[HN Gopher] XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support
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XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 210 points
Date : 2024-10-06 17:41 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ostechnix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ostechnix.com)
| hawski wrote:
| I mained dwm some years ago and I like it, but if I just need a
| quick environment I usually go back to Xfce. My family's
| computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my media PC,
| because I was lazy) are all Xfce. I will consider switching to
| Wayland when Xfce will support it.
|
| I still remember seeing a video of Xfce (I think it was version
| 4.0.4) and being amazed how simple and reliable you could pick
| your own launchers and widgets on the bar. For me it was much
| simpler than Gnome at the time.
|
| Modern KDE looks sometimes like Xfce for me (just my feeling,
| don't bite me), but somehow I always get a lot of strange bugs
| when I try to change things. Xfce had its own problems (I
| remember when Thunar was quite unstable), but it still is my go
| to desktop for simplicity and reliability.
| serf wrote:
| >My family's computers (my dad's, my mom's, my sister's and my
| media PC, because I was lazy) are all Xfce.
|
| same.
|
| why?
|
| they all grew up on Win9x and the visual metaphors used by XFCE
| _just click_ , they could all care less what's behind the
| scenes as long as YouTube and Facebook work.
|
| p.s. dwm is great. most suckless stuff is.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Yep tho kind of limited in configurability, it's really easy
| to modify the look of KDE for even casual users. I do wish
| the would at least ditch the default start menu and use
| whiskers or something similar though.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| XFCE being stuck on X11 was what finally made me finally move to
| KDE when I installed Linux on my machine at work a few months ago
|
| When compiling code on a remote machine, a terminal on one window
| would cause YouTube videos to lag on the other! As far as I could
| ascertain, there was simply no hardware accelerated playback
| going on. Both Chrome and Firefox had seemingly abandoned X11 for
| a Vulkan based render backend on Wayland
|
| After leaving KDE 5 to "marinate" overnight (I use Gentoo, so
| compiling an entire desktop environment like KDE can be time
| consuming) everything "just worked"
|
| I miss the visual simplicity of XFCE and I'm hopeful to return to
| it one day, but in the interim, responsiveness is key
| dev_snd wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty much the same story for me; after having
| found out how to get all the same features in KDE that I had in
| xfce, there was no way back. I always like to use the
| lightweight and less resource intensive software, but arguably
| not using hardware acceleration is actually very resource
| hungry.
| bogwog wrote:
| > I always like to use the lightweight and less resource
| intensive software, but arguably not using hardware
| acceleration is actually very resource hungry.
|
| What hardware are you using where KDE is considered "resource
| intensive", yet it also has a GPU that supports Vulkan and
| hardware video decoding?
|
| I've used KDE for a long time, and can't remember a time when
| I noticed its resource usage (and I used to daily drive a
| ThinkPad X200 as late as 2016)
| o11c wrote:
| I once noticed a memory leak in KDE when setting the
| background to a (very many image) slideshow instead of a
| single image. That was probably sometime around 2015.
|
| Normally it's a bit tricky to calculate memory blame
| between X11, the WM, and the shell, since often their
| allocations are _actually_ on behalf of an application, and
| killing the application will reclaim it.
| infamia wrote:
| I notice KDE's resource utilization more or less
| constantly. With KDE's bling turned all the way down, Kwin
| constantly uses 5-10% CPU when I am literally doing nothing
| (with my hands off the mouse/keyboard). This causes my
| laptop fans to noticeably spin up and makes them a lot more
| prone to spinning up more forcefully while doing a small
| task. With XFCE, my fan never audibly spins up unless I'm
| actively doing something. Even if I just do something
| small/quick, my fans don't spin up most of the time.
|
| edit: typos
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| Laptops with loud fans makes it really easy to find
| inefficient software.
|
| Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer
| and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your
| sacrifice, thank you.
| EasyMark wrote:
| KDE 6 isn't really that much heavier than a "full install" of
| xfce to be honest. I just prefer the simplicity (probably
| 1/10th the adjustability of KDE) of xfce for ease of
| maintenance, but KDE is fine too.
| zekica wrote:
| Firefox on X11 works fine if you enable
| media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled in about:config
| lottin wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. I didn't have it enabled, but to be
| honest I've never noticed any lag when playing back videos or
| in any other situation.
| EasyMark wrote:
| With all the cores in modern PC's I'd doubt if you would
| unless you're on a computer that is 8 or 10 years old
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Y'all need to remember this in those threads when you say
| Linux just works and MS's registry is stupid and needs
| tweaking to work right.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Eh the thing for me is that the config is distributed and
| fairly easy to correct. If you're fiddling with Windows
| registry, you better make sure to do a snapshot/backup
| beforehand. I don't have to do any of that with linux, I
| just do a simple cp to file.backup and if I hose the system
| do an emergency boot or linux on usb and fix it.
