Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

Comment The new version of the longest-established Linux desktop is here, and at last, it’s possible to use Wayland – although not everything works yet.

Xfce 4.20 was released over the weekend, bang on the schedule we mentioned in October. Along with a wide range of improvements, small features, and refinements, you can now run Xfce using either the Wayfire or Labwc Wayland compositors to manage its windows … but there are still some drawbacks, and a list of things that don’t work yet using Wayland.

Depending on the level of density of information you prefer, the project offers a high-level tour of the new features, or a slightly denser blog post from the project lead. The differences from the final development version are modest, but the full changelog is nearly 400 lines long. This is a substantial update. The team, and we quote here, “did a gazillion of bug fixes.”

The Thunar file manager is faster, especially when handling folders with large numbers of files. It allows the directory tree to be expanded and navigated in the file-list pane, like on macOS. There are new toolbar buttons and the option of GNOME-style “Client Side Decorations” – which means a combined window title bar and main toolbar. It handles small window sizes better, and has a wider choice of icons that can show more information. Screen blanking and locking have been significantly simplified. Not ground-breaking stuff, but that’s not the goal of this desktop.

As we described early last year, this version abstracts away many of the differences between displaying via X11 and Wayland, with the goal of working identically on both, as far as possible. This is exactly what we want to hear, and especially in combination with the honesty of a list of what doesn’t work yet, we found this refreshing.

For most of our purposes, X.org works just fine and does everything we want. We’ve found this regularly baffles the sort of people who get enthusiastic about Wayland. Many Wayland announcements trumpet features that this aging hack’s eyes simply can’t detect. In our book, if you can’t see a visual enhancement, or you couldn’t see the alleged problem it eliminated, then it is not only not impressive, it’s not interesting at all. This vulture has had myopia since childhood, but with glasses, his vision is 20:20 or better.

The latest Xfce on PorteuX, showing additional system info and lots more toolbar buttons in Thunar – click to enlarge

Even on our 15-year-old laptops, we don’t notice tearing in video playback or window movement, and we can’t detect high refresh rates. Despite perfect color vision, we’re perfectly happy with early-2000s twisted-nematic LCDs, because we remember late-1980s monochrome passive-matrix screens where the mouse pointer disappeared when it moved and text blurred to undifferentiated streaks when it scrolled. (We preferred a crisp green-screen CRT anyway.)

Most of the screens in the Irish Sea wing of Vulture Towers are standard-definition, because they’re good enough and much, much cheaper. Next to our 27-inch retina iMac, we have a cheap used HP M27fe on a Raspberry Pi. It’s the same size, and to us, from half a meter (18 inches) away, 1920×1080 looks about the same as 5120×2880.

So, the hype-filled announcements of triple-buffering and variable-refresh-rate rendering in GNOME version forty-whatever leave us cold: can’t see it, don’t care. Maybe a 20-year-old can see it, but we can’t. For us, functionality is what matters; we care a very great deal about having consistent keyboard controls for 100 percent of a desktop’s features, and those keystrokes better match the industry standard popularized by Microsoft Windows.

Instead of promoting graphical features that are literally invisible to me, Xfce 4.20’s announcement frankly owns up to the stuff that doesn’t work on Wayland yet. For now, the Xfce window manager xfwm4 has not been ported, so you’ll need to replace it – the developers recommend either LabWC or Wayfire. As it happens, these are the same two compositors that the Wayland-enabled Raspberry Pi OS version 5 suggested.

Other non-working features are “workspaces” (that is, virtual desktops); Xfdashboard, which provides a GNOME-style overview; Xfce4-screensaver; the Windowck Plugin, which lets a maximized window’s title bar merge with the top panel, Unity-style; and the Xkb plugin, for managing multiple keyboard layouts via XKB. The Xfce4-screenshooter screenshot tool can only do full-screen grabs for now. Multiple apps lack status icons, because they still use GtkStatusIcon, which has been deprecated since Gtk 3.14 a decade ago. Power-related keyboard functions (such as changing brightness, or suspending the system) don’t work; nor do keyboard and mouse handling in the Xfce Settings app. The project roadmap has more details. Overall, the list of missing features doesn’t sound too onerous.

Xfce has always been strong on function over form, which is just how some of us like it. Among FOSS desktop environments, it’s the sensible, slightly boring one: simple and lightweight, but not to the extent of compromising functionality or customizability.

LXDE (now in maintenance mode) is smaller, and its successor LXQt is nearly as small, but neither has anything approaching the breadth of Xfce’s options. Want a macOS or Unity-like layout with a single global menu bar? Xfce can do that. Dock instead of a taskbar? Fine. GNOME 2 or MATE-style, with twin panels? No problem. Windows 7-style icon-based taskbar? There’s a plugin for that. The optional Panel Profiles app makes it trivially easy to switch.

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Xfce doesn’t sport fancy eye-candy, but it can if you want. It doesn’t demand a powerful computer – it’s all written in compiled native code. (Compare to GNOME Shell, which is implemented in Javascript as a plugin [PDF] to the Mutter compositor.)

It’s also highly modular; for instance, this how-to on a macOS style setup discusses using the Docky and Plank docks; others replaced the panel with tint2, as used in CrunchBang++ and BunsenLabs. The Asmi distro replaces the file manager with the Cinnamon desktop’s Nemo.

This kind of modular design, where end users can swap components without any programming, is what UNIX was originally all about. We feel that it still ought to be. KDE, of course, offers a lot of choices – but primarily within its own ecosystem of components, because unlike almost every other FOSS desktop, it isn’t built on C and Gtk, but C++ and Qt instead. We feel that Xfce is a great example of what more open source should be like: small, simple, clean, and giving control to its users, without requiring them to be developers. ®

Bootnote
We suspect that some folks may link the version number of this release with humor related to cannabis consumption, although the Xfce project itself has, perhaps wisely, refrained. If you don’t know why, Know Your Meme explains all in more detail than you might expect.