XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

XFCE’s Appeal and Current Usage

  • Many commenters use XFCE as their main or fallback desktop, especially on family machines, low‑end laptops, VMs, and *BSD servers.
  • It’s praised as “Windows 9x/2000‑like”: predictable WIMP UI, simple panels and launchers, few surprises, and low maintenance.
  • Perceived strengths: stability, low lag, modularity, and “just works” feel compared to heavier or more change‑prone environments like GNOME and sometimes KDE.

Wayland vs X11: Attitudes and Concerns

  • Some users switched from XFCE to KDE or other DEs purely for mature Wayland support, citing hardware‑accelerated video and smoother responsiveness.
  • Others view delay in Wayland adoption as a feature, given current pain around screen sharing, remote workflows, and tooling.
  • A vocal group sees Wayland as “here to stay” and X11 as effectively in maintenance/hospice mode; another group insists X11 “works today” and they will stay on it (or even switch to Windows/BSD) if Wayland breaks workflows.
  • There is frustration that Wayland is still missing or complicating certain X11 use cases (fine‑grained remote desktop like x11vnc, X-style accessibility/automation, some perf issues).

XFCE’s Wayland Roadmap and Technical Notes

  • XFCE 4.20 will not ship its own compositor but will allow many components to run on external Wayland compositors (tested mostly with wlroots‑based ones like Wayfire and Labwc).
  • An XFCE Wayland compositor based on wlroots is being worked on via xfwm4, but is expected to be at least a year away from being usable, and several releases away from feature parity.
  • The project plans to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel for the foreseeable future; there is no immediate “forced switch”.

Performance, HiDPI, and “Lightweight” Debates

  • Some report KDE Plasma being as light or lighter than a “full” XFCE install, especially with proper GPU acceleration; others see KDE/kwin using noticeable idle CPU and spinning fans, while XFCE stays quiet.
  • Mixed experiences with HiDPI: several say XFCE with proper DPI scaling looks fine; others find layouts and icons ugly or broken versus KDE or Cinnamon.
  • Disagreement over how “broken” Wayland is: some see screen sharing and Teams/Zoom/etc. as solved for most users; others still experience stutter, frame drops, or brittle sharing setups.

UX, CSD, and Consistency

  • Some fear XFCE drifting toward GNOME‑style client‑side decorations and “modern” UX, diluting its traditional desktop feel.
  • Others note that Wayland is agnostic; CSD is mostly a toolkit/DE policy choice, and Wayland actually gives compositors more control to enforce server‑side decorations if desired.