>The goal is, that xfwl4 will offer the same functionality and behavior as xfwm4 does...
I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence?
As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.
This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?
I hope that XFCE remains a solid lightweight desktop option. I've become a huge fan of KDE over the past couple of years, but it certainly isn't what you would consider lightweight or minimal.
Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it. To me the reasoning is solid: Wayland appears to be the future, and Rust is a good way to help avoid many compositor crashes, which are a more severe issue in Wayland (though it doesn't necessarily need to be fatal, FWIW.) Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary.
Of course, if they made the right choice, it should be apparent in relatively short order, so I wish them luck.
In my view, this project itself shows some of the reasons why Wayland is the right path forward.
On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.
On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).
But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
I've used Smithay's Rust client toolkit for a few months now. For making apps it is still sometimes have unsafe wrappers disguised as safe. It has a lot of internals wrapped in Arc<>, but in my tests, the methods are not safe to call from different threads anyhow, you will get weird crashes if done so.
I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.
I resisted Wayland for a longtime, but I'm sold now that I see how well it does on old hardware.
I have an old Thinkpad. Firefox on X is slow and scrolls poorly. On wayland, the scrolling is remarkably smooth for 10 y/o hardware, and the addition of touchpad gestures is very nice. Yes, there's more configuration overhead for each compositor, but I'm now accepting this trade.
If wayland support was there already I would be using xfce. I truly admire it, it's great to see this happening and I hope the project continues in great speed. With DE's requiring hard system-d support, I would rather have something like xfce
I see the words "feature parity". I hope those words are taken seriously. I feel like most Wayland advocates would do well to take those words seriously.
As someone that is sensitive to displays, one of the best features of XFCE, unlike others desktops, is that it doesn't cause eye strain, probably because it doesn't play tricks - a pixel at a certain color is stable, and not dithered(if you choose) and higher level primitives are also stable and don't play time/frequency based games.
I hope XFCE preserves this, it is a killer feature in today's world.
I guess at this point it is safe to say that whenever you see "rewrite in Rust", it simply means there is no one to maintain the software anymore. They are saying this pretty openly that they weren't able to patch xfwm4.
I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it.
If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust.
Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.
I started off using twm / olwm / vtwm in 1991. Then FVWM and Afterstep / WindowMaker. I've been using XFCE since around 2007. As long as it functions similarly I'll be happy.
This bullet point from the reason to chose one library over another is a prime example of what I love about XFCE:
• smithay has great documentation.
Not only are they considering it, but they're expressly calling it out. I'm convinced that the publication of the Agile Manifesto was an exercise in Cunningham's Law, and to that end the XFCE team has produced something great by doing the opposite.
I suspect many of us still using X, are xfce users waiting for an alternative; I've heard very mixed things about current Fedora xfce wayland setups from different people.
The more wayland compositors the better. It will force developers to actually abide by the specification instead of creating single implementation hacks like in the webbrowser ecosystem.
Wow, this is annoying. I really like Xfce, but there are plenty of minor things which would need improvements. Instead of fixing all these minor things, they waste a lot of their donations on a rewrite for Wayland / Rust - apparently for exactly the same reason as all the other Wayland stuff and Rust reworks. Developers like to write new code more than actually maintaining / improving fixing existing things and finds some excuses to do this.
My response to the Wayland/X11 nonsense bickering has always been that I'll switch to Wayland when xfce does. I usually eyeroll when I see "in Rust" but the developers writeup in the linked article and their comments here are very reassuring and I look forward to their success!
i'm trying to build a Linux desktop and the first thing I got stuck at is X11 versus Wayland for greetd. Next thing Il got stuck at his XFCE4 doesn't exist for Wayland. What the shit. if we want to tell me wayland is the future, fine. sure. great. Tt's been 11 years!
Xfwl4 – The Roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor
(alexxcons.github.io)369 points by pantalaimon 27 January 2026 | 325 comments
Comments
I wonder how strictly they interpret behavior here given the architectural divergence?
As an example, focus-stealing prevention. In xfwm4 (and x11 generally), this requires complex heuristics and timestamp checks because x11 clients are powerful and can aggressively grab focus. In wayland, the compositor is the sole arbiter of focus, hence clients can't steal it, they can only request it via xdg-activation. Porting the legacy x11 logic involves the challenge of actually designing a new policy that feels like the old heuristic but operates on wayland's strict authority model.
This leads to my main curiosity regarding the raw responsiveness of xfce. On potato hardware, xfwm4 often feels snappy because it can run as a distinct stacking window manager with the compositor disabled. Wayland, by definition forces compositing. While I am not concerned about rust vs C latency (since smithay compiles to machine code without a GC), I am curious about the mandatory compositing overhead. Can the compositor replicate the input-to-pixel latency of uncomposited x11 on low-end devices or is that a class of performance we just have to sacrifice for the frame-perfect rendering of wayland?
Personally, I'm a big proponent of Wayland and not big Rust detractor, so I don't see any problem with this. I do, however, wonder how many long-time XFCE fans and the folks who donated the money funding this will feel about it. To me the reasoning is solid: Wayland appears to be the future, and Rust is a good way to help avoid many compositor crashes, which are a more severe issue in Wayland (though it doesn't necessarily need to be fatal, FWIW.) Still I perceive a lot of XFCE's userbase to be more "traditional" and conservative about technologies, and likely to be skeptical of both Wayland and Rust, seeing them as complex, bloated, and unnecessary.
Of course, if they made the right choice, it should be apparent in relatively short order, so I wish them luck.
On X, we had Xorg and that is it. But at least Xorg did a lot of the work for you.
On Wayland, you in theory have to do a lot more of the work yourself when you build a compositor. But what we are seeing is libraries emerge that do this for you (wlroots, Smithay, Louvre, aquamarine, SWC, etc). So we have this one man project expecting to deliver a dev release in just a few months (mid-2026 is 4 months from now).
But it is not just that we have addressed the Wayland objection. This project was able to evaluate alternatives and decide the smithay is the best fit both for features and language choice. As time goes on, we will see more implementations that will compete with each other on quality and features. This will drive the entire ecosystem forward. That is how Open Source is supposed to work.
Great to know there's work on the wayland support front.
Also, writing it in Rust should help bring more contributors to the project.
If you use Xfce I urge you to donate to their Open Collective:
https://opencollective.com/xfce
https://opencollective.com/xfce-eu
I will seek to dive-in to how Wayland API actually works, because I'd really like to know what not to do, when the wrappers used 'wrong' can crash.
I have an old Thinkpad. Firefox on X is slow and scrolls poorly. On wayland, the scrolling is remarkably smooth for 10 y/o hardware, and the addition of touchpad gestures is very nice. Yes, there's more configuration overhead for each compositor, but I'm now accepting this trade.
If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?
I hope XFCE preserves this, it is a killer feature in today's world.
I only fear that this is manifestation of a wider phenomenon when new software developers are unable to maintain software created by old software developers. If that is so, they will try to simplify the software to what they can actually maintain and rewrite it into a form in which they can maintain it.
If i assume this is true, then all of this is annoying, but actually makes sense: Wayland is simpler than X11, so people will tend to maintain Wayland-related software rather than X11-related. Rust won't let unskilled coders to make some mistakes, so from their point of view it is going to be simpler to rewrite something in Rust.
Although, goodbye network-transparency, goodbye performance, goodbye stability. Oh well, but it's that time of the year.
- speed
- memory consumption
- simplicity to use
- customisability
- if it's X11 or Wayland
If everything above the last remains the same in the Wayland version, I stay, else there is LXDM.
Now the last 3 times I tried Wayland everything ended up a blurry mess and some windows just ended up the wrong size, so.
I suppose I'll just keep holding out hope.
I wonder how long it'll take them writing a compositor from scratch.
I've been using popos for a while, but xfce will always have a place in my heart.
If it had tiling support I'd probably use it still. Being so lightweight is a massive boon.
The beginning of the end, or are there plain and simple alternative microsoft rust compilers? Is microsoft rust syntax at least as simple than C?
Or the right way will be to use an alternative wayland compositor with the rest of xfce?