>
I've been using XFCE for the better part of 15 years meanwhile.Nice, nearly 20 years for me.
> (apparently they only have two full-time developers for the whole project?)
We actually have zero full time developers. I'm probably the closest thing to a full-time developer as I have a lot of free time on my hands these days, but even then I don't work on Xfce enough to call it full time. And we only have two people working on Wayland support, and so that's even less than the non-full-time each of us put in.
> Its Wayland support is a permanent unfortunate "work-in-progress"
We've probably made more progress in the past 6 months than all the time prior, combined. Things are coming along, but it'll probably be another 1-2 years before it's usable, and only "stable" in time for the 4.22.0 release at the end of 2026. And that's still all aspirational; it may not materialize in that time.
It turns out that the Wayland protocol is super limited, and a lot of things that you could do easily on X11 you essentially have to re-invent from scratch. And that's before we even talk about turning xfwm4 into a Wayland compositor. (Some rando has forked xfwm4 and is building a Wayland compositor with it, but has chosen not to collaborate with us at all, so it's unclear if their work will ever be mergeable.)
But that's what happens when you're a developer for a software project that has no corporate sponsorship or people hired specifically to work on it. Feel free to contribute; we could definitely use the help!
Anyhow: I run Xfce on a Framework 13, and it's fine. I've set UI scaling to 2x, and I've added a custom modeline to X11 for 2712x1805 (1.2x native). Big downside is apparently this turns off the iGPU's ability to eliminate tearing. I suspect there's a way to fix that, but I haven't had the motivation to dig into it (I wonder if simply using a more-even scaling factor like 1.25 would do it, even if things would appear a little smaller than I'd like).