Xfce Forum

Giroscopic

Member

Registered: 2012-05-11

Posts: 3

Wayland - Xfce Compositor

Hello, i want to ask a question, and the forums search engine has not been able to provide an answer in the time i dumped in it.

Since Xfce has its own compositor, and wayland will interact directly with the compositor to draw the desktop.

Will Xfce support wayland?

Btw, i may well be a total moron and my question is totally dumb because i do not understand each part of the architecture. If so, tell me GTFO and i will be off to read. Case contrary, please do tell

fraang

Member

Registered: 2012-09-28

Posts: 12

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

AFAIK Wayland support is not excluded but it is not a high priority. X works fine so there is no immediate need for Wayland support.

Magnus

Member

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 51

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

For Xfce to support wayland some work needs to be done first. First all xfce apps need to be ported to Gtk+3 and remove all Xlib dependencies, if there are any. Then xfwm needs to be ported to wayland, which probably means a rewrite. Xfwm will also need to handle request for administrative privileges (gksu), screen capture and screen locking, as these are taken care of by the Wayland compositor (I'm not sure about the clipboard, but it probably needs to be handled by xfwm as well). Finally XSettings is gone so Xfconf will need some other way to store data. Since xfce isn't ported to Gtk+ 3 yet it's going to take a while for wayland support, though there isn't any hurry since it will take a year at least before Wayland is usable.

Giroscopic

Member

Registered: 2012-05-11

Posts: 3

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

Thanks a lot for the info magnus / fraang!

QwertyChouskie

Member

Registered: 2016-04-08

Posts: 1

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

Any updates on this?  Since Xfce 4.14 will use GTK3, will it also support Wayland?

Magnus

Member

Registered: 2011-04-20

Posts: 51

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

Xfce 4.14 won't support Wayland. So far no work has been done to port Xfce to Wayland.

Steve

Member

From: London

Registered: 2014-11-19

Posts: 7

Website

Re: Wayland - Xfce Compositor

Libinput, as far as I know, is supported at least on the Git version of Xfce. Xfwm4 needs to be ported to Wayland and that piece of working has not started yet, as far as I'm aware.

For what it's worth I don't consider Wayland to be stable yet - some corners of the APIs needed for Desktop user experience remain undefined / undiscussed.

---

Steve DL
IRC nick: sidi
http://mupuf.org - http://shimmerproject.org