Really happy with XFCE on X11

Posted Jan 27, 2026 20:27 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Really happy with XFCE on X11 by jmalcolm
Parent article: Xfwl4: the roadmap for a Xfce Wayland compositor

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 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).