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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?

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

wvstolzing 11 hours ago
I don’t think it does virtual desktops with labwc still; but when it does, labwc is as good a replacement for xfwm as any, IMHO.

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.
legluondunet 11 hours ago
I love this DE, I use it since several years now cause it uses lightweight resources (= more resources for gaming) and is highly customizable.


Last edited by legluondunet on 16 December 2024 at 12:46 pm UTC
devland 10 hours ago
I've been using kde on wayland since it was released officially a while ago. No issues whatsoever and I game a lot.

Glad to see that xfce is making the change as well. That's a really cute and solid DE.
hardpenguin 8 hours ago
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.
CyborgZeta 8 hours ago
I haven't used Xfce in several years, but I've always liked it. It is, indeed, very stable and lightweight. My favorite Xfce is Xubuntu, which has a really lovely looking Xfce.
pb 8 hours ago
It was my desktop of choice for several years, but lack of wayland support made me drop it in favour of kde (shortly, bad experience) and eventually Hyprland. Not going back, sorry.
fagnerln 8 hours ago
I love XFCE, but I love even more Wayland, which was the reason that I stopped using it. However this implementation sounds like a workaround. I want an alternative to Gnome and KDE, but looks like only Cosmic can fight them.
Xpander 7 hours ago
My second choice for DE. But like MATE, it seems the wayland stuff is extremely experimental, broken and missing features.
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.
Caldathras 3 hours ago
QuoteDo you use Xfce? If so, why do you use it and not others like KDE and GNOME?
I use Cinnamon for daily driving; XFCE and GNOME (Pop!_OS variant) for gaming.

I am quite impressed with XFCE. It is lightweight, highly customizable and stable.

I like KDE but find it to be unstable on Nvidia Optimus, so I don't use it.

In no hurry for Wayland -- it will come when it comes.


Last edited by Caldathras on 16 December 2024 at 5:41 pm UTC
Linux_Rocks 3 hours ago
I used Xfce in GhostBSD/FreeBSD. Always worked great for me and never had any issues.
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