| sweeter wrote:
| This guy was using Gentoo on what I'm guessing is an older
| laptop. That kind of comes with the territory. You don't
| use LFS or Gentoo as a daily driver and expect not to do
| some footwork... but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS,
| Ubuntu/Debian etc... it pretty much is "just works." Of
| course, you have to do stuff on pretty much any PC,
| Windows, Mac or Linux. I own them all and know this to be
| the case... it's just that some people are blind to the
| things that they _have_ to do everyday on their OS of
| choice.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Not an older laptop. Some 9th gen Intel i7 machine with a
| Radeon RX6400 GPU attached
| IshKebab wrote:
| Always an excuse... Why can't you just agree that this
| isn't how it should be but maybe you like Linux anyway?
| sweeter wrote:
| Using Gentoo as an example of how Linux is hard to use is
| a bad argument. I have Mac, Linux and windows PCs and
| they all have fairly ridiculous thing that users of those
| OS's excuse because they are used to it. I'm not sure how
| that is an excuse. I'm just reiterating what my og
| comment said here.
| TrueSlacker0 wrote:
| "but if you use Mint, Fedora, Pop_OS, Ubuntu/Debian
| etc... it pretty much is "just works." "
|
| I just started to make the transfer to Linux from
| windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu
| on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It
| wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.
|
| I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has
| been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when
| windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids
| won't use the computer unless it's the last one
| available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I
| cannot seem figure out what's causing it.
| t43562 wrote:
| If you want "just works" your more likely to get it with
| Ubuntu than Fedora. As for being unbearably slow ....
| there aren't a lot of ways for that to happen unless
| you're using absolutely the wrong graphics driver.
|
| A typical way would be using xfce's "enable display
| compositing" setting with a graphics driver that doesn't
| support proper acceleration.
| Aachen wrote:
| I'm surprised people are saying this because Firefox works
| perfectly fine on X11 for me without config tweaks
|
| If your hardware is supported (e.g. WiFi chips and GPUs are
| definitely a valid concern), I know of no post-install
| config that Debian with Cinnamon needs that you'd not also
| need to do on Windows, and Microsoft will put ads in your
| start menu for the trouble of buying their license at that
| lupusreal wrote:
| Firefox works fine on X11 without that setting, but perf
| ricers will always find something to tweak and complain
| about on any platform. You can bet some Windows users of
| Firefox have settings that Firefox is ""unusable"" without
| too. A certain segment of the population will apply this
| sort of audiophile mentality to anything you can think of.
| There are people who think cars are "undrivable" without
| some fancy hacked ECU, people who think the rental skis at
| resorts are unusable, and of course people who think the
| earbuds that came with their phone are completely
| unlistenable.
|
| Reality is most people aren't sensitive to whatever it is
| these people believe they are perceiving and will get on
| fine with whatever the defaults are.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| I tried enabling that. I was able to verify vaapi was
| enabled. But even using a "forceh264" plugin, Youtube
| defaulted to unaccelerated playback
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Do I understand correctly that they are building on top of
| wlroots? If so, I am pretty happy about this development as I
| might get to enjoy the solidity of XFCE apps in other WMs /
| compositors like Sway or River.
| kelnos wrote:
| Yes, eventually anyway. I've done a little work on xfwm4, using
| wlroots, but it'll be another year or more before that's
| usable. For the desktop components that work on Wayland, we've
| mostly tested on wlroots-based compositors.
| jmclnx wrote:
| If I _had_ to use a Desktop environment in Linux, it would be
| XFCE.
|
| But, this Wayland thing is pushing me over to the BSDs. So far I
| have no abandoned Linux and I doubt Wayland will become mandatory
| until Firefox stops supporting X.
| hggigg wrote:
| Could be worse. The whole Gnome 3 and Wayland thing pushed me
| to macOS.
| linguae wrote:
| I sympathize, but unfortunately Tim Cook's stewardship of the
| Mac, from the embrace of soldered RAM and even storage
| throughout the Mac lineup, to the increasing annoyances of
| macOS either in the name of security (e.g., notarization, the
| popups that request permission to read user directories,
| which is really annoying when using LLVM's debugger in modern
| macOS) or to help advertise Apple's subscription services,
| have harmed the Mac experience. The issue of soldered RAM and
| storage in particular pushed me back to Windows after more
| than 15 years of using Macs (which is a shame since Apple's
| ARM hardware is awesome when it comes to performance and
| energy consumption); the last time I used Windows as my
| daily-driver OS was during the XP era. Unfortunately I don't
| like any of the mainstream desktop operating systems; Windows
| is annoying and loves to get in the way, macOS is becoming
| increasingly annoying with each release and is also tied to
| hardware with massive prices for RAM and storage upgrades
| with no DIY options like in the past, and the Linux desktop
| has a Sisyphean development cycle with so much churn. Instead
| of working on refining the user experience and polishing
| applications like LibreOffice to make them more competitive
| to Microsoft Office, it seems like every few years there are
| major infrastructure changes that require major code changes
| or even rewrites.
