4.20 will let you run some of our components on another compositor. We mostly test with Wayfire and Labwc, as our compositor will also be using wlroots.
Great software. Great mix of flexibility, modularity, ease of use, and good taste.
I also thank the devs.
But yes, some people are excited, some don't care, some are worried.
But there won't be a switch. If users want to keep running it on X11, they can do that. I can't promise that will be the case forever, but it's not (won't be) that hard to support both with how things are currently.
A lot of xfwm4's behavior is windowing-independent, or fairly easy to put the windowing-specific calls behind interfaces. There's some of it that turns out to be pretty hard to untangle, which is where the real work is, but I think it's worthwhile work to take on.
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. :)
But it's worth doing here. And wlroots does so much heavy lifting that it becomes a lot more manageable. Most of the code in xfwm4 will still be window management code, as it should be.
I've worked on Xfce on and off for 20 years (mostly off, I suppose; probably a total of ~7 years in that time), so I get what these big things are like, and what maintainership means. We're also a very small team of volunteers who have other jobs and other things going on in our lives. But that's fine; Xfce does just fine with that level of work, and will continue to do just fine.
Btw I love xfce. Find it to be the perfect balance between features, stability and performance!!!
A Wayland compositor is a completely different beast, and that's what we have to build.
And even if it isn't, and it's statically linked, so what? RAM is cheap and plentiful in most places these days, and if you're really upset about it you can build it yourself with --disable-wayland or whatever.
Anyway, the negativity is quite unnecessary and tiresome.
If I am upset about something, it is wlroots does not manage properly its symbol namespaces with the C preprocessor, that to reduce to near 0 the possibility to have symbol collision while static linking.
The great thing is finally xfce is going to have its wayland compositor. And there, there is not negativity, only positivity, because the real core of wayland is orders of magnitude simpler than x11 core, and wayland is getting its way on mobile, which means with vulkan3d, dude, the future looks bright, not grim, cheer up.