Wlroots-Based Xfce Xwfm4 Wayland Code Taking Shape

With last week's release of Xfce 4.18 there was some disappointment expressed among readers over the lack of any major Wayland progress in this desktop release. While not part of Xfce 4.18, the work on adapting the Xfwm4 compositor / window manager code to using Wlroots for Wayland has continued progressing.

Back during the summer I wrote about an experimental Xfwm4 port to Wlroots as part of the Wayland enablement and an alternative to a Weston library (libweston) based port also being pursued.

Xfce on Ubuntu 22.10.

That work by open-source developer "Adlo" has continued and a new milestone was recently announced. The wlroots version of xfwm4-wayland has added partial support for wlr-foreign-toplevel, which is a protocol around enabling the creation of taskbars and docks by providing a list of opened applications and handling requests around certain actions on them -- such as window maximization.

Adlo has declared "feature parity with the libwston version" of Xfwm4 and thus merged the wlroots branch directly into the Wayland branch.

The announcement came on the Wayland list. Those wishing to try out the code or keep track of the progress can now monitor this Wayland branch if interested in seeing Xfce4 on Wayland.