To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer.
4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.
Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to know what your opinion is on the matter.
Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.
I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen.
And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».
It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.
I actually prefer XFCE's scaling via setting a font DPI to e.g. KDE/Gnome's scaling which increases everything in size and not just fonts.
First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).
Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.
Linux Mint XFCE. Appearance > Fonts > DPI Custom DPI setting: 144 makes fonts across the desktop larger. The default setting: 96 seems fine to me. The default in Firefox was -1.0 which is also fine.
It's absurd that people who recommend "light" Linux distros mention DEs that are much heavier than LXQt and LXDE.
As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close applications to reduce the swap usage.
Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.
It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)!
Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag.
It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it!
Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical.
By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!
XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago
When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland
After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked"
I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key
Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.
This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC, Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be the case... it's just that some people are blind to the things that they have to do everyday on their OS of choice.
"but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." "
I just started to make the transfer to Linux from windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.
I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids won't use the computer unless it's the last one available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I cannot seem figure out what's causing it.
If you want "just works" your more likely to get it with Ubuntu than Fedora. As for being unbearably slow .... there aren't a lot of ways for that to happen unless you're using absolutely the wrong graphics driver.
A typical way would be using xfce's "enable display compositing" setting with a graphics driver that doesn't support proper acceleration.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
> I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding?
I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)
I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time.
I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015.
Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.
KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of maintenance, but KDE is fine too.
The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.
My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts.
Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.
If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.
I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it.
I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much simpler than Gnome at the time.
Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling, don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go to desktop for simplicity and reliability.
>My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce.
same.
why?
they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click, they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work.
Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.
In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.
I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every application had to add explicit support, but I've had no problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.
Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.
There's really nothing that can be said then but I personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at home. its basically `ssh -x`
It is, but with a whole slew of tweaks to pull it off. It's a mess.
...I get it that Wayland is the future and all, that it has features we need as an OS to get to the next level, but I feel there should be no rush to do it, and I feel a strong push for Wayland in distros right now, even with all these little broken things all over the place.
Xfce is not perfect but pretty close (in *nix realm); it is a stable WIMP desktop environment. Everything where you expect it to be, no excessive feature creep, stable. It is like a tool, I love it. I wish it had a better brand. Too nerdy.
If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE.
But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.
I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites.
I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts).
I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years.
I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people.
I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
macOS is my dream OS as it stands.
I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone.
I can share a calendar with my family and it just works.
I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my phone.
I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to futz with anything or open a terminal.
I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops out full of my writing which I can send to people for review and feedback.
I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far superior to any open source products and I do not mind paying for that privilege.
etc etc.
The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant anyway to the pain I would incur without it.
And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that. No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
I do not like the panels Apple uses, they have harsh backlight, due to 450 nm blue primary; nwer panels have 455-460nm blue light peak. My eyes are sensitive and I get tired on Apples.
I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.
X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves.
It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.
The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;)
What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Do I understand correctly that they are building on top of wlroots? If so, I am pretty happy about this development as I might get to enjoy the solidity of XFCE apps in other WMs / compositors like Sway or River.
Yes, eventually anyway. I've done a little work on xfwm4, using wlroots, but it'll be another year or more before that's usable. For the desktop components that work on Wayland, we've mostly tested on wlroots-based compositors.
In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently. Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and Wayland users.
Xfce is pronounced “ecks-eff-see-ee”. The name Xfce originally stood for “XForms Common Environment”, but since then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn't use the XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as “XFCE” and is no longer an abbreviation for anything (although suggestions have been made, such as “X Freakin' Cool Environment”).
Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland, which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything unusable every other month
Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny.
Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard Ubuntu.
Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver?
[editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension]
I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount of work involved that’s clearly not the case?
(It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X development, and so I’ve paid literally no attention to the details)
The core wayland does not even implement the idea of a window, to show how far the differences go.
Based on experiences of an acquaintance writing from scratch support for wayland for an UI framework that shares absolutely zero code with any of the major ones, the differences in even basic things like how to implement drop-down menu are staggering.
Funnily enough, said acquaintances needs would have been fully covered by slightly more capable XRender and a way to synchronize to VSync that does not depend on GLX.
A desktop environment in X11 is leaning on the X server. One on Wayland has to have libs for most of the things. There is no window manager. A compositor is like a server and a window manager in one. There are libs, but the process is much more involved and the API is much more tight so not everything is easy to get as in X.
Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?)
But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs?
I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?
Wayland is written by most of the same folks who maintain xorg, and XWayland is part of xorg.
It's generally more transparent than running a separate X server on Mac or Windows -- you don't normally need to care about whether an app is X11 or native Wayland.
Xwayland is basically Xorg with a Wayland DDX layer -- and it recently got a rootful mode. So that means it's possible to run a complete X desktop, including WM, on top of a Wayland compositor.
However, the drawback is that with the exception maybe of Weston, one does not simply start up a Wayland compositor. You need to have support for logind seats and that sort of thing. So unless you want to spend an afternoon assembling the components like a piece of flat-pack furniture from Target, you basically need systemd and a distro that bundled those components for you the right way.