|
| I'm quite disillusioned with desktop computing in general.
| Microsoft and Google are leading the way with
| "enshittification"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and the Mac
| experience in 2024 isn't like what it was in 2009 when the
| Mac was at its peak, in my opinion. The Linux desktop
| ecosystem suffers from a lack of funding relative to its
| commercial peers, combined with the "organization from chaos"
| that comes with bazaar-style development. The X11 to Wayland
| transition would be easier to pull off if the Linux desktop
| has Microsoft- or Apple-levels of funding and cooperation,
| but such funding doesn't exist, and part of the
| characteristic of the bazaar is that developers and teams of
| developers get to work on projects of their own interest and
| its the community that "votes" on projects by using them. The
| bazaar definitely exhibits freedom, but the major downside is
| that major changes in infrastructure (such as the X11 to
| Wayland transition) could take a lot of time and have major
| pain points (for example, the development of incompatible
| Wayland compositors and the fact that the X11 concept of a
| window manager doesn't exactly translate to Wayland's
| concepts).
|
| I love free, open source software, but I'm drawn more to
| cathedral-style projects such as the BSDs and HaikuOS where
| there is a coherent vision for the system. Unfortunately the
| BSDs are dependent on the broader FOSS ecosystem for
| desktops, which is dominated by the GNOME/KDE/Wayland
| ecosystem (which also priorities Linux and treats other Unix-
| like operating systems as an afterthought, but that's another
| discussion). I'll need to re-investigate HaikuOS to see
| whether it can be used as a daily driver today; I've seen
| that a lot of attention has been given to HaikuOS in recent
| years.
|
| I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm implementing
| my dream OS, which is influenced by various alternate paths
| of workstation and desktop computing explored in the 1980s
| and 1990s but were overtaken by Windows and Unix, namely Lisp
| machines, the Smalltalk environment, and 1990s Apple
| initiatives such as OpenDoc and the original plans for the
| Newton, which involved a Lisp OS
| (https://mikelevins.github.io/posts/2021-07-12-reimagining-
| ba...). But I have a busy day job and so this will take years
| of effort on the side.
| hggigg wrote:
| I'll be horribly blunt here but I don't give a shit about
| any of that any more. It's irrelevant which is why open
| source is a complete joke for most people.
|
| I, much as other users, just want my computer to solve the
| problems I ask of it, not turn into an activity in its own
| right or a maze of hosting problems and pain to get a
| simple task done. The job of the computer is to free us
| from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well
| forgotten that.
|
| macOS is my dream OS as it stands.
|
| I can add a cucumber to my shopping list on my mac and when
| I get to the supermarket, it's on my phone.
|
| I can share a calendar with my family and it just works.
|
| I can listen to music on it and the same music is on my
| phone.
|
| I can open and move pages around in a PDF without having to
| futz with anything or open a terminal.
|
| I can literally write on my iPad with a pen and a PDF pops
| out full of my writing which I can send to people for
| review and feedback.
|
| I can use Lightroom, Photoshop and Excel, which are far
| superior to any open source products and I do not mind
| paying for that privilege.
|
| etc etc.
|
| The hardware cost and upgrade inflexibility, neither of
| which I have found a problem either way, is insignificant
| anyway to the pain I would incur without it.
|
| And that's what the community does't get: the last 20% is
| the hard bit and the above is the last 20% and it has never
| even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely
| near that. No one cares about the political purity and
| ideology behind it.
| IWeldMelons wrote:
| I do not like the panels Apple uses, they have harsh
| backlight, due to 450 nm blue primary; nwer panels have
| 455-460nm blue light peak. My eyes are sensitive and I get
| tired on Apples.
| djbusby wrote:
| Have you tried blue-block type lenses? Not those yellow
| ones from infomercial - it's a clear lens that cuts some
| wavelength for staring at bright monitor all day. Lots of
| cheap readers have those.
| pkkm wrote:
| > I'm slowly working on a side project where I'm
| implementing my dream OS, which is influenced by various
| alternate paths of workstation and desktop computing
| explored in the 1980s and 1990s but were overtaken by
| Windows and Unix, namely Lisp machines, the Smalltalk
| environment, and 1990s Apple initiatives such as OpenDoc
| and the original plans for the Newton
|
| Cool, I'll be following that. To me, one of the most
| interesting aspects of Genera is the command line
| interface, where commands know their arguments' names,
| types, defaults, and help strings. The commands can output
| nicely formatted data such as tables and, because they're
| just Lisp functions, they can share structured data
| directly rather than parsing and serializing ad-hoc text
| formats as is that's typical in the Unix world.
