After two years of work the Xfce team have release Xfce 4.20 which amongst many other things, now has very experimental Wayland support.
With it still being experimental they only recommend Wayland for "advanced users" but "almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing". For now they suggest using Labwc and Wayfire, since Xfce doesn't have a compositor that supports Wayland yet but plans are underway they said to get Wayland support in their own Xfwm4.
Various other new features and improvements including improvements to the file manager Thunar like an option to use client side decorations, performance improvements, crash / freeze fixes, Ipv6 remote URLs are now supported and more. The Xfce panel can now have the border width configurable, icon size management has overall improvements, there is now the possibility to show the desktop when hovering the mouse on the "show desktop" panel icon and various other improvements.
See more in the announcement.
Do you use Xfce? If so, why do you use it and not others like KDE and GNOME?
labwc itself can do virtual desktops; there’s a desktop switcher, a 'send window to desktop' function, and the window switcher is aware of windows only in the current desktop – but I can’t figure out how to query window-per-desktop information programmatically otherwise.
waybar, wlrctl, as well as xfce-panel don’t seem to have access to that info either. Still waiting for accomodations with respect to some wayland extension, I suppose.
xfce-panel *used to* have some restrictions wrt plugins; but all the core applications on Xfce have been ported to Gtk3 a long time ago, so they all work just fine on Wayland.
Last edited by legluondunet on 16 December 2024 at 12:46 pm UTC
Glad to see that xfce is making the change as well. That's a really cute and solid DE.
QuoteDo you use Xfce? If so, why do you use it and not others like KDE and GNOME?I still do on my laptop! I love it for its simplicity and sufficiency. It's just the right size. I used it for many years on my desktop as well.
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-wayland-session
so yeah i think this will take at least couple of years to get it functional and edge cases ironed out.
I wonder which will get there first: MATE or XFCE.
But anyway, i will have to stick with X11 for many years to come :)
at least it works the way i expect it to work.
See more from me