Wayland
Important Notice: Please be aware that the Wayland support in Xfce 4.20 is experimental. It is recommended for advanced users only, as you may encounter bugs and experience incomplete functionality. Proceed with caution!
Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.
This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, "libxfce4windowing" was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components.
So far Xfce does not feature a compositor which supports Wayland. If you want to run Xfce in Wayland, Labwc and Wayfire will give you the best results. A detailed instruction on this can be found here. Please be aware that Wayland support is still experimental!
Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don't hold your breath waiting for it.
For few components and multiple features, it was not possible to port them to Wayland, partly because there are no standardized Wayland protocols available yet to provide the required services:
- Workspace support is missing (ext-workspace protocol was just merged).
- Systray icons will be missing for multiple applications (required to use StatusNotifier instead of GtkStatusIcon)
- Xfce4-settings: Keyboard and mouse settings so far are internal to the Wayland compositor and as such the according Xfce dialogs won't be available on Wayland yet.
- Power related keyboard handling (brightness keys, suspend, etc.) is internal to the Wayland compositor and as such cannot be supported yet by Xfce components.
- Wayland does not specify a native protocol for taking screenshots. However, xfce4-screenshooter already supports screenshots via the wlroots 'screencopy' protocol (entire screen). Screenshots of a rectangle selection or the active window are not yet supported via Wayland.
Some other Xfce components don't run at all on Wayland:
- Xfwm4
- Xfdashboard
- Xfce4-screensaver (porting to Wayland completed but not merged, as it requires the experimental libwlembed library)
- Xfce4-windowck-plugin (needs to be ported to libxfce4windowing)
- Xfce4-xkb-plugin (keyboard handling is internal to the Wayland compositor)
More detailed info on the current Wayland status can be found on our Wayland roadmap.
Scaling
Icons and thumbnail scaling was fixed for various components. Various missing icons for larger scales were added. Any blurriness when using Xfce components on a HiDPI display should be gone now.