| linguae wrote:
| I've never used Genera; I was born in 1989 and thus was
| too young to experience Lisp machines. However, I've read
| a lot about them over the years, and I wish we had a
| modern analogue. I think the closest thing we have to
| Genera is the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk and its
| derivatives (Pharo and Cuis Smalltalk).
|
| I wholeheartedly agree with you; a system based on
| structured data or objects would be much better than what
| we have today. What I've been dreaming about for years is
| a system where everything is an object, much like
| Smalltalk. Instead of typing "ls" in a terminal window,
| you would send a get_files request to the current
| directory, which would return a list of file names. It's
| possible to emulate the traditional Unix "ls" command,
| but interacting programmatically with the system enables
| so many other uses that's much easier than parsing text
| or calling POSIX system calls. Because the user is
| working with objects instead of text, not only would it
| be easier to write scripts compared to Unix shell
| scripts, it would also be easier for developers to
| implement GUI tools for the system. For example, imagine
| if word processing documents were represented by a class
| that handled all sorts of manipulations of the document,
| hiding the details of the underlying file format from the
| user and developer in most cases. It would be easier to
| come up with scripts for generating and modifying word
| processing documents without having to use the word
| processor's macros (if they're available in the first
| place) or without having to dive deep into the underlying
| file formats of the documents.
| jmspring wrote:
| When I've had servers with a desktop env, it's always been
| FreeBSD and XFCE.
| talldayo wrote:
| Don't look now:
| https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
| exe34 wrote:
| I'm on X11 still and completely ignored the train wreck, hoping
| it'll go away eventually.
| EasyMark wrote:
| It's not going to go away. Wayland is here to stay.
| mkgreen wrote:
| And so is X11. We are heading for a dual stack desktops.
| There are tons of expensive applications that target Linux
| _because_ of X11 and they will rather force users to switch
| OSes than get rewritten.
| panick21_ wrote:
| X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the
| developers moved to Wayland. Even the BSD and everybody else
| relaying on X11 has noticed that and they know they can't
| maintain X11 by themselves.
|
| It will 100x not go away, there is no way. Literally all big
| stakeholder both open source (Gnome, KDE, Fedora and so on)
| and companies like Valve are all in on Wayland.
|
| The reality is, X11 is a complete train wreck and always was.
| Its just that for a long time people invest in it and made it
| usable. The same is true for Wayland, things have been
| improving rapidly in Wayland and it many ways its already
| better.
|
| The train wreck is being cleared and the trains are running
| again, literally nobody will go back to horses.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I mean yeah. Wayland started with a feature aversion from
| its initial developer, then continued with feature
| avoidance by committee, the committee in turn required by
| the "everyone gets to implement the X server equivalent"
| design and some of the trouble coming particularly from
| "everyone" including Gnome. Some of these missing features
| are really not considered optional at this point by many
| desktop Linux users. But there aren't many left _now_. I
| 'll probably make the switch in 0.5-3 years ;)
|
| What is there in Wayland is really quite clean though, so
| it will... EVENTUALLY... be pretty good.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| >X11 is basically already unsupported, pretty much all the
| developers moved to Wayland
|
| In my view, Wayland is basically unsupported. GNOME and KDE
| support it. XFCE, Lxqt, Mate, and Cinnamon don't. It's been
| over 10 years. You could make a whole DE from scratch in
| this time.
| cwillu wrote:
| You say X11 is unsupported, and I note with glee that X11
| hasn't _broken_ for me _since_ they stopped supporting it.
| badgersnake wrote:
| Sway works fine on FreeBSD.
|
| I haven't figured out the magic dbus (I guess) incantations
| required to make screen sharing work without systemd though. I
| guess it needs pipewire at least.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I thought XFCE worked on *BSD as well?
| bitwize wrote:
| This "Wayland thing" is what the X devs would rather work on
| instead of X. It's the future. Best to rip the Band-Aid off
| now.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I used Windows 7 until Steam stopped working. The band-aid
| stays on.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Perhaps if the X devs want people to migrate, they should
| consider giving Wayland all the features of X. Otherwise
| people are going to keep using the thing that works.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Why should old WMs/DEs add support for Wayland, why not just
| write new for Wayland specifically?
| talldayo wrote:
| In this case, because XFCE is based on GTK, and the backend for
| GTK has gotten a lot of support for native Wayland recently.
| Starting from scratch would probably end up duplicating a lot
| more code than necessary, whereas supporting both in one
| codebase helps keep the featureset in lockstep for both x11 and
| Wayland users.
