HN Reader

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.

>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 focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.

This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?

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.

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

In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward.

On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.

On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).

But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.

I resisted Wayland for a longtime, but I'm sold now that I see how well it does on old hardware.

I have an old Thinkpad. Firefox on X is slow and scrolls poorly. On wayland, the scrolling is remarkably smooth for 10 y/o hardware, and the addition of touchpad gestures is very nice. Yes, there's more configuration overhead for each compositor, but I'm now accepting this trade.

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.

I started off using twm / olwm / vtwm in 1991. Then FVWM and Afterstep / WindowMaker. I've been using XFCE since around 2007. As long as it functions similarly I'll be happy.

I certainly hope they support themes. I have been using a Mac OS 7 Platinum theme on all my XFCE desktops for years and I want to keep doing so :)

As someone that is sensitive to displays, one of the best features of XFCE, unlike others desktops, is that it doesn't cause eye strain, probably because it doesn't play tricks - a pixel at a certain color is stable, and not dithered(if you choose) and higher level primitives are also stable and don't play time/frequency based games.

I hope XFCE preserves this, it is a killer feature in today's world.

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

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

So long as I can windowshade things and it doesn't end up making things a blurry mess, cool.

Now the last 3 times I tried Wayland everything ended up a blurry mess and some windows just ended up the wrong size, so.

I suppose I'll just keep holding out hope.

Am I the only one who's not buying into the Wayland hype? I just want X11 support not to fall into disrepair, as I see nothing wrong with it.

Great to see xfce continue on into the next age.

I've been using popos for a while, but xfce will always have a place in my heart.

If it had tiling support I'd probably use it still. Being so lightweight is a massive boon.

I see the words "feature parity". I hope those words are taken seriously. I feel like most Wayland advocates would do well to take those words seriously.

This bullet point from the reason to chose one library over another is a prime example of what I love about XFCE:

    • smithay has great documentation.

Not only are they considering it, but they're expressly calling it out. I'm convinced that the publication of the Agile Manifesto was an exercise in Cunningham's Law, and to that end the XFCE team has produced something great by doing the opposite.

daily drive xfce4, best DE ever, simple and complete.

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

Isn't the switch from X11 to Wayland the most painful switch that happened in the linux world ? Even going from python 2 to 3 was not as bad

Rust is not GNU

I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4.

I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it.

If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust.

Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.

As an Xfce4 user my priorities for a WM are in diminishing importance:

- speed

- memory consumption

- simplicity to use

- customisability

- if it's X11 or Wayland

If everything above the last remains the same in the Wayland version, I stay, else there is LXDM.

I’ll switch to Wayland as soon as I can use xscreensaver with it, preferably as the screen locker.

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?

My response to the Wayland/X11 nonsense bickering has always been that I'll switch to Wayland when xfce does. I usually eyeroll when I see "in Rust" but the developers writeup in the linked article and their comments here are very reassuring and I look forward to their success!

This is great news! If anyone from the Team reds these comments, Thank you people so much for XFCE4!

I suspect many of us still using X, are xfce users waiting for an alternative; I've heard very mixed things about current Fedora xfce wayland setups from different people.

Until I can still compile xfce with an small and simple C compiler or even a simpler SDK.

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?

Wow, this is annoying. I really like Xfce, but there are plenty of minor things which would need improvements. Instead of fixing all these minor things, they waste a lot of their donations on a rewrite for Wayland / Rust - apparently for exactly the same reason as all the other Wayland stuff and Rust reworks. Developers like to write new code more than actually maintaining / improving fixing existing things and finds some excuses to do this.

So will it be renamed to Wfce in the end?

i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for greetd. 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!