users do not want Wayland. And sure, they maintain X11 compatibility, but for how long?

[Malsabku]

Both Wayland and Xorg are defective by design from a today's perspective.

But sadly the open-source community doesn't have the ressources to create something better.

[Weasel]

Both Wayland and Xorg are defective by design from a today's perspective.

But sadly the open-source community doesn't have the ressources to create something better.

True. But while Xorg breaks your security, you can still use your system if you're careful enough.

Wayland breaks your functionality and there's nothing you can do about it. So it's way worse.

[oiaohm]

True. But while Xorg breaks your security, you can still use your system if you're careful enough.

Wayland breaks your functionality and there's nothing you can do about it. So it's way worse.

If you are looking at having companies pay for developers to take care of it Wayland not having the security faults is more likely to have embedded users and so on pay for Wayland development.

So Wayland has money to over time close the functionality gap. X11 bare metal does not appear to have the money to maintain itself.

Basically they are the worst in to different ways. Wayland has possibility of improvement due to paid developers.

Weasel those attempt to keep X11 alive are not answering the question how is X11 xserver maintenance going to be funded going forwards. Wayland you can answer this question and find the parties putting up the money.

[EphemeralEft]

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

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A medium-sized YouTuber talked about you and you didn't disappoint.

[HEX0]

I've been using Sway full-time for several years since v 1.0 after they switched from wlc to wlroots which fixed tremendous amount of problems.

I know wayland is far from perfect. But it was amazing witnessing all the progress over the past few years. Firefox, mpv, sdl2, obs and many other projects slowly adding support and maturing.

On a non hiDPI displays I've been very happy with Wayland.
Almost everything is Wayland native for me. Living in mostly alacritty terminal and firefox helps :P

Wine gaming via Xwayland using wine virtual desktop has been practically issue free.

And now I'm super excited seeing Wine native Wayland driver slowly maturing and wine-wow64. It will be pretty cool running 32bit games without multilib on pure Wayland and pure 64bit distro.

Gimp 3 finally will drop gtk2. It's one of the last pieces of software I need Xwayland for.

I realize I'm an early adopter and I had to make compromises and tinker. Change my workflow and try many different programs. But it has been really fun experimenting with Wayland.

I think maybe by next year I will be able to live without Xwayland when wine and gimp3 mature.

One problem with Wayland has been Java. It's probably the most janky experience I had and will take a long time to port JDK to wayland.

Also looking forward to trying out niri, Smithay based rust tiling wayland compositor.

Different strokes for different folks. And I realize many people will stick with xorg for another decade like it was with Windows 7.

But I urge you to give it a try. Don't be too stubborn in your ways. If your use case is broken please try to experiment with Wayland alternatives. Try living in it. Try various DEs and tiling WMs. Try living only in terminal or tty.

Maybe you will like it and learn new things. Linux is amazing and fun. And love the free software community.

[avis]

A medium-sized YouTuber talked about you and you didn't disappoint.

Can you give a link?

[Anux]

Maybe so, but in many cases it’s also the only crap Obviously, xcfe is not wayland ready. But it is the most stable DE I’ve used, so I’ll stick with it regardless of wayland.

Xfce always had a slow dev cycle and therefore rarely introduces big changes. This wayland transition will probably be the biggest change in a long time but it will also take a long time till it's finished.
I'm not such a big fan of wayland but if my DE works as expected I couldn't care less what's underneath the hood.