| kelnos wrote:
| Because for us (Xfce) that would probably take 15 years.
|
| The only component that requires major changes is the WM.
| Otherwise, for the rest of them, it's more about fixing
| platform specific quirks.
|
| (Ok, we did have to write an embedded compositor library for
| our panel to use, but... yeah.)
| EasyMark wrote:
| Why rewrite stable code? rewrite the layer that you need to
| rewrite. There are plenty of new DE for wayland if you're so
| inclined, however.
| fb03 wrote:
| In all honesty, the screen sharing situation (and other stuff) in
| Wayland is currently so brittle that I consider XFCE (my daily
| driver) lagging behind in its adoption a feature.
| treve wrote:
| I'm curious where you're having trouble. It seemed to me that
| this was quite bad at first (completely broken) and every
| application had to add explicit support, but I've had no
| problem with Firefox, Zoom and Slack recently. Just Microsoft
| Teams, but webcams don't even work in Teams.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Not the GP, but I have a workflow that depends on the
| functionality in x11vnc, which allows me to script sharing of
| individual windows, regions, or desktops. AFAIK, nothing
| comparable exists in Wayland, and there isn't even the
| possibility to bring something like that to non-wlroots
| environments. So I'm stuck on X11 for now.
| sweeter wrote:
| There's really nothing that can be said then but I
| personally use `waypipe` like this `waypipe ssh
| user@127.0.0.1 sway` so that I can run remote sessions and
| it works amazingly. I sometimes use it to run GUI apps like
| thunar on my home laptop with tailscale when Im not at
| home. its basically `ssh -x`
|
| https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/waypipe/waypipe.1.
| e...
| sanqui wrote:
| Check out waypipe. It's not compatible with every piece of
| software, but when it works, it's like one of those magic
| "run x application over the network" legends except it
| actually works well.
| OvbiousError wrote:
| I'm on wayland, have had no issue screen-sharing over teams.
| Webcam works for me, but only if it was plugged in before
| teams started.
| badgersnake wrote:
| I've got whole screen sharing working in sway, and I don't dare
| touch it. Not sure if individual window / tab sharing is even a
| thing.
| fb03 wrote:
| It is, but with a whole slew of tweaks to pull it off. It's a
| mess.
|
| ...I get it that Wayland is the future and all, that it has
| features we need as an OS to get to the next level, but I
| feel there should be no rush to do it, and I feel a strong
| push for Wayland in distros right now, even with all these
| little broken things all over the place.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Well I don't think the pace of Wayland introduction can be
| called "a rush" :)
|
| I'm still on X11 myself for the time being as my OS doesn't
| support wayland properly yet (it runs but not with KDE)
| jrm4 wrote:
| Ditto. In terms of other stuff, I'm thinking about x2go, which
| I still use religiously? I'm curious, is Wayland anywhere on
| this?
| kelnos wrote:
| To be clear here, we don't have a compositor yet. I've done a
| little work on it, but it won't be usable for at least a year,
| maybe (probably) longer.
|
| 4.20 will let you run some of our components on another
| compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our
| compositor will also be using wlroots.
| sweeter wrote:
| Awesome! A lot of people are excited, XFCE is a very charming
| and beloved desktop environment. I'm curious to see how people
| will take this change though... I know a lot of XFCE users
| either want Wayland or don't care, and then there are a lot who
| will probably be very resistant to this change. Taking it slow
| at least allows you to take advantage of the recent growth of
| Wayland and allows you all to polish XFCE Wayland up so that
| there are minimal hiccups during the switch. I'd be curious to
| know what your opinion is on the matter.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's not so much a change as it is (well, will be) an option.
| We're not abandoning X11, and I expect it will be a couple
| more major releases before we have feature parity on Wayland
| with what we have in X11.
|
| But yes, some people are excited, some don't care, some are
| worried.
|
| But there won't be a switch. If users want to keep running it
| on X11, they can do that. I can't promise that will be the
| case forever, but it's not (won't be) that hard to support
| both with how things are currently.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Good luck and thanks for all the work. XFCE has been my daily
| driver for a few years, the kind of tool that is so on point
| you forget it's there.
| indyjoenz wrote:
| XFCE has been my preferred Unix desktop for like 20 years.
|
| Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of
| use, and good taste.
|
| I also thank the devs.
| fractal618 wrote:
| Isn't compiz a compositor for xfce?
|
| Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between
| features, stability and performance!!!
| kelnos wrote:
| Compiz is an X11 compositor that can be used with Xfce if you
| disable xfwm4's builtin compositor.
|
| A Wayland compositor is a completely different beast, and
| that's what we have to build.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| (uninformed outsider) have you considered reaching out to the
| System76 folks? They are also setting out doing a Wayland
| compositor for a (decreasingly) gtk-based desktop and are
| reasonably far along on this goal. I wonder if their compositor
| would suit your needs?
