XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

XFCE 4.20 is planning preliminary support for Wayland, prompting debate over whether the lightweight, Windows‑like desktop should move away from the aging X11 display system. Many users welcome Wayland for better hardware acceleration, modern features, and long‑term viability, while others cite broken screen sharing, accessibility gaps, and performance regressions as reasons to stick with X11. XFCE developers stress that Wayland support will arrive gradually, with X11 remaining supported for the foreseeable future, and that their goal is to preserve XFCE’s traditional, stable user experience while modernizing the underlying stack.

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.