Xfce’s new Wayland compositor, xfwl4, has received its second preview release, version 4.21.1, less than two months after the initial 4.21 preview in June.
The first release allowed wider testing but lacked several features users expect from the Xfce desktop. With 4.21.1, development has progressed, adding missing capabilities and fixing many issues found during early testing.
Among the more visible additions is support for horizontal and vertical window maximization. The compositor can now switch between windows of the same application or application leader using dedicated shortcuts.
Regarding input handling, touchscreens can now be assigned to a specific monitor, and pointer devices support rotation and reflection. Additionally, keyboard-controlled window movement and resizing now support key repeat, making these operations behave more naturally when a key is held down.
Window management received many fixes. These cover focus handling after minimizing windows or switching workspaces, focus-follows-mouse behavior, popup grabs, modal dialogs, window stacking, parent-child relationships, and focus restoration after using the window menu.
The compositor is now stricter about which windows can be minimized or focused and properly updates window capabilities when application hints change. Client-side decorated windows are handled more accurately, with server-side decoration buttons hidden when not applicable.
At the same time, X11 compatibility continues to improve. xfwl4 4.21.1 adds support for X11 window icons via WM_HINTS and uses Motif window manager hints. It also implements X11 unminimize requests and fixes several issues involving override-redirect windows, restacking, focus handling, and window removal.
Minimization behavior has also received improvements. Sticky windows now correctly apply minimize and restore operations across all workspaces, minimized windows retain their output information, and restoring a window brings back its child windows where appropriate.
On top of that, the release also introduces improved handling for unresponsive applications. xfwl4 can ping XDG clients when a close request is issued and, if the application does not respond within three seconds, offer to terminate it. An unresponsive-window dialog appears only if the affected application is still running.
Screen capture support has been improved through several fixes to the wlr-screencopy implementation. These include correct cursor handling, damage events, timestamps, offsets, image flipping, and support for BGR pixel formats.
Window icons and previews received additional work, with xfwl4 now sending correctly sized previews and icons, improving scaling, fixing parsing of X11 _NET_WM_ICON data, and uses a consistent premultiplied ARGB32 format internally.
Session handling has matured with a new --session option that allows xfwl4 to launch a specified command at startup. The compositor can start a D-Bus session bus if none is available and terminate it on shutdown if it started it.
Other changes include fixes for the Wayland session-lock protocol, lock screen rendering, keyboard shortcut inhibition, layer-shell focus and tooltip placement, server-side decoration state, Num Lock restoration, and workspace activation state.
Finally, keep in mind that xfwl4 is still a preview project and is not yet intended to replace Xfce’s long-standing X11 window manager, xfwm4, for everyday use.