| kelnos wrote:
| To me, at least, xfwm4's window management behavior is a big
| part of what makes Xfce... well, Xfce. So no, I don't think
| I'd consider using someone else's compositor.
| dingdingdang wrote:
| Genuinely find XFCE the only pragmatic option when it comes to
| "no-fiddling-just-working-and-lightweight" WMs in Linux/BSD land
| - it's basically like a better Windows 2000 UI with sane defaults
| throughout. Thanks so much to the devs involved in keeping XFCE
| up to date. This is major good news.
| IWeldMelons wrote:
| KDE is actually lighter. And hidpi is much better on Qt.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Source?
| ahoka wrote:
| It used to use more resources and was slower than Gnome 2,
| when it was still a thing. I don't know why it got a
| reputation of being lightweight. I guess people assume less
| features mean better optimized, which is jot really true. I
| used to run it for years though, really liked it for a
| while.
| BanazirGalbasi wrote:
| I think it's because Xubuntu was a lighter alternative to
| Ubuntu when it ran Unity desktop. I don't know how Gnome
| compares to Unity, but at the time Xubuntu was far better
| for low-end computers than vanilla Ubuntu so the
| reputation of XFCE was justified.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Xubuntu was lighter than Ubuntu (when it had Gnome), at
| least that is how I remember it.
| bombela wrote:
| Alright I do use KDE those days. I have used XFCE before. I
| don't think I can believe that KDE is lighter in term of
| response/lag. I didn't check the ram usage because Firefox is
| taking it all anyways.
| nine_k wrote:
| Auto Tab Discard [1] does wonders to Firefox RAM
| consumption if you open lots of tabs. Has the "recommended"
| badge.
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-
| tab-disc...
| mikae1 wrote:
| _And_ , no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the day
| they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued.
|
| LXQt if you want something with less features, Plasma if you
| want more features. They're both performant.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| It's absurd that people who recommend "light" Linux distros
| mention DEs that are much heavier than LXQt and LXDE.
|
| As for Wayland, I use it on a Raspberry Pi 4 (Raspbian
| xwayland). It works well enough, but there is some kind of
| bug that causes xwayland to fill the swap space at almost
| 100%. When this happens, I find it necessary to close
| applications to reduce the swap usage.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _And, no Client Side Decorations. XFCE died for me the
| day they adopted it. Inconsistency-hell ensued._
|
| Not sure what you mean. We have CSDs available for people
| who like it, but they can be turned on and off.
|
| If you're talking about random GTK apps that run on Xfce,
| there's not much we can do about that; we don't set app
| policy.
|
| That's one of the nicer things about Wayland, though:
| there's a way for the compositor to tell applications "I'll
| draw the decorations". On X11 there's no protocol for that,
| only a way for an app to tell the window manager it wants
| to draw its own, without a way for the WM to say "no, don't
| do it".
| tankenmate wrote:
| But unfortunately KDE is Wayland only now, so no way to turn
| the compositor off.
| LorenDB wrote:
| That is just false. Source: the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed
| packages provide an up-to-date X11 version of kwin.
| EasyMark wrote:
| definitely my go to for VM's and VNC for lightweight no need to
| fiddle installs.
| pjerem wrote:
| I love XFCE but nowadays it's unbearable on a HiDPI screen.
|
| And so I discovered that Cinnamon is also a very good option
| when it comes to << a better Windows 2000 ui >>.
|
| It's also not incredible on HiDPI but at least Cinnamon is
| pretty good at not breaking everything when you increase font
| size by 150 or 200%. On XFCE if you do this everything becomes
| ugly.
| nine_k wrote:
| Hmm, can't agree, having run Xfce for years on HiDPI screens.
|
| Go to Settings, Appearance, Advanced, set the font DPI to
| something like 144 or what works for your screen.
|
| The only thing that does not obey this is Firefox; the way to
| adjust it is to set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something
| like 1.5 in about:config.
| mmphosis wrote:
| Linux Mint XFCE. Appearance > Fonts > _DPI_ Custom DPI
| setting: 144 makes fonts across the desktop larger. The
| default setting: 96 seems fine to me. The default in
| Firefox was -1.0 which is also fine.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| KDE is really excellent on HiDPI. Running it here on a 4K 24"
| screen and it looks amazing
| YarickR2 wrote:
| What monitor do you use ? 24" 4K is such a rare thing these
| days ; I'm using cheapo LG , but I always look out if
| there's something better
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I'm using that cheapo LG 24UD58 :) unfortunately they
| only make 27" now. I really wish they would start making
| them again. 27" @ 4K is a little bit too low res for me.