To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year, maybe (probably) longer.
4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.
Isn’t compiz a compositor for xfce?
Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!
Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point you forget it's there.
XFCE has been my preferred Unix desktop for like 20 years.
Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of use, and good taste.
I also thank the devs.
Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to know what your opinion is on the matter.
Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE up to date. This is major good news.
I love XFCE but nowadays it’s unbearable on a HiDPI screen.
And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option when it comes to « a better Windows 2000 ui ».
It’s also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes ugly.
I actually prefer XFCE's scaling via setting a font DPI to e.g. KDE/Gnome's scaling which increases everything in size and not just fonts.
First because usually it is only text that I want to be larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything" just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that conform to the text like button still increase in size to contain the text).
Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.
Hmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens.
Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to something like 144 or what works for your screen.
The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something like 1.5 in about:config.
Linux Mint XFCE. Appearance > Fonts > DPI Custom DPI setting: 144 makes fonts across the desktop larger. The default setting: 96 seems fine to me. The default in Firefox was -1.0 which is also fine.
KDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24" screen and it looks amazing
KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.
And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.
LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you want more features. They're both performant.
It's absurd that people who recommend "light" Linux distros mention DEs that are much heavier than LXQt and LXDE.
As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close applications to reduce the swap usage.
Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is taking it all anyways.
Auto Tab Discard [1] does wonders to Firefox RAM consumption if you open lots of tabs. Has the "recommended" badge.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
But unfortunately KDE is Wayland only now, so no way to turn the compositor off.
That is just false. Source: the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed packages provide an up-to-date X11 version of kwin.
Source?
It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2, when it was still a thing. I don’t know why it got a reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I used to run it for years though, really liked it for a while.
I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the reputation of XFCE was justified.
If you really want a just working and actually lightweight (instead of pretending like XFCE), you choose icewm.
apples and oranges tho. you can use icewm instead of XFWM
definitely my go to for VM's and VNC for lightweight no need to fiddle installs.
Xfce all day every (work) day.
I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only "pc" I had at the time)!
Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to click on something and have it work instantly with no lag.
It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who work on it!
Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor, and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical.
By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it all works so well to be honest!
XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago
When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland
After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time consuming) everything "just worked"
I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key
Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config
Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or in any other situation.
With all the cores in modern PC's I'd doubt if you would unless you're on a computer that is 8 or 10 years old
I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube defaulted to unaccelerated playback
Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs tweaking to work right.
Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.
This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC, Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be the case... it's just that some people are blind to the things that they have to do everyday on their OS of choice.
"but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." "
I just started to make the transfer to Linux from windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.
I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids won't use the computer unless it's the last one available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I cannot seem figure out what's causing it.
If you want "just works" your more likely to get it with Ubuntu than Fedora. As for being unbearably slow .... there aren't a lot of ways for that to happen unless you're using absolutely the wrong graphics driver.
A typical way would be using xfce's "enable display compositing" setting with a graphics driver that doesn't support proper acceleration.
Not an older laptop. Some 9th gen Intel i7 machine with a Radeon RX6400 GPU attached
Always an excuse... Why can't you just agree that this isn't how it should be but maybe you like Linux anyway?
Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
> I always like to use the lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and hardware video decoding?
I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)
I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm actively doing something. Even if I just do something small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time.
edit: typos
Laptops with loud fans makes it really easy to find inefficient software.
Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your sacrifice, thank you.
I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a single image. That was probably sometime around 2015.
Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their allocations are actually on behalf of an application, and killing the application will reclaim it.
KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of maintenance, but KDE is fine too.
The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't adopt more Gnome3 patterns.
CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application draws the window controls and borders.
The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a UX problem when it doesn't do it right.
My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global shortcuts.
Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to support every wayland compositor.
Global shortcuts are managed by the XDG Desktop Portal.
If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to Windows it's not even funny.
I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to Wayland when Xfce will support it.
I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much simpler than Gnome at the time.
Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling, don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go to desktop for simplicity and reliability.
>My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce.
same.
why?
they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE just click, they could all care less what's behind the scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work.
p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.
Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish the would at least ditch the default start menu and use whiskers or something similar though.
In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.
I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every application had to add explicit support, but I've had no problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.
Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic "run x application over the network" legends except it actually works well.
There's really nothing that can be said then but I personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at home. its basically `ssh -x`
https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.e...
I'm on wayland, have had no issue screen-sharing over teams. Webcam works for me, but only if it was plugged in before teams started.
I’ve got whole screen sharing working in sway, and I don’t dare touch it. Not sure if individual window / tab sharing is even a thing.
It is, but with a whole slew of tweaks to pull it off. It's a mess.
...I get it that Wayland is the future and all, that it has features we need as an OS to get to the next level, but I feel there should be no rush to do it, and I feel a strong push for Wayland in distros right now, even with all these little broken things all over the place.
Well I don't think the pace of Wayland introduction can be called "a rush" :)
I'm still on X11 myself for the time being as my OS doesn't support wayland properly yet (it runs but not with KDE)
Xfce is not perfect but pretty close (in *nix realm); it is a stable WIMP desktop environment. Everything where you expect it to be, no excessive feature creep, stable. It is like a tool, I love it. I wish it had a better brand. Too nerdy.
