It’s no secret that the days of X11 are largely behind us. It has been replaced by Wayland, which is now the default display server for almost all major desktop environments. One notable exception is Xfce, which still relies on X11, but that, too, looks set to change later this year. Why do I say that?
The Xfce development team has announced plans to build a native Wayland compositor, xfwl4, written in Rust. The work is being funded directly through community donations and led by longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone.
According to the project, a substantial portion of its donated funds will be allocated to xfwl4’s development. The goal is to provide a Wayland compositor that behaves as closely as possible to xfwm4, preserving the familiar Xfce window management experience while adapting to Wayland’s architectural realities.
It’s important to note that xfwl4 is not a port or refactor of xfwm4. Instead, it is being written entirely from scratch. Earlier attempts to extend xfwm4 to support both X11 and Wayland in parallel were ultimately abandoned.
Xfce devs say another factor behind the rewrite is the fundamental mismatch between some X11 window-management concepts and the Wayland protocol. Certain behaviors simply do not exist under Wayland, and working around those differences inside an X11-first codebase proved impractical.
In addition to achieving feature parity with xfwm4, the xfwl4 roadmap includes broader architectural changes across the Xfce stack. Session startup will be restructured so the compositor becomes the root of the Wayland session, replacing the current role of xfce4-session.
Support for the xdg-session-management protocol is planned, along with integration with XWayland to maintain compatibility with X11 applications.
Development on xfwl4 is already underway, and the Xfce team says a first development release is expected around the middle of the year. Source code and design discussions are publicly available. For more information, see the announcement.