| Adverblessly wrote:
| I actually prefer XFCE's scaling via setting a font DPI to
| e.g. KDE/Gnome's scaling which increases everything in size
| and not just fonts.
|
| First because usually it is only text that I want to be
| larger so I can read it. Increases the size of "everything"
| just decreases UI density with no benefit (while things that
| conform to the text like button still increase in size to
| contain the text).
|
| Second because scaling "everything" often leads to ugly
| results. E.g. I use a program to browse local media files
| that generates thumbnails for those files. The size of the
| thumbnail generated matches the size of the widget it
| displays for that file. If the widget is scaled 1.5x due to
| UI scaling, it will show a blurry upscaled thumbnail.
| Rapzid wrote:
| HiDPI pushed me to run Mint for a while, then multi-monitor
| issues with hiDPI finally pushed me to WSL.
|
| Been using WSL full time for over a year and have no plans to
| go back..
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I love XFCE but nowadays it's unbearable on a HiDPI
| screen._
|
| How so? We support setting GTK's UI scaling to 2x, and (as of
| 4.18) I believe all the bugs around blurry icon rendering
| have been fixed.
|
| What exactly becomes ugly for you?
| prmoustache wrote:
| If you really want a just working and actually lightweight
| (instead of pretending like XFCE), you choose icewm.
| hnisoss wrote:
| apples and oranges tho. you can use icewm instead of XFWM
| roomey wrote:
| Xfce all day every (work) day.
|
| I've been using it for years and years. I started when it was the
| only lag free WM I could run on an atom powered netbook (the only
| "pc" I had at the time)!
|
| Now many years later im still using it, and it still makes me
| happy. I'm not sure if people know what it's like to be able to
| click on something and have it work instantly with no lag.
|
| It is a great piece of software, thank you to all the Devs who
| work on it!
|
| Edit: I've seen a few complaints about hidpi. I'm not sure if
| this helps, but I have a 4k laptop screen, usb-c to a 4k monitor,
| and hdmi to a regular 1024 monitor orientated vertical.
|
| By setting x2 in the appearance settings both the 4k monitors
| look beautiful, and then in the screen manager (where you can
| move around the screens and set orientation, I just have to set
| 2x scale on the 1024 monitor and it's fine. Like obviously less
| good than the 4ks... But it is a worse monitor. I'm surprised it
| all works so well to be honest!
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I regret clicking this link without Adblock. Popover videos,
| mailing list signups, giant ads taking most of my verticle space,
| ugh.
|
| Does anyone a cleaner article?
| olliej wrote:
| Ok, I'm super confused, how much work is involved in supporting
| Wayland vs Xserver?
|
| [editing to add: my assumption that it isn't is due to this post
| - xfce is what I used to use because it was lightweight, but if
| such a lightweight manager requires significant adoption effort
| it would imply that Wayland isn't X API+new extension]
|
| I had thought that Wayland was still functionally an
| implementation of the X server protocol, just reengineered to
| drop any pretense of network transparency, but given the amount
| of work involved that's clearly not the case?
|
| (It has been a long time since I did anything resembling X
| development, and so I've paid literally no attention to the
| details)
| kelnos wrote:
| Wayland is an entirely new display system that's completely
| incompatible with X11.
|
| X11 apps can generally run under Wayland, but through XWayland,
| an X server that runs nested under a Wayland compositor.
| olliej wrote:
| Oh, ok, so X _apps_ can run under Wayland, because Wayland
| DEs can run an X server (an existing X impl, or does Wayland
| provide an X translation layer /impl?)
|
| But the DE/window manager is what is actually responsible for
| deciding when/where to provide that interface? For actual
| rendering+windows etc the DE is communicating entirely
| through Wayland specific APIs?
|
| I guess the operation mode is similar to how you would run X
| apps on Mac and windows where you could launch an x server
| that would act as a layer between the Mac/windows windowing
| system?
| EasyMark wrote:
| There is no reverse equivalent of Wayland->X11 to my
| knowledge. Just the X11->Wayland via XWayland .
| bitwize wrote:
| Weston has (for the time being) an X11 backend.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Wayland is written by most of the same folks who maintain
| xorg, and XWayland is part of xorg.
|
| It's generally more transparent than running a separate X
| server on Mac or Windows -- you don't normally need to care
| about whether an app is X11 or native Wayland.
| bitwize wrote:
| Xwayland is basically Xorg with a Wayland DDX layer -- and
| it recently got a rootful mode. So that means it's possible
| to run a complete X desktop, including WM, on top of a
| Wayland compositor.
|
| However, the drawback is that with the exception maybe of
| Weston, one does not simply start up a Wayland compositor.
| You need to have support for logind seats and that sort of
| thing. So unless you want to spend an afternoon assembling
| the components like a piece of flat-pack furniture from
| Target, you basically _need_ systemd and a distro that
| bundled those components for you the right way.