If I had to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be XFCE.
But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory until Firefox stops supporting X.
Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me to macOS.
I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the popups that request permission to read user directories, which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services, have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead of working on refining the user experience and polishing applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are major infrastructure changes that require major code changes or even rewrites.
I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general. Microsoft and Google are leading the way with "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos" that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation, but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of developers get to work on projects of their own interest and its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major pain points (for example, the development of incompatible Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's concepts).
I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent years.
I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the Newton, which involved a Lisp OS (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years of effort on the side.
I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open source is a complete joke for most people.
I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.
macOS is my dream OS as it stands.
I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone.
I can share a calendar with my family and it just works.
I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my phone.
I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to futz with anything or open a terminal.
I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops out full of my writing which I can send to people for review and feedback.
I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far superior to any open source products and I do not mind paying for that privilege.
etc etc.
The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant anyway to the pain I would incur without it.
And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that. No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.
I do not like the panels Apple uses, they have harsh backlight, due to 450 nm blue primary; nwer panels have 455-460nm blue light peak. My eyes are sensitive and I get tired on Apples.
Sway works fine on FreeBSD.
I haven’t figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I guess it needs pipewire at least.
When I've had servers with a desktop env, it's always been FreeBSD and XFCE.
Don't look now: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?
This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off now.
I used Windows 7 until Steam stopped working. The band-aid stays on.
I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping it'll go away eventually.
It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.
X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't maintain X11 by themselves.
It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on) and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was. Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already better.
The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from its initial developer, then continued with feature avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent" design and some of the trouble coming particularly from "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features are really not considered optional at this point by many desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left now. I'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;)
What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
>X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the developers moved to Wayland
In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.
Do I understand correctly that they are building on top of wlroots? If so, I am pretty happy about this development as I might get to enjoy the solidity of XFCE apps in other WMs / compositors like Sway or River.
Yes, eventually anyway. I've done a little work on xfwm4, using wlroots, but it'll be another year or more before that's usable. For the desktop components that work on Wayland, we've mostly tested on wlroots-based compositors.
Getting back to XFCE, and being able to leave gnome would be a godsend. I didn't dare to try KDE yet.
I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos, mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space, ugh.
Does anyone a cleaner article?
Why should old WMs/DEs add support for Wayland, why not just write new for Wayland specifically?
Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years.
The only component that requires major changes is the WM. Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing platform specific quirks.
(Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for our panel to use, but... yeah.)
Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so inclined, however.
In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently. Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and Wayland users.
Should the project be renamed to WFCE?
No, not anymore:
Xfce is pronounced “ecks-eff-see-ee”. The name Xfce originally stood for “XForms Common Environment”, but since then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn't use the XForms toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer capitalized as “XFCE” and is no longer an abbreviation for anything (although suggestions have been made, such as “X Freakin' Cool Environment”).
Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable
Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland, which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything unusable every other month
Most projects will eventually remove the X code path.
The long-term solution is to switch to Wayland.
Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny.
Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard Ubuntu.
The way Wayland is done is a mistake.
Ok, I’m super confused, how much work is involved in supporting Wayland vs Xserver?
[editing to add: my assumption that it isn’t is due to this post - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort it would imply that Wayland isn’t X API+new extension]
I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount of work involved that’s clearly not the case?
(It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X development, and so I’ve paid literally no attention to the details)
The core wayland does not even implement the idea of a window, to show how far the differences go.
Based on experiences of an acquaintance writing from scratch support for wayland for an UI framework that shares absolutely zero code with any of the major ones, the differences in even basic things like how to implement drop-down menu are staggering.
Funnily enough, said acquaintances needs would have been fully covered by slightly more capable XRender and a way to synchronize to VSync that does not depend on GLX.
A desktop environment in X11 is leaning on the X server. One on Wayland has to have libs for most of the things. There is no window manager. A compositor is like a server and a window manager in one. There are libs, but the process is much more involved and the API is much more tight so not everything is easy to get as in X.
Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely incompatible with X11.
X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland, an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.
Oh, ok, so X apps can run under Wayland, because Wayland DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland provide an X translation layer/impl?)
But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely through Wayland specific APIs?
I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing system?
Wayland is written by most of the same folks who maintain xorg, and XWayland is part of xorg.
It's generally more transparent than running a separate X server on Mac or Windows -- you don't normally need to care about whether an app is X11 or native Wayland.
There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .
Weston has (for the time being) an X11 backend.
Xwayland is basically Xorg with a Wayland DDX layer -- and it recently got a rootful mode. So that means it's possible to run a complete X desktop, including WM, on top of a Wayland compositor.
However, the drawback is that with the exception maybe of Weston, one does not simply start up a Wayland compositor. You need to have support for logind seats and that sort of thing. So unless you want to spend an afternoon assembling the components like a piece of flat-pack furniture from Target, you basically need systemd and a distro that bundled those components for you the right way.
[dead]