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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

#61
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not an older laptop. Some 9th gen Intel i7 machine with a Radeon RX6400 GPU attached

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#62
post #12

XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend…

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

I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube defaulted to unaccelerated playback

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#63
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got whole screen sharing working in sway, and I don’t dare touch it. Not sure if individual window / tab sharing is even a thing.

It is, but with a whole slew of tweaks to pull it off. It's a mess. ...I get it that Wayland is the future and all, that it has features we need as an OS to get to the next level, but I feel there should be no rush to do it, and I feel a strong push for Wayland in distros right now, even with all these little broken things all over the place.

Well I don't think the pace of Wayland introduction can be called "a rush" :)

I'm still on X11 myself for the time being as my OS doesn't support wayland properly yet (it runs but not with KDE)

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#64
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Always an excuse... Why can't you just agree that this isn't how it should be but maybe you like Linux anyway?

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#65
post #17

To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer. 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.

Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point you forget it's there.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#66
post #17

To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer. 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.

Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point you forget it's there.

XFCE has been my preferred Unix desktop for like 20 years.

Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of use, and good taste.

I also thank the devs.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#67
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.

I actually prefer XFCE's scaling via setting a font DPI to e.g. KDE/Gnome's scaling which increases everything in size and not just fonts.

First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).

Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#68
The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#70

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.

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

And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.

LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.

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