Over the past half-year, Xfwl4 has been developed as a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. Released this weekend was the first preview release of Xfwl4 in alpha form.

This first release of Xfwl4 is described as "ready to get some wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing features. Think of this as an alpha release."

Brian Tarricone has been leading the development of Xfwl4 via a sponsorship from the Xfce project. The ultimate goal of Xfwl4 is:

"The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there’s a difference. In reality, of course, it won’t be quite that seamless, and there’s still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least."

Some of the known feature limitations right now include the lack off screen margins, the workspaces settings dialog not working, the mouse and touchpad settings dialog not working, the Xfdesktop's minimized window icon view, pager thumbnails in the panel, not yet being able to restore window positions or workspaces on startup, and other early limitations.

More details on the first Xfwl4 preview release can be found via Brian's release announcement.