I love XFCE, with the move to wayland I hope they start thinking about abandoning GTK though
Why do you hope they abandon GTK?
What would you have them replace it with?
Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
21–30 of 339 posts
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#22daily drive xfce4, best DE ever, simple and complete.
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#23I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…
Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…
It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#24Until I can still compile xfce with an small and simple C compiler or even a simpler SDK.
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#25I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal. Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it…
Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to sup…
Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#26[flagged]
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#27[deleted]
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#28>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does...
I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence?
As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.
This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#29[flagged]
Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
#30[flagged]
I know, I know! Change is hard and scary. To be honest, while I am glad they're finally tackling this, I'm also expecting to have a pretty annoying couple of weeks whenever they ship this support and I finally decide to make the switch. There will be things to learn and new behaviors to understand and, yes, new bugs and annoyances to learn to work around. But I think if we both put our big boy pants on, keep a positive and friendly attitude, and help each other out, we can make it through these difficult times and come out the other side with proper high DPI support, sane multi-monitor handling and hot-swapping, and maybe even some wild new stuff like high color depth options.