| hawski wrote:
| A desktop environment in X11 is leaning on the X server. One on
| Wayland has to have libs for most of the things. There is no
| window manager. A compositor is like a server and a window
| manager in one. There are libs, but the process is much more
| involved and the API is much more tight so not everything is
| easy to get as in X.
| p_l wrote:
| The core wayland does not even implement the idea of a window,
| to show how far the differences go.
|
| Based on experiences of an acquaintance writing from scratch
| support for wayland for an UI framework that shares absolutely
| zero code with any of the major ones, the differences in even
| basic things like how to implement drop-down menu are
| staggering.
|
| Funnily enough, said acquaintances needs would have been fully
| covered by slightly more capable XRender and a way to
| synchronize to VSync that does not depend on GLX.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The oversimplified answer is that a Wayland compositor must
| include all the functionality of an X window manager _and_ the
| Xorg display server. There are libraries to help implement all
| that, but it 's still a big lift.
| fbritoferreira wrote:
| Should the project be renamed to WFCE?
| severine wrote:
| No, not anymore:
|
| _Xfce is pronounced "ecks-eff-see-ee". The name Xfce
| originally stood for "XForms Common Environment", but since
| then Xfce has been rewritten twice and doesn 't use the XForms
| toolkit anymore. The name survived, but it is no longer
| capitalized as "XFCE" and is no longer an abbreviation for
| anything (although suggestions have been made, such as "X
| Freakin' Cool Environment"). _
| guilhas wrote:
| Hope XFCE still keeps xorg reliable
|
| Most projects introduced bugs in xorg trying to support wayland,
| which is not reliable for many use cases, making everything
| unusable every other month
| bitwize wrote:
| Most projects will eventually remove the X code path.
|
| The long-term solution is to switch to Wayland.
| darren0 wrote:
| The transition to Wayland also seems to correlate with the
| adoption of client side decorations (CSD). This "modern" approach
| destroys the traditional UX of XFCE as seen by recent changes in
| the settings manager. I fear for the future of XFCE. The
| advantage of XFCE for me has always been that it's a stable
| implementation of a traditional Win98/XP UX. I hope they don't
| adopt more Gnome3 patterns.
| tristan957 wrote:
| CSD has nothing to do with UX. CSD just means the application
| draws the window controls and borders.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The application drawing window controls and borders becomes a
| UX problem when it doesn't do it right.
| cwillu wrote:
| The application having the ability to change how the title
| bar works is an anti-feature for me.
| kelnos wrote:
| [delayed]
| braiamp wrote:
| What has this to do with wayland or XFCE? The only major DE
| that is using client side decorations is gnome. This has been
| true since 2018:
|
| > I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all
| applications implementing CSD. One of the arguments seems to be
| that CSD is a must on Wayland. That's of course not the case.
| Nothing in Wayland enforces CSD. Wayland itself is as ignorant
| about this as X11. [...] In fact we created a protocol
| (supported by GTK) that allows to _negotiate with the Wayland
| compositor whether to use CSD or SSD_.
|
| From https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-
| side-d...
|
| Wayland is agnostic, and it's up to the compositor and
| application to decide what to do while operating under wayland.
| kelnos wrote:
| [delayed]
| rurban wrote:
| Getting back to XFCE, and being able to leave gnome would be a
| godsend. I didn't dare to try KDE yet.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| My accessibility needs are dead under Wayland. There needs to be
| shortcuts that can be emulated per application and global
| shortcuts.
|
| Their security model won't allow this. I don't know how
| accessibility and automation tools are going to get by trying to
| support every wayland compositor.
| bitwize wrote:
| If accessibility is a serious concern, Linux is probably not
| the OS for you. It's so far behind in accessibility compared to
| Windows it's not even funny.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Global shortcuts are managed by the XDG Desktop Portal.
| emilfihlman wrote:
| Wayland is still broken in so many ways it's not funny.
|
| Just recently I had to switch back to X11 because Wayland was
| just awful performance wise, like stuttering and constant fps
| drop. And this on a what 2023 high quality laptop with standard
| Ubuntu.
|
| The way Wayland is done is a mistake.
| valeg wrote:
| Xfce is not perfect but pretty close (in *nix realm); it is a
| stable WIMP desktop environment. Everything where you expect it
| to be, no excessive feature creep, stable. It is like a tool, I
| love it. I wish it had a better brand. Too nerdy.
| Aachen wrote:
| For anyone else not in the know
|
| > In human-computer interaction, WIMP stands for "windows,
| icons, menus, pointer"
| --https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Ive got a hybrid XFCE/i3 setup as my main desktop.
|
| The panel is killed on startup.
|
| This could get me looking into sway/Wayland.
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