Xfce's Xfwm4 Sees Wayland Port With Wlroots

Developer "adlo" announced to Wayland developers today the work on porting Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager code to Wayland and this new "Xfway" compositor is being brought up using the wlroots library that is becoming increasingly common among the smaller Wayland compositors.

A wlroots-based Xfce xfwm4 port is in the works and making good progress but with known limitations. There are feature regressions compared to an alternative libweston-based port.

Xfce

This new port also moves Xfwm4 over to the Meson build system. Wlroots was started by the Sway compositor project and is being increasingly used for sharing code among Wayland compositors and providing many of the core building blocks for compositors to easily re-use.

Those interested in this experimental Xfwm4 Wayland port using wlroots can see this GitHub repository for the current state.

Upstream Xfce 4.18 is eyeing Wayland application support but a full transition of this lightweight, GTK-based desktop will likely take a while. The Xfce Wiki outlines these plans for trying to ensure Xfce applications at least run on Wayland nicely under say the Weston compositor but not a complete Wayland port of Xfce in its entirety. That release engineering page notes, "It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all)."