Ubuntu Budