XFCE 4.20 aims to bring preliminary Wayland support

I love xfce, I don't use it anymore though because I wanted Wayland support. As a (past and potentially future) user, I want to see a healthy xfce, not one that is burning out its devs with the giant task of maintaining a Wayland compositor. :)

Yes, guess you're correct. Qt apps in Plasma was a better mix for me. I have consistency and no funky titlebars.

Most people nowadays would just get a fanless computer and give up on fighting the bloat. But I appreciate your sacrifice, thank you.

I just started to make the transfer to Linux from windows. I have limited experience after running Ubuntu on a dual boot laptop back in school a long time ago. It wasnt my daily driver at the time but class required it.

I recently downloaded fedora onto a desktop and it has been a horrid experience. It's sooo slow compared to when windows was on the same hardware. It's so bad the kids won't use the computer unless it's the last one available. I regret the switch, but want the results. I cannot seem figure out what's causing it.

Don't all WMs have shortcut keys anyway?

I really appreciate your comment. QT is a great framework doing a lot of heavy lifting. However, the accessibility software I help maintain needs the ability to know what windows are in the foreground, all applications running and emulating key/text/mouse input in any of those running applications. Wayland is antithetical to those features by design.

I can see your point with QT for standalone applications. However, with interacting with other applications I'm not sure QT can solve the issue.

No one cares, until they do. Everything you mentioned depends on a single company, which follows the commands from just a few people, who can one day decide to lead the operating system in a direction which makes it no longer your "dream OS", and intellectual property law makes it so that no other company can undo their changes.

> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.

We haven't, and that's why we prefer operating systems we fully control, instead of being bound by the whims of some foreign megacorporation, enforced by intellectual property law.

I think a lot of people in OSS do get that, but in many ways it's significantly harder to do that last 20% in an open source project than it is for a proprietary software company to do it.

But ultimately I don't care that much, honestly. If you don't get what you need out of open source, that's fine. You not using it isn't a problem for me or for my own open source work. As long as there are enough users to keep communities going and developers interested, that's all that matters.

> and the above is the last 20% and it has never even once in the history of OSS got anywhere even remotely near that.

That's provably false, and it's pretty annoying when people make uninformed absolutist statements like that.

> No one cares about the political purity and ideology behind it.

A lot of people do. No, not a majority, and maybe not even a largely sizeable minority, but it's very very far from "no one". If you don't, I guess that's fine. I hope your proprietary software continues to do what you need and want, and that your needs and interests continue to be aligned with what those software companies want to give you. That hasn't been true for me for a very long time now, but certainly people have different needs and different thresholds for it to matter. But if that changes, feel fortunate that all the work we've done will still be available for you to take advantage of.

> The job of the computer is to free us from slavery and everyone seems to have bloody well forgotten that.

Your use of the word "slavery" is a bit bizarre and overwrought, but it's funny you say something like this. Open source software is the only kind of software that's going to respect your freedom. Proprietary software never will. You're at the whims of its makers, and can never take control of your own computing destiny.

Like the sibling said, I guess that doesn't matter to you now. But maybe it will, someday, when the game changes yet again.

I wholeheartedly agree with you; a system based on structured data or objects would be much better than what we have today. What I've been dreaming about for years is a system where everything is an object, much like Smalltalk. Instead of typing "ls" in a terminal window, you would send a get_files request to the current directory, which would return a list of file names. It's possible to emulate the traditional Unix "ls" command, but interacting programmatically with the system enables so many other uses that's much easier than parsing text or calling POSIX system calls. Because the user is working with objects instead of text, not only would it be easier to write scripts compared to Unix shell scripts, it would also be easier for developers to implement GUI tools for the system. For example, imagine if word processing documents were represented by a class that handled all sorts of manipulations of the document, hiding the details of the underlying file format from the user and developer in most cases. It would be easier to come up with scripts for generating and modifying word processing documents without having to use the word processor's macros (if they're available in the first place) or without having to dive deep into the underlying file formats of the documents.

IMO, we're heading for "X11 over Wayland" desktops, in which the only X11 implementation is Xwayland. These expensive applications which target X11 will keep working, through that compatibility layer.

Those that are written to use Xlib directly, sure, they'll take some work (though rewritten? doubtful). If their maintainers don't want to do that, they'll still run under Xwayland.

XFCE, Lxqt, Mate all have at least partial wayland support.

Cinnamon has experimental support.

For most of those years, fundamental parts of the desktop experience were just not possible on Wayland. Even today, there are some current Xfce features that are just not implementable on Wayland.

> You could make a whole DE from scratch in this time.

Depends on your goals and team size. Part of me would love to rewrite Xfce in Rust (yes, I'm one of those people), using a different, lighter, actually-well supported toolkit (unlike GTK3), but with the team we have, that would be another two decades.

Consider that Xfce 4 is a little over 20 years old at this point. It's taken that long to build it to what it is. Starting over wouldn't take any less time to get there with the people and resources we have.

"Unsupported" as in there are no maintainers, there's no roadmap, there's no future. X11 is a dead end. All the people who were working on it would rather work on Wayland instead. It's taking a while for the DEs, etc. to catch up, but even the slow pace of improvement Wayland is exhibiting is much better than "dead in the water" which is where X11 is.

Unsupported in the context of software doesn't really mean what you took it as anyway.

There's really no reason why someone couldn't write a "WX11" or something of that nature, but I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.

Not really. It's perfectly fine to just advertise a single dummy wl_seat, and use whatever non-logind mechanism there is to tell the OS that you want to be in control of the input and display hardware.