• Overall Plans
• Long Term Goals
• Component specific status
  • Core components
  • Applications
  • Thunar Plugins
  • Panel Plugins
• Testing
• Links

For Xfce 4.20, the plan is, to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn't mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).

Check the table in the component specific status section for details and labelled issues by group:

• Core
• Apps
• Panel Plugins
• Thunar Plugins

It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all). Below is a list of larger tasks which would need to be done in some way for such a transition to occur.

Some of them are mostly agreed on by the Xfce devs.

• Do not depend on XWayland
  • No xsettings
• Use wlroots over libmutter
  • keep the possibility to run xfdesktop and xfce4-panel as separate components
  • Prevent dependency on libgnome-desktop
  • xfce4-panel and xfdesktop have been ported to Wayland assuming our compositor will be based on wlroots.
  • We plan to port xfwm4 to Wayland using wlroots but it will only be for Xfce 4.22 at best.
• Keep X11 compatibility for the foreseeable future
  • Nvidia support to Wayland is still problematic, one more reason to keep X11 backward compatibility (nouveau driver usually is slower)
  • Wayland compositors which were written from scratch like Weston or sway will never run as a x11 window manager. But others which started as x11 window managers such as kwin or mutter still keep their x11 window management code
  • FreeBSD has decent support for Wayland, OpenBSD is still working on supporting Wayland

This table reflects the current status of what's released as 4.19 or git master.

• Port to Wayland done: xfce4-panel!103
  • Wlroots-based, targeted compositors: Labwc, Wayfire
• On Wayland the panel cannot use GtkSocket/GtkPlug any more to run plugins as external (separate processes). Initially, to advance in the porting of other features, it is enough to run them as internal (same process as the panel, so the crash of a plugin causes the panel to crash). If we want to get this back “natively” afterwards, it seems that we'll have to make the panel a Wayland compositor to some extent (Embedding Compositor, see also Allow embedding foreign wl_surfaces). For the moment the socket/plug structure has been reproduced on Wayland using the layer-shell protocol and D-Bus, which, although not native, has the merit of simplicity and of reusing what exists (more details here).

• Port to Wayland done: xfdesktop!43
• Workspaces support needs an X11/Wayland abstraction, and could use the wlr-workspace-unstable-v1 protocol on Wayland.
• Listing all toplevel windows (windowlist menu, window icons on desktop) needs an X11/Wayland abstraction, and could use the wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1 protocol on Wayland.

• A counterpart to xsettings on Wayland has been added in xfce4-settings!104, with the minimum of modifications to make xfsettingd executable on Wayland.
• A port to Wayland of the display settings has been made in xfce4-settings!112, this time with a complete separation of the X11/Wayland code paths throughout xfce4-settings.
• Of the things whose implementation is specific to X11, only the display settings are suitable for porting to Wayland. There is currently no protocol for the rest (keyboard, mouse, workspaces, etc., are all internal to the compositor).

• Port to Wayland done: xfce4-power-manager!54
• The essential features of user inactivity monitoring and display power management have been restored via protocols ext-idle-notify and wlr-output-power-management.
• There's no real counterpart to brightness management (the wlr-gamma-control protocol offers similar functionality in appearance, but in fact has nothing to do with power saving), but the existing Polkit implementation works independently of the windowing environment.
• Everything to do with keyboard handling (brightness keys, suspend key, etc.) is not restored, since only the compositor is currently able to manage this.

GTK doesn't appear to do anything special if you set a window to be override-redirect or always-on-top.

Originally Wayland wasn't meant to have protocols allowing screenshots (see here), that is about to change with new proposed protocols. In the meantime we decided to use wlroots' screencopy protocol because that's probably what our compositor will support.

At the moment only Entire Screen screenshots are supported (xfce4-screenshooter!52), Rectangle Selection will be implemented next but Active Window is going to be much trickier, perhaps we'll need a custom protocol for our compositor to take care of that.

If we want to support compositors that don't implement the protocols mentioned above, we have to add DBus Support for org.freedesktop.portal.Screenshot. This however is not planned and it's unlikely we'll ever fully support other compositors.

See details in the xfce4-panel section about how to run external plugins on Wayland. At first, “yes” below simply means “doesn't crash”, even after some elementary manipulations (eventually). It does not mean that everything works like on X11.

Regarding the version to test: master, or latest dev release would be best. If you don't test master, best add info on which version you tested.

If you run a NVidia GPU, you will need to use the “Nouveau” driver for testing, Since the proprietary NVidia driver does not provide Wayland support. (Though some things might work in some cases)

A wlroots compositor is almost a prerequisite for most core components (as well as panel plugins and some apps), at least to ensure that all features ported to Wayland are available. The default compositor is labwc, but wayfire is another wlroots compositor on which tests have generally been carried out.

To start an Xfce session on Wayland, you can run startxfce4 --wayland from a tty, which will launch xfce4-session from labwc. If you want to use wayfire instead, you'll need to run startxfce4 --wayland wayfire and add this configuration first, as wayfire doesn't have a --startup option like labwc (see startxfce4 --help for details):

~/.config/wayfire.ini

[autostart]
session = xfce4-session

Configuration adaptations may be required for other compositors as well, if they also don't have a --startup option to pass to startxfce4.

A @datadir@/wayland-sessions/xfce-wayland.desktop file has also been added to xfce4-session for display managers, such as lightdm, with which this has been tested. The command line must also be modified in this file to use a compositor other than the default one.

• Porting mate apps to wayland
• A deep dive into the wayland protocol
• Check if current display is a wayland display

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