Xfce Forum

Austin

Member

Registered: 2016-02-08

Posts: 2

Will XFCE work fully under Xwayland?

Possibly a naive question, but can I set up (Ubuntu 22.04 + XFCE system) with Wayland plus Xwayland, and have everything working as before?  I.e. all X apps working, and the XFCE desktop, and preferably login just as now.

Second question: is it actually worth it?  Do I lose the benefits of Wayland by inserting the extra layer of Xwayland?

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,485

Re: Will XFCE work fully under Xwayland?

Possibly a naive question, but can I set up (Ubuntu 22.04 + XFCE system) with Wayland plus Xwayland, and have everything working as before?  I.e. all X apps working, and the XFCE desktop, and preferably login just as now.

No, not for 22.04. Wayland support is currently being actively worked on and will probably be released in 4.20 in some sort of beta format. A new core module, libxfce4windowing, is being developed as an abstraction library to support both X11 and wayland. The work is currently being done in 4.19 development branches. More info can be found at the wayland roadmap and instructions on how to setup a wayland test environment using the 4.19 branch is located here. Note that many components still don't work as this is an early work in progress.

Second question: is it actually worth it?  Do I lose the benefits of Wayland by inserting the extra layer of Xwayland?

If you are asking if its worth it to run now, probably not unless you are looking to contribute to development. For the future, probably as wayland is newer and X11 is like 35 years old, but this a very opinionated topic at the moment, especially since nvidia doesn't properly support wayland yet as I understand it. Note: the Xfce developers have chosen not to support Xwayland, but rather to use wlroots. More info at the roadmap link above.

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Tamaranch

Member

Registered: 2020-12-31

Posts: 321

Re: Will XFCE work fully under Xwayland?

Note: the Xfce developers have chosen not to support Xwayland, but rather to use wlroots. More info at the roadmap link above.

These are two completely independent things as far as I understand. Any Wayland compositor is supposed to provide an Xwayland server (often active by default), whether that compositor is based on wlroots or another library.

Possibly a naive question, but can I set up (Ubuntu 22.04 + XFCE system) with Wayland plus Xwayland, and have everything working as before?  I.e. all X apps working, and the XFCE desktop, and preferably login just as now.

In theory yes (not sure about the login), in practice it might not be very nice. You have to set the GDK_BACKEND environment variable correctly anyway, so that GTK doesn't try to use Wayland instead of Xwayland as it does by default. See https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-pane … note_65929.

Do I lose the benefits of Wayland by inserting the extra layer of Xwayland?

Basically I think the answer is yes. I haven't done extensive testing of Xwayland though, I've been more concerned with porting X11 applications to Wayland.

I think Xwayland should be seen and used for what it is: a fallback solution for running some X11 applications within a real Wayland session.

Skaperen

Member

From: right by Jesus, our Saviour

Registered: 2013-06-15

Posts: 862

Re: Will XFCE work fully under Xwayland?

in theory it should work.  it may just partially work.  it may require that all graphical activity also use the X API provided under Xwayland to keep everything organized right (e.g. mixed use of Wayland and Xwayland APIs may not work as expected).  if there is a way to hide or mask the Wayland API to all but Xwayland, that might be useful.