Really happy with XFCE on X11

Posted Jan 27, 2026 19:58 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: Really happy with XFCE on X11 by NightMonkey
Parent article: Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

I also hope X11 support for XFCE sticks around. I am a huge Wayland booster but I have no desire to "kill" X11 and XFCE is an important environment on operating systems where Wayland has not penetrated as far as it has on Linux.

That said, it is hard to imagine a little project like XFCE maintaining both long term. It was intriguing that they were going to build an abstraction layer that would lower the cost of maintaining both but it seems like that has failed. So, they will have two different implementations. Not only is this more work but, as GNOME and Plasma discovered, it is also going to hold you back as you are forced to support only functionality that can reasonably be expressed in both environments.

This is why we have seen Budgie, GNOME, and KDE all move to Wayland only. I fully expect that Cinnamon will do the same once they switch. I had been expecting XFCE to maintain both but, with this move, that seems less certain. The fact that they are dedicating such a large fraction of their resources to Wayland tells you how they view the future. MATE is another question mark, although it is the default desktop in some very X11-ish places like Solaris and GhostBSD. As we exit 2027, the only X11 desktop environments may be Trinity and CDE.

I am sure you know this but Waypipe and WPRS offer an alternative to X-forwarding if you do find yourself on Wayland. It works quite well.

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Really happy with XFCE on X11

Posted Jan 27, 2026 20:27 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

XFCE apps are built against GTK3, are they not? So unless they drop down to low-level Xlib calls or some other X11-specific toolkit in a particular app, the apps should be fine and should work on both X11 and Wayland.

It's only the window manager that's heavily intertwined with X11 that needs replacing.

Really happy with XFCE on X11

Posted Jan 27, 2026 20:34 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Replying to myself: Of course, Gtk will drop X11 support in Gtk-5, and then XFCE will stop working on X11 or else rely on ancient/unmaintained versions of Gtk.

Really happy with XFCE on X11

Posted Jan 27, 2026 21:46 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

> XFCE apps are built against GTK3, are they not?

Yes they are. And they work very well today on both X11 and Wayland. The XFCE project itself is X11 first today but there are already distros that ship XFCE as Wayland only on top of a compostor like LabWC.

Some parts of XFCE will require special attention to keep working on X11 but you are right, the primary support burden will be XFWM itself.

Many of the non-GNOME GTK desktops seem to be sticking with GTK3 on purpose though there is some sign that shipping alternative implementations of libadwaita in GTK4 may replace that strategy. GTK itself has a long support lifefime so there is not much of an emergency to move away from these versions. GTK5 will probably arrive Wayland-only but that will affect application availability more than the viability of the desktop environment itself (at least at first).