[bgorman]

XFCE should be spending all of its development efforts on supporting Wayland. The project's priorities are clearly not in the right place to ensure the future growth of the project. Market share will continue to decline until wayland support is added, no matter how great any new features are.

[boudin]

Switching to wayland is not a small feat, even if libraries like wlroots can reduce significantly the work. XFCE is not a commerical project, it doesn't really care about market share I guess. They have plans to move towards wayland support but those things takes time.

[otikik]

> Market share will continue to decline until wayland support is added, no matter how great any new features are.

It might be that they are not interested on "Market share". Or they are but not enough to justify the work. I'm sure they would be glad to accept a pull request.

[biggunz]

I had to abandon XFCE due to some issue with aging XFCE4 libraries and high cpu problems, switched to KDE Plasma 5.x,. got 50% longer battery lifetime and havent looked back.

They need to focus on these kinds of problems, not on adding new features, otherwise I would have stayed.

[nortonham]

what about a DE's libraries would make it drain so much battery life?

[geon]

Does xfce do a lot of the graphics in software? That is very inefficient on modern hardware.

[nortonham]

I have no idea, I was asking because it's not something I know enough about.

[znpy]

yes, but nah.

Yes, wayland is the future, is cool, is better and everything.

And yet, I don't really care about it. I'll stay on Xorg as long as XFCE stays on Xorg. I'll move to wayland as soon as XFCE moves to wayland.

And I know that the Xfce people already have plans for wayland support.

[mpol]

I am happy they decided to spend their time first on supporting GTK v3. GTK v2 is disappearing from distro's and the situation was getting urgent. This happened on 4.16 and I suppose a lot more small work for it happened in 4.18.

I am also happy they decided to release more often, allthough once a year turned out to be too short. Supporting applications on Wayland is already a great step. How they decide to build their Wayland compositor is not fully clear, I think it is wise they take the time for that, to build something that they can support and maintain for years to come with a small team of people.

[oblio]

If you view Xfce as the hobby project for several undergrad and grad students, you will understand their priorities better.

[josteink]

I don’t know. Wayland support is very important (tm) to us Wayland-users, but I don’t know how the rest of the world feels about that.

It could be like that whole kerning-thing which is super-mega important to some people, while the rest of the world don’t even notice?

[stevedonovan]

I've honestly never noticed the problem, so I never saw the problem with X in the first place.

(It is possible that I have never experienced a truly beautiful desktop, but my eyes are no longer particularly precise enough to operate at modern pixel densities)

[izacus]

The whole point of Wayland is that you don't need "precise enough eyes" to comfortably use modern pixel densities.

But for that you need a functional UI scaling system provided by the Waylands rework.

[rwmj]

People also complain loudly about Hi-DPI support and tearing with X. I've not noticed either of them being an issue ever. I can play videos fine and I can plug my laptop into a 55" TV, and it all just works (as far as I can tell) with plain old X11.

[ChuckNorris89]

>People also complain loudly about Hi-DPI support and tearing with X. I've not noticed either of them being an issue ever.

Why wouldn't they complain for something that affects them? If you don't have any issues, that's great for you, but that doesn't help those who do in any way, so why do you downplay their issues?

[bgorman]

HiDPI support and fractional scaling are simply must-haves for anyone with a computer built after 2011.

[nortonham]

X always worked fine for me and my basic use case. I do agree something new is needed to replace it, but I don't have a need to try it until it's more mature.

[Scramblejams]

I see a lot of pushback here but I'll mention why I'm eager for my DE of choice to get Wayland support: Gaming under Xorg with multi-monitors can get very hitchy/teary, and Wayland is focused on smooth frame delivery.

Details if anyone wants it: The game itself may only be running on one monitor, but it doesn't matter, if I have multi monitors active it'll hitch. You can apparently mitigate this somewhat by making sure all your monitors are running the exact same frame rate, but two of my monitors run 59.95Hz while the third runs 59.92Hz, that's not close enough, and I can't seem to get them to something common like 59.00 Hz. I tried disabling two monitors while playing on the third, and it's better, but still far from perfect.

I tried a very recent KDE on Wayland and while gaming felt smooth, its multi-monitor support is very buggy right now -- actually the whole DE felt really buggy -- so that's out.

I really wish gamescope could be run on top of Xorg and the game could 'just' run in that...

[Gordonjcp]

Wayland support would be great! Can we see your patches to add it?

[sph]

I would love to try XFCE on Wayland. I used to love that DE, but I haven't been able to stand uncomposited Xorg in a decade (running xcompmgr is not good enough).

Are there concrete plans to migrate to wayland?

EDIT: of course you're getting downvoted because you dared utter the W-word. Come on people, this is not Reddit.

[coldpie]

> Are there concrete plans to migrate to wayland?

Yes, of course. Two minutes of searching would have led you here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap Come on, sph, this is not Reddit.

> of course you're getting downvoted because you dared utter the W-word. Come on people, this is not Reddit.

I downvoted them because I think it's rude to complain about how others choose to spend their time contributing to open source projects.

[senko]

> Two minutes of searching would have led you here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

That page says: "For Xfce 4.18, the plan is to ensure our applications are working acceptably on Wayland"

Since this is the 4.18 release and Wayland is not mentioned in the blog post, it's reasonable to ask if that plan is still in place. (I do agree it's up to XFCE maintainers and contributors to set the pace, if any, for Wayland support).

[coldpie]

> it's reasonable to ask if that plan is still in place

Do you think it is more likely that that user found the wiki page, performed the same analysis as you, then came back here to ask their question without mentioning any of the research they did; or they just turded out the first question they could think of and did zero research trying to answer it for themselves?

[lottin]

XFCE has had its own compositor for ages.

[sylware]

Hopefully we get wayland for 4.20. Namely xfce needs its compositor.

[rwmj]

Does Wayland support network transparent applications yet?