I've been using Xfce as a daily driver in one machine for about a decade now.

Great to know there's work on the wayland support front.

Also, writing it in Rust should help bring more contributors to the project.

If you use Xfce I urge you to donate to their Open Collective:

https://opencollective.com/xfce

https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu

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. To me the reasoning is solid: Wayland appears to be the future, and Rust is a good way to help avoid many compositor crashes, which are a more severe issue in Wayland (though it doesn't necessarily need to be fatal, FWIW.) 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.

Of course, if they made the right choice, it should be apparent in relatively short order, so I wish them luck.

Very interesting that they opted for a rewrite in Rust instead of adjusting the existing codebase.

I wonder how long it'll take them writing a compositor from scratch.

FYI, you can currently use most wlroots-based compositors with XFCE. I myself am running Hyprland + XFCE on Gentoo. https://github.com/bergutman/dots

If wayland support was there already I would be using xfce. I truly admire it, it's great to see this happening and I hope the project continues in great speed. With DE's requiring hard system-d support, I would rather have something like xfce

i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for the greater. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!

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?

I've used Smithay's Rust client toolkit for a few months now. For making apps it is still sometimes have unsafe wrappers disguised as safe. It has a lot of internals wrapped in Arc<>, but in my tests, the methods are not safe to call from different threads anyhow, you will get weird crashes if done so.

I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.

>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does...using xfwl4 should feel just like using xfwm4 on X11.

I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here? xfwm4 has accumulated like what 20 years of focus-stealing prevention logic, window snapping quirks and placement heuristics that are implicitly tied to X11 atoms and server round trips.

Is it actually desirable to port all of that logic to a smithay-based compositor or is this an opportunity to shed legacy behaviors? Mostly, this got me wondering about the input latency pipeline. One of the reasons people stick to xfce on X11 is that it feels fast, raw and responsive even on potato hardware. Can a rust/smithay stack achieve the same input-to-pixel latency as a C/Xlib stack on lowend devices? Would love to see more opinions on this.

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