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Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

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Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#251

Post by fransje26 »

prima-facie wrote: post #159
treve wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cognitive dissonance going on here. The vast majority of current Linux Desktop users are on Wayland, and X11 is phased out across the board. Calling it hype is absurd.

Sure, but do you have any facts to backup that assertion?

Ubuntu and Fedora dropping X11:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/12/ubuntu_2510_to_drop_x...

https://itsfoss.com/news/fedora-43-wayland-only/

Kde Plasma 6.8 dropping X11:

https://itsfoss.com/news/kde-plasma-to-drop-x11-support/

Suse dropping X11:

https://documentation.suse.com/releasenotes/sles/html/releas...

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#252

Post by pantalaimon »

simoncion wrote: post #57
rpcope1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point, I would be willing to pay $10-20 a month just for someone to maintain Xorg and xfree86. I really doubt I am the only one.

If the XLibre project appears to be making enough fairly-consistent progress for you to be comfortable tossing around some cash, then do gather up some likeminded folks to hire a dev to follow the guidance here [0] and help out! Do note that I've never tried to croudfund a programmer, but that's something that I have to believe is possible to do. [0] https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file#i-wan... >

Given that all their patches were reverted in upstream X11 due to quality issues [0], I wouldn't put too much trust into that project.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#253

Post by mnw21cam »

MrFurious wrote: post #87
adzm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about systemd?

Systemd was easy for me. All things worked in transition and have the big advantage that don't need shell scripts for create services. Wayland..., is slow, buggy, applications close without reason...

I still want my /var/log/messages back. The new system just doesn't seem to work correctly.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#254

Post by josefx »

mikkupikku wrote: post #178
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…

Compositor overhead even with cheapo Intel laptop graphics is basically a non-issue these days. The people still rocking their 20 year old thinkpads might want to choose something else, but besides that kind of user I don't think it's worth worrying too much about.

It isn't always pure overhead, but also jitter, additional delays and other issues caused by the indirection. Most systems have a way to mostly override the compositor for fullscreen windows and for games and other applications where visible jitter and delays are an issue you want that even on modern hardware.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#255

Post by abenga »

themafia wrote: post #193
adzm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about systemd?

I still have a choice to not use systemd. The systemd people didn't inhabit and then try to kill sysvinit or runit or any of the other competing technologies.

The X people are the Wayland people, it's not an external occupying force.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#256

Post by einr »

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…

I am an XFCE user since many years, and am pretty decidedly in the "traditional and conservative about technologies" camp, and I think this is neat and just fine and dandy -- as long as they're not in a hurry to depreciate X11. Whenever I eventually have to go Wayland I would like to continue to use XFCE, so thumbs up for doing the work.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#257

Post by mrktf »

jchw wrote: post #208
thisislife2 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I based it on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46780901

Latency and throughput are very different things. However, it's worth noting that the comparison here is with and without compositing. If you were using compositing already on X11 (I believe XFCE offers it with "Desktop Effects" or something to that tune) then you've already been eating compositing latency, and you should actually get less latency in some situations. But as far as it performing worse overall, I don't…

Little misconception here (beware i'm using xlibre and causal user). On X11 you can find two mechanisms which can be called compositor :

1st: "enable display compositing" option - this one increases latency as every window draw need go though compositor application (in nutshell it exchanging opengl textures - only synchronization messages goes over "wire")

2nd: the Xserver rendering pipeline compositor, this one goes with modesetting (intel, amdgpu) driver TearFree option - almost everything inside X11 server in OpenGL textures and compositor perform direct blending to screen (including direct scanout).

What I want to tell, on modern X (there are merge requests for Xorg server to modesetting driver, amdgpu have this code) with TearFree enabled you by default optimal hardware acceleration - there comes lower latency

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#258

Post by gf000 »

eptcyka wrote: post #244
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but systemd has absolutely nothing, or even less than nothing to do with user-space GUI desktop applications.

Systemd runs each userspace desktop application in it's own control group.

No it doesn't. It could, but as far as I know this is not used at all.

There are user services, but that's a separate concept.

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#259

Post by sylware »

It seems I will require a microsoft rust compiler and won't be able to use a small alternative plain and simple C compiler for xfce.

The beginning of the end, or are there plain and simple alternative microsoft rust compilers? Is microsoft rust syntax at least as simple than C?

Or the right way will be to use an alternative wayland compositor with the rest of xfce?

Re: Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

#260

Post by jcgl »

eptcyka wrote: post #244
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but systemd has absolutely nothing, or even less than nothing to do with user-space GUI desktop applications.

Systemd runs each userspace desktop application in it's own control group.

Not exactly. Desktop environments (or whatever the program is that launches the application) decides to use systemd to run each application in its own cgroup.

Systemd is certainly relevant to the Linux desktop as a whole, especially regarding logind. But there's no specific relation to GUI desktop applications that I'm aware of at least.

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