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XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

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Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#51
post #9
post #2

I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it. I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launc…

>My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. same. why? they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click , they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work. p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.

Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#52
post #5

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.

I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#53
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config

Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.

This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC, Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be the case... it's just that some people are blind to the things that they have to do everyday on their OS of choice.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#54
post #15
post #5

If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE. But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.

I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.

It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#55
post #42
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11. X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.

Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?) But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs? I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run…

There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#56

Why should old WMs/DEs add support for Wayland, why not just write new for Wayland specifically?

Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so inclined, however.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#57
post #50

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen. And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ». It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.

Hmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens.

Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen.

The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#58
post #31

Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver? [editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension] I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server prot…

A desktop environment in X11 is leaning on the X server. One on Wayland has to have libs for most of the things. There is no window manager. A compositor is like a server and a window manager in one. There are libs, but the process is much more involved and the API is much more tight so not everything is easy to get as in X.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.

Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.

Auto Tab Discard [1] does wonders to Firefox RAM consumption if you open lots of tabs. Has the "recommended" badge.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#60
post #50

Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.

I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen. And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ». It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.

KDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24" screen and it looks amazing
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