The Xfce project is working on a brand-new Wayland compositor for their lightweight desktop environment, which will be used as an alternative to the current window manager to support Wayland sessions.
Meet Xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce designed to offer the same functionality and behavior as Xfwm4, but for Wayland sessions, not X11. Therefore, future Xfce releases will ship with both Xfwm4 and Xfwl4 to provide users with support for X11 and Wayland sessions and ensure a seamless transition between them.
The work will be led by Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone, who plans to reuse the existing configuration dialogs and xfconf settings from the Xfwm4 window manager, which is currently used on the latest Xfce 4.20 release. However, the dev said that Xfwl4 won’t be based on the existing Xfwm4 code.
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided on a meaningful way to use the generous donations from our community: funding longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce,” said the Xfce development team in a blog post.
Work on porting the Xfce desktop environment to Wayland kicked off a couple of years ago, and an experimental Wayland session ended up in the Xfce 4.20 release back in 2024. However, it turned out that porting Xfwm4 to Wayland was the wrong path forward, according to developer Brian Tarricone.
For Xfwl4, the dev will use the smithay project, which can be used to create Wayland compositors in the Rust programming language, instead of the more popular wlroots, due to its support for most/all official Wayland protocol extensions, lack of a high-level abstraction layer, and great documentation.
As you can imagine, this work will require major changes to Xfce’s session-startup, since on Wayland sessions the compositor needs to be the root of the session instead of the traditional xfce4-session. Hopefully, Xfce’s brand-new Xfwl4 Wayland compositor will be ready for the next major release, Xfce 4.22, which should arrive in 2026.
- Design
