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XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

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101–110 of 204 posts

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#101
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.

Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce?

Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#102

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.

If you really want a just working and actually lightweight (instead of pretending like XFCE), you choose icewm.

apples and oranges tho. you can use icewm instead of XFWM

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#103
post #77
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.

This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off now.

Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise people are going to keep using the thing that works.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#105
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.

I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.

Xubuntu was lighter than Ubuntu (when it had Gnome), at least that is how I remember it.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#106
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…

The oversimplified answer is that a Wayland compositor must include all the functionality of an X window manager and the Xorg display server. There are libraries to help implement all that, but it's still a big lift.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#107
post #47
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.

Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayla…

It's not so much a change as it is (well, will be) an option. We're not abandoning X11, and I expect it will be a couple more major releases before we have feature parity on Wayland with what we have in X11.

But yes, some people are excited, some don't care, some are worried.

But there won't be a switch. If users want to keep running it on X11, they can do that. I can't promise that will be the case forever, but it's not (won't be) that hard to support both with how things are currently.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#108
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.

Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce? Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!

Compiz is an X11 compositor that can be used with Xfce if you disable xfwm4's builtin compositor.

A Wayland compositor is a completely different beast, and that's what we have to build.

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#109
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.

I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.

[deleted]

Re: XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

#110
post #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.

CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.

The application having the ability to change how the title bar works is an anti-feature for me.
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