I’m pleased to announce the first preview release of xfwl4, Xfce’s Wayland compositor.

After close to six months of work, I feel like it’s ready to get some wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing features. Think of this as an alpha release.

First off, I’d like to give a big thanks to the rest of the Xfce core team for offering to sponsor this work. I’ve been an on-again off-again Xfce developer since 2004 (more “off” than “on”, I suppose), and I consider it a great privilege to have this work sponsored, giving me the opportunity to focus solely on this project since the beginning of the year. This is also a huge thank-you to all the supporters who have generously donated to Xfce over the years.

Here are the essentials:

Source tarball. Build and install instructions are in the README. Please pay careful attention to build and runtime prerequisites.

Issue tracker. Search the issue tracker first in case someone else has already filed a similar issue. If not, and you file a new one, be sure to fill out every part of the issue template.

Git repository. If you’ve found an issue, it would be helpful if you could ensure it’s still present on git main. You can also try any fixes and features I’ve added since the release. Be sure to clone it with --recursive.

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.

The issue tracker will give you a decent idea of things that are not implemented yet or are known to be broken, but here is a list of notable things that won’t work, so you aren’t surprised:

• The “Mouse and Touchpad” settings dialog (but whatever settings you’ve set under X11 will be applied under xfwl4) (issue).
• The “Workspaces” settings dialog (issue).
• Screen margins (issue).
• xfdesktop’s minimized window icon view, and the middle-click window menu (issue and issue).
• Pager thumbnails in the panel (no tracking issue yet).
• Taskbar apps can only change maximize/minimize/fullscreen state (issue and issue).
• Keyboard shortcuts for application/application-window switching (regular all-window cycling works fine) (issue).
• Most (all?) apps will not be able to restore their window positions or workspace on startup (issue and issue).

(This is not an exhaustive list, just a few things I thought worth calling out.)

Over the coming weeks and months, I plan to write a blog series on how I built xfwl4. I’ll update this to link each new post here as they’re published. Anyhow, give it a spin!