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The developers of Xfce have updated their page with plans to add support for the Wayland protocol. The plan nowa includes the initial implementation of Wayland support in core components of the next major release of Xfce 4.20, while simultaneously maintaining support for
In the information update made, the Xfce developers mention that the Wayland-based session in Xfce 4.20 will address the minimum required set of capabilities, with the intention of gradually adding missing functionality in future versions. It is also planned to continue perfecting work in an environment based on the Wayland protocol in user applications that have already been ported.
general plans
For Xfce 4.20, the plan is to add preliminary Wayland support to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn't mean that for the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we expect it to be minimally usable. We also plan to continue refining our apps so that they work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with little effort).
Among the guidelines agreed upon by Xfce developers to transition to Wayland, the following stand out:
- XWayland Independence: Components must be independent of XWayland.
- Without X Configurations: X-specific configurations should be avoided.
- Using wlroots over libmutter: wlroots is preferred over libmutter for the composer.
- X11 Compatibility: Support for X11 should be maintained for the foreseeable future.
Although it has not been clearly established in which version the transition to Wayland will be completed, there are a number of important tasks to address, such ass it is noted that the project does not have the necessary resources to maintain its own composition manager for Wayland and the possibility of using a link to XWayland for this purpose is ruled out. The previous decision to use the wlroots library in the Wayland environment instead of libmutter, developed by the creators of the Sway front-end and which provides basic functions for organizing the work of a Wayland-based composition manager, still stands.
On the desktop side, xfdesktop and the xfce4 panel, it is mentioned that these have already been ported to Wayland using wlroots and will continue to be developed as independently released components, in addition to the xfce4 panel has been tested with Labwc and Wayfire composite servers, while on the part of xfce4-panel plugins most of them already have support for Wayland , but we will work to make the panel a Wayland composer to some extent, this is because you can no longer use GtkSocket/GtkPlug to run plugins as external, now these must be run internally (i.e. as a single process) so the Failure of a plugin causes the panel to crash.
To abstract work in Wayland and specific window system. X11 support is implemented using libwnck.
In addition to this, it is mentioned thatThe following components have been ported to Wayland:
- exo
- libxfce4ui
- libxfce4util
- thunar
- xfce4-appfinder
- xfce4-settings
- xfconf
- xfce4-power-manager
- tumbler
- garcon
- thunar-volman
- xfce4-dev-tools
However, Wayland support is not yet available in the xfce4-session session manager and xfwm4 window manager, although an unofficial xfwm4 port exists to work with Wayland.
Apps that have added support for Wayland include: xfce4-terminal, mousepad, xfce4-notifyd, xfce4-taskmanager, xfce4-mixer, ristretto, catfish, xfburn, parole, xfmpc, xfce4-dict, gigolo and xfce4-panel-profiles.
Although an Xfce session on Wayland is not expected to offer all existing features, it is expected to be minimally usable. Additionally, we plan to continue refining the applications so that they work acceptably on Wayland.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link.