{"id":17755,"date":"2026-06-26T11:28:23","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=17755"},"modified":"2026-06-26T11:28:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T18:28:23","slug":"xfces-wayland-preview-release-is-horribly-expectedly-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2026\/06\/26\/xfces-wayland-preview-release-is-horribly-expectedly-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"XFCE&#8217;s Wayland &#8220;Preview Release&#8221; is Horribly, Expectedly Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is a good overview of the Wayland project for XFCE which is primarily X11, X.Org (going away?) and XLibre. I personally like XFCE and have it installed on my computers along with Cinnamon and SonicDE (KDE X11 fork), though I mostly use SonicDE. Wayland is hyped as modern and more secure, though subtrafuge, as it&#8217;s more secure for less skilled coders and AI vibe coders. Wayland came from IBM\/Red Hat and is really more about agentic AI integration, and why they&#8217;ve put so much effort into killing X.Org and a propaganda campaign to get Linux moved over to Wayland, paving the way for the age verification, digital ID push underway globally. From the money wasted to politics, it&#8217;s not a good look for the XFCE project. Consequently, it&#8217;s good we can avoid the megacorp agenda driven woke projects exposing themselves in the current woke opensource climate. And it&#8217;s funny that nobody on the conservative side is even bothering to fork Gnome to support X11, as Gnome just sucks if you&#8217;re a critical thinker.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"XFCE&amp;apos;s Wayland &quot;Preview Release&quot; is Horribly, Expectedly Broken\" width=\"1290\" height=\"726\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/o9RYK7lgWP4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.spurint.org\/journal\/2026\/06\/xfwl4s-first-preview-release\">https:\/\/www.spurint.org\/journal\/2026\/06\/xfwl4s-first-preview-release<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Xfwl4&#8217;s First Preview Release<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">June 21, 2026 at 15:40<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m pleased to announce the first preview release of xfwl4, Xfce\u2019s Wayland compositor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After close to six months of work, I feel like it\u2019s ready to get some wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing features. Think of this as an alpha release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">First off, I\u2019d like to give a big thanks to the rest of the Xfce core team for offering to sponsor this work. I\u2019ve been an on-again off-again Xfce developer since 2004 (more \u201coff\u201d than \u201con\u201d, I suppose), and I consider it a great privilege to have this work sponsored, giving me the opportunity to focus solely on this project since the beginning of the year. This is also a huge thank-you to all the supporters who have generously donated to Xfce over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here are the essentials:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.xfce.org\/src\/xfce\/xfwl4\/4.21\/\"><strong>Source tarball<\/strong><\/a>. Build and install instructions are in the README. Please pay careful attention to build and runtime prerequisites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/\"><strong>Issue tracker<\/strong><\/a>. Search the issue tracker first in case someone else has already filed a similar issue. If not, and you file a new one, be sure to fill out every part of the issue template.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/\"><strong>Git repository<\/strong><\/a>. If you\u2019ve found an issue, it would be helpful if you could ensure it\u2019s still present on git main. You can also try any fixes and features I\u2019ve added since the release. Be sure to clone it with <code>--recursive<\/code>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there\u2019s a difference. In reality, of course, it won\u2019t be quite that seamless, and there\u2019s still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The issue tracker will give you a decent idea of things that are not implemented yet or are known to be broken, but here is a list of notable things that won\u2019t work, so you aren\u2019t surprised:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>The \u201cMouse and Touchpad\u201d settings dialog (but whatever settings you\u2019ve set under X11 will be applied under xfwl4) (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfce4-settings\/-\/work_items\/644\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The \u201cWorkspaces\u201d settings dialog (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwm4\/-\/work_items\/914\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Screen margins (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/37\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>xfdesktop\u2019s minimized window icon view, and the middle-click window menu (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/58\">issue<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/libxfce4windowing\/-\/work_items\/65\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Pager thumbnails in the panel (no tracking issue yet).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Taskbar apps can only change maximize\/minimize\/fullscreen state (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/58\">issue<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/libxfce4windowing\/-\/work_items\/65\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Keyboard shortcuts for application\/application-window switching (regular all-window cycling works fine) (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/43\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Most (all?) apps will not be able to restore their window positions or workspace on startup (<a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/xfwl4\/-\/work_items\/28\">issue<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/gitlab.xfce.org\/xfce\/libxfce4ui\/-\/work_items\/148\">issue<\/a>).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(This is not an exhaustive list, just a few things I thought worth calling out.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the coming weeks and months, I plan to write a blog series on how I built xfwl4. I\u2019ll update this to link each new post here as they\u2019re published. Anyhow, give it a spin!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a good overview of the Wayland project for XFCE which is primarily X11, X.Org (going away?) and XLibre. I personally like XFCE and have it installed on my computers along with Cinnamon and SonicDE (KDE X11 fork), though I mostly use SonicDE. Wayland is hyped as modern and more secure, though subtrafuge, as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17756,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17755\/revisions\/17756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}