Xfce is getting a brand-new Wayland compositor called xfwl4

The Xfce desktop environment is expanding with plans afoot for a new Wayland compositor called xfwl4.

In an official blog post the team announced that using donations from the community, they're going to fund Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce. It will use up a "significant portion" of their funding but they "believe it’s an important investment in Xfce’s future". Makes sense, considering more distributions have begun dropping support for X11.

Written in Rust, their goal for xfwl4 is to offer the same functionality as xfwm4 as much as possible, but it will be a rewrite and not be based on xfwm4.

Why are they doing a rewrite? As they explained in the post:

The first attempt at creating an Xfce Wayland compositor involved modifying the existing xfwm4 code to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel. However, this approach turned out to be the wrong path forward for several reasons:

• Xfwm4 is architected in a way that makes it very difficult to put the window management behavior behind generic interfaces that don't include X11 specifics.
• Refactoring Xfwm4 is risky, since it might introduce new bugs to X11. Having two parallel code bases will allow for rapid development and experimentation with the Wayland compositor, with zero risk to break xfwm4.
• Some X11 window management concepts just aren't available or supported by Wayland protocols at this time, and dealing with those differences can be difficult in an X11-first code base.
• Using the existing codebase would require us to use C and wlroots, even if a better alternative is available.

Pictured - Xfce on Linux Mint 22.3

As part of it they want to add support for xdg-session-management and XWayland and work has already started on the xfwl4 project. With a first development release hopefully coming around the middle of the year.

Brian has already started work on the project, so stay tuned for the first development release of xfwl4, which we hope to share around mid-year.

See more on the official Xfce website.