XFCE 4.20: Will continue betting on X11 and implement Wayland
Yesterday, we shared a great post about Hyprland, a Tiling window manager for Wayland based on wlroots, which is characterized by its fluid animations, its good resemblance to the Sway Window Manager, its high compatibility with the latest Wayland functions, its enormous customization capacity, among many others. And as we express in it, at a graphic or visual level, GNU/Linux Distributions (via Desktop Environments and Window Managers) are on their way, without a doubt, to the implementation of Wayland as a graphical server to replace X11 (Xorg).
And although Wayland is still a project in full development and consolidation, it advances little by little and at a firm pace in its stability, capabilities and functions. Therefore, many development teams of many GNU/Linux Distros, Applications, and Desktop Environments and Window Managers, have chosen to start a slow, but increasingly faster, race for the implementation of the same, as an interesting and Innovative alternative to Xorg. For example, a few months ago we learned that Fedora 40 will say goodbye to the X11 session in KDE to leave only Wayland, which Cinnamon 6.0 will arrive with experimental support from Wayland, and that Budgie 10.9.0 begins initial migration work to Wayland, among many others. Being the last one to enter in this race to implement Wayland, the future version of "XFCE 4.0".
Budgie 10.9 screenshot
But, before starting to read about this interesting news and technological innovation about "XFCE 4.20" and its future support for Wayland, we recommend one previous related post with future use of Wayland in Budgie 10.9.0:
XFCE 4.20: Will add support for Wayland without losing support for X11
XFCE 4.20 roadmap shows future support for Wayland
As can be seen in the following publication (Roadmap /RoadMap) related to Wayland in XFCE, the development team of this XFCE Desktop Environment project mentions the following and highlights 3 important guidelines (points), among many others, related to the topic:
For XFCE4.20, the plan is to add preliminary support to Wayland on top of core components without losing X11 support. This does not mean that, for the next major release, an XFCE session in Wayland will offer all the existing functions, but we do hope that it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our apps so that they work acceptably on Wayland (both those that already work or those that can be made to work with little effort).
- This first advance will provide a set of minimally necessary features, which will allow and facilitate over time the gradual addition of sufficient and desired functionalities in subsequent releases. Above all, those aimed at perfecting the performance of user apps already moved to the Wayland-based environment.
- In the long term, they intend to bring together the rsufficient resources to develop and maintain their own composite manager for Wayland, as they refuse to rely on using XWayland to manage it over XFCE. And also, have decided to continue using the wlroots library instead of libmutter in the Wayland environment.
- They will try to maintain support for X11 as long as necessary. However, some of the work already implemented includes added support for el xfdesktop workspace and xfce4 panel, leveraging wlroots, and making them work as separately released components.
Wayland It is a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architecture with the goal of making it easier to develop, extend, and maintain. Wayland is the language that applications can use to communicate with a display server in order to make themselves visible and obtain information from the user (a person). What is Wayland? - Official Web site
Summary
In summary, the new and increasingly robust, stable and advanced Wayland graphic server, becomes a viable and real alternative toThe protocol and architecture of the X11 window system (Xorg), making it possible to develop, extend and maintain it and the applications that will depend on its support. And for this reason, the XFCE development team, like many others, have started the process to su future version "XFCE 4.20 support Wayland" natively and efficient. However, if you are one of those who already use Wayland and have experienced using it on the XFCE 4.18 Desktop Environment or using a native XFCE app, we invite you to let us know your user experience about it, via comments.
Lastly, remember visit our «homepage» en español. Or, in any other language (just by adding 2 letters to the end of our current URL, for example: ar, de, en, fr, ja, pt and ru, among many others) to find out more current content. Additionally, we invite you to join our Official Telegram channel to read and share more news, guides and tutorials from our website. And also, the next Alternative Telegram channel to learn more about the Linuxverse in general.