Xfce 4.20 released [LWN.net]

Version 4.20 of the Xfce desktop environment has been released. "The major focus during this development cycle was the preparation of the codebase to be ready for Wayland". See the Xfce 4.20 tour for an overview of the changes in this release.

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Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 16, 2024 18:41 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (25 responses)

Of course it is too early to expect it in a distro today, but do we have an idea of which distros will step up to 4.20 before others?

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 16, 2024 19:01 UTC (Mon) by jfb (subscriber, #60805) [Link] (24 responses)

ftp://slackware.oregonstate.edu/pub/slackware/slackware-c...

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 16, 2024 19:30 UTC (Mon) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (23 responses)

Thank you! From that changelog:

"Sun Dec 15 20:49:39 UTC 2024
Welcome Xfce 4.20 and congratulations to the developers for the great work!
Read the announcement and find out what's new here:
https://www.xfce.org/about/news/?post=1734220800
l/python-hatchling-1.27.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
x/libdisplay-info-0.2.0-x86_64-1.txz: Added.
Needed by libxfce4windowing-4.20.0.
xfce/Greybird-3.23.3-noarch-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/exo-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/garcon-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/libxfce4ui-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/libxfce4util-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/libxfce4windowing-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Added.
xfce/thunar-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/thunar-volman-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/tumbler-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-appfinder-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-dev-tools-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-panel-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-power-manager-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-session-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfce4-settings-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfconf-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfdesktop-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded.
xfce/xfwm4-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded."

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 17, 2024 8:28 UTC (Tue) by thoeme (subscriber, #2871) [Link] (22 responses)

Hm, is there a problem ? I am not using Slackware, just being curious.
"xfce/xfwm4-4.20.0-x86_64-1.txz: Upgraded."

From the XFCE 4.20 tour:
"Some other Xfce components don't run at all on Wayland:
Xfwm4"

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 17, 2024 22:31 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (21 responses)

Has X support been removed from 4.20? All I see is that groundwork for Wayland is done, not that Wayland is required.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 16:27 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (19 responses)

From the "tour": Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.

What I find concerning from the release notes is that apparently porting common desktop functionality to Wayland still appears to be very difficult. Again from the tour:

    Workspace support is missing (ext-workspace protocol was just merged).
    Systray icons will be missing for multiple applications (required to use StatusNotifier instead of GtkStatusIcon)
    Xfce4-settings: Keyboard and mouse settings so far are internal to the Wayland compositor and as such the according Xfce dialogs won't be available on Wayland yet.
    Power related keyboard handling (brightness keys, suspend, etc.) is internal to the Wayland compositor and as such cannot be supported yet by Xfce components.
    Wayland does not specify a native protocol for taking screenshots. However, xfce4-screenshooter already supports screenshots via the wlroots 'screencopy' protocol (entire screen). Screenshots of a rectangle selection or the active window are not yet supported via Wayland.

Still no screen-shotting in Wayland after all these years? And this is is supposed to be the designated successor of X11.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 16:56 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

> Still no screen-shotting in Wayland after all these years? And this is is supposed to be the designated successor of X11.

This is sorta true but misleading. There is a XDG portal for this that is commonly used. XFCE could use that or adopt the Wayland Wlr screencopy protocol

https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org...

https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1

So there are atleast two options here.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 19:51 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

According to the release information, XFCE is trying the second one, but there are still problems (and that page describes the interface as unstable).

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 21:51 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> According to the release information, XFCE is trying the second one, but there are still problems (and that page describes the interface as unstable).

The first one is stable, is more widely used and works well with sandboxed environments. It is unclear to me why XFCE isn't using that.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 19, 2024 6:57 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

After a glance at the page, it seems to me a "portal" is a service the desktop environment provides to applications. So a desktop environment like XFCE must implement it in some way.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 19, 2024 16:55 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Right but plenty of other desktop environments including GNOME, KDE but even Cinnamon, Cosmic, Hyperland etc have implemented the appropriate backends that can be used within the desktop environments. If any XFCE developer is around, it would be good to know why it wasn't implemented for XFCE

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 17:21 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (12 responses)

> Still no screen-shotting in Wayland after all these years? And this is is supposed to be the designated successor of X11.

This, and nearly everything else [1] on that list, is squarely in XFCE's court.

(Or did you think that XFCE's integration with X11 and its myriad extensions wrote itself?)

[1] The exception appears to be GtkStatusIcon, which was always a bit of a non-portable problem child and was formally deprecated in gtk-3.14 (2014!) in favor of the GNotification API.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 19, 2024 10:07 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (11 responses)

Except for the fact that X11 actually implements all of those things and you just need to call into it while Wayland with their "just a protocol" model requires every compositor to actually fully implement it from scratch (or work around that major design flaw by using a library that does like wlroots).

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 19, 2024 10:48 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> Except for the fact that X11 actually implements all of those things and you just need to call into it while Wayland with their "just a protocol" model requires every compositor to actually fully implement it from scratch (or work around that major design flaw by using a library that does like wlroots).

X11 is also just a protocol. You would call into X.org. Which is different from "calling into a library that does like wlroots"... exactly how?

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 20, 2024 1:08 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Except for the fact that X11 actually implements all of those things

Not quite. X11 simply allows every application to do whatever it wants with the whole screen.

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 21, 2024 3:50 UTC (Sat) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (8 responses)

It used to be that, if you wanted to be a desktop environment that used Wayland, you were stuck building lots of the foundation yourself. In that universe, I can understand saying that the lack of support in the core platform is a flaw.

Today, ignoring even the other options, you have wlroots to provide all that core plumbing. What is the difference between calling into xorg or calling into wlroots? If you do not like wlroots, you can always start with Louvre or something else.

Well, one big difference is that wlroots is not the "only" choice. There are competing Wayland implementations that, over time, will compete with each other for mainstream dominance or find niches where they can specialize. Normally we see these competing implementations as a strength of the ecosystem. For some reason in Wayland, it is a "design flaw".

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to complain about the history of Wayland so far. At this point though, most users are moving to Wayland without trouble and many desktop environments are moving to it without too many problems either. The gap that remains is closing pretty rapidly every day.

I am actually looking forward to the world 5 years from now where we have multiple high-quality and functionally complete Wayland platforms to choose from. Most importantly, I am looking forward to the innovation that happens and the ability for new code-bases to emerge and succeed without having to push aside a massively entrenched monopoly incumbent like we had in xorg.

Rather than a design flaw, I see the ability to have these competing implementations as one of Wayland's great strengths.

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 9:30 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (2 responses)

It essentially completely eliminated all the small window managers you could have with Xorg and now you are lucky if you find one or two fully functional alternatives to Gnome and KDE.

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 20:24 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

River, Hyprland, sway. And there are a lot more. Sure, not as many WMs as X has, but there's also the comparison of time involved.

Design flaw?

Posted Jan 1, 2025 20:17 UTC (Wed) by jch (guest, #51929) [Link]

> River, Hyprland, sway.

...and of course labwc <https://github.com/labwc/labwc>.

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 10:39 UTC (Mon) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link] (3 responses)

> I see the ability to have these competing implementations as one of Wayland's great strengths.

Do you see absence of syscall-for-syscall compatible Linux kernel reimplementations as Linux's greatest weakness?

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 13:12 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Well, we do have the BSDs, we do have Plan 9, we do have ...

What I don't like is that so much of this falls into a "winner takes all" scenario, and quite often the winner is not the "best" solution.

MS Office won the office race by virtue of dirty underhand tricks.

Linux won the OS race by virtue of being GPL, the AT&T lawsuit, Linus being a very good people person - take your pick of the reasons why ...

(Bear in mind Wayland *IS* effectively X13) X won the Unix Gui race for reasons before my time ...

And indeed, both Linux and X / Wayland are perfect examples of why technical excellence is very rarely the reason you win - Linux has a lot of flaws (many of which are quite possibly down to Posix), while Wayland exists *because* of all the flaws in X11 (and politics :-)

Probably, of those three, the only one I'd say actually deserved to win through "technical excellence" (whatever that means :-) is Wayland. Because they started with a lot of hindsight available :-)

(Oh - and it sounds like wlroots is winning the race to be the "X server of choice" equivalent for Wayland - let's hope it deserves it :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 13:52 UTC (Mon) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

What absence? There are numerous implementations of Linux syscall interface:
– FreeBSD has Linuxolator
– Solaris branded Zones
– Windows Services for Linux v1

Design flaw?

Posted Dec 23, 2024 14:27 UTC (Mon) by adobriyan (subscriber, #30858) [Link]

WSL1 was abandoned in favor of Linux inside VM.

Design flaw?

Posted Jan 16, 2025 7:58 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> I am actually looking forward to the world 5 years from now where we have multiple high-quality and functionally complete Wayland platforms to choose from.

I'd argue we are already living in that world, no need to wait 5 years. :)

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Jan 16, 2025 8:12 UTC (Thu) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

> What I find concerning from the release notes is that apparently porting common desktop functionality to Wayland still appears to be very difficult.

The functionality you listed is working fine in other Wayland DEs. It's not yet in Xfce's Wayland session because the transition is incomplete there.

> Still no screen-shotting in Wayland after all these years? And this is is supposed to be the designated successor of X11.

The X mechanisms used for this allow any client to constantly & silently perform surveillance of everything the user sees (and does). E.g. remember the recent malicious Pidgin plugin which captured the screen contents and sent them off to some server.

Replicating this isn't universally considered in scope for the Wayland protocol, to put it diplomatically. There won't be any Wayland protocol extension which allows this and is supported by all Wayland compositors.

Others have mentioned the portal mechanism for this, which is used by many Wayland DEs (it can also work in X sessions though). It involves the user actively choosing what to share with which application, i.e. a form of user consent. This prevents the kind of surveillance possible via X.

Are we there yet, Mom?

Posted Dec 18, 2024 17:21 UTC (Wed) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link]

X support has not been removed. The XFCE devs put in place an abstraction layer to facilitate working with both display servers. However, as others have noticed, Wayland support is still spotty and experimental in XFCE 4.20.

Personally, I'm not looking forward to the move to Wayland. For my end-user purposes, Xorg is just fine. I'm very glad that the XFCE devs are offering a path to having a choice of display server protocols, though I know it may not last.

Congratulations on the release!

Posted Dec 17, 2024 14:35 UTC (Tue) by sam.thursfield (subscriber, #94496) [Link] (4 responses)

It's great to see folk volunteering their time to bring Xfce into the 21st century ;-)

Congratulations on the release!

Posted Dec 18, 2024 10:09 UTC (Wed) by gb (subscriber, #58328) [Link] (3 responses)

Using xfce for last 10 years, it is much more productive than other windows managers I am aware of, in 21st century.
It lucks distracting bells and whistles some kids love in any century.
It is of very high quality - it never crashed and in 10 years I saw one minor bug. I went to xfce4 forum and immediately got help on how to solve that minor annoyance.
It has all necessary components to support everything I need to do.
It does not mimic windows, mac or anything else.
It is specialized for desktop, not trying to be universal UI between touch-interface and keyboard use.
It does not assume that you only have one full-screen window all the time.
It is not trying to change stuff for the sake of change, checkbox is checkbox not switch. groups of elements are visually separated. All changes I ever saw in Xfce are for good - like support hpdi, color profiles, new underlying libraries.
Xfce is not assuming that it's user is 21st century dumb, so it has complicated options to setup, supports complicated keybindings, workspaces and focus follow mouse mode.
Xfce is amazing 21st century user interface with very right balance of well developed and new features.

Congratulations on the release!

Posted Dec 18, 2024 15:38 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

I echo all of the things in parent comment. What I love about XFCE is that each new release is a bit better and more polished than the previous release, without totally upending the universe and making me learn a new GUI.

A stable, boring, unobtrusive, fast, functional desktop is what I want, and XFCE delivers that brilliantly.

Congratulations on the release!

Posted Dec 19, 2024 11:25 UTC (Thu) by sam.thursfield (subscriber, #94496) [Link]

I'm glad to hear it!

Congratulations on the release!

Posted Dec 21, 2024 3:54 UTC (Sat) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

XFCE has been my primary desktop for a long time. I echo your comments completely.

That said, I cannot wait to use it in Wayland. I have a couple machines using DEs other than XFCE now and they are Wayland already.