Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor • Hacker News Board

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#61

Post by PunchyHamster » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

Fiveplus wrote: post #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 fo…

> 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?

well, the answer is just no, wayland has been consistently slower than X11 and nothing running on top can't really go around that

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#62

Post by badpenny » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

prima-facie wrote: post #15

Am I the only one who's not buying into the Wayland hype? I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair, as I see nothing wrong with it.

Yes, you are the only one in the entire world who hasn't fallen for it. Well done.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#63

Post by cf100clunk » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #11

jchw wrote: post #3

I 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…

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

> The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehards; some weird minority

I upvoted your general response but this line was uncalled for. No need to muddy the waters about X11 -> Wayland with the relentlessly debated, interminable, infernal init system comparison.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#64

Post by PunchyHamster » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:39 PM UTC

ok123456 wrote: post #20

jchw wrote: post #3

I 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 mostly coz nobody really wants to improve X11. I don't think there is many wayland features that would be impossible to implement in X11 it's just nobody wants to dig into crusty codebase to do it.

And sadly wayland decided to just not learn any lessons from X11 and it shows.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#65

Post by adzm » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:40 PM UTC

poulpy123 wrote: post #56

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

What about systemd?

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#66

Post by rascul » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:45 PM UTC

poulpy123 wrote: post #56

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

X11 to Wayland was painless for me. I guess it depends on what you need from it.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#67

Post by duped » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

BearOso wrote: post #50

coldpie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

If Rust has one weakness right now, it's bindings to system and hardware libraries. There's a massive barrier in Rust communicating with the outside ecosystem that's written in C. The definitive choice to use Rust and an existing Wayland abstraction library narrows their options down to either creating bindings of their own, or using smithay, the brand new Rust/Wayland library written for the Cosmic desktop composito…

There really isn't a "massive barrier" to FFI. Autogenerate the C bindings and you're done. You don't have to wrap it in a safe abstraction, and imo you shouldn't.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#68

Post by WD-42 » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:51 PM UTC

mghackerlady wrote: post #14

I love XFCE, with the move to wayland I hope they start thinking about abandoning GTK though

If you are wishing they used QT instead the fact that they chose Rust only makes that less likely.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#69

Post by patjensen » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:52 PM UTC

cf100clunk wrote: post #63

coldpie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary. Very long time (since 2007) XFCE user here. I don't think this is accurate. We want things to "just work" and not change for no good reason. Literally no user cares what language a project is implemented in, unl…

> The X11 diehards will go the way of the SysV-init diehards; some weird minority I upvoted your general response but this line was uncalled for. No need to muddy the waters about X11 -> Wayland with the relentlessly debated, interminable, infernal init system comparison.

Just wait for systemd-wayland.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#70

Post by ux266478 » Tue, Jan 27, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #9

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.