Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

Date:
Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:20:10 +0000

Description:
The Xfce team has announced that
it will be providing funding to Brian Tarricone to work on xfwl4 ,
a Wayland compositor for Xfce: Xfwl4 will not be based on the existing xfwm4 code. Instead, it
will be written from scratch in rust, using smithay building
blocks. The first attempt at creating an Xfce Wayland compositor involved modifying the existing xfwm4 code to support both X11 and Wayland in
parallel. However, this approach turned out to be the wrong path
forward for several reasons: Xfwm4 is architected in a way that makes it very difficult to put the window management behavior behind generic interfaces
that don't include X11 specifics. Refactoring Xfwm4 is risky, since it might introduce new bugs to X11. Having two parallel code bases will allow for
rapid development and experimentation with the Wayland compositor, with zero risk to break xfwm4. Some X11 window management concepts just aren't
available or supported by Wayland protocols at this time, and dealing with those differences can be difficult in an X11-first code base. Using the existing codebase would require us to use C and
wlroots, even if a better alternative is available. Work has already commenced on the project, and the project hopes to
share a development release in mid-2026.

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Link to news story:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1056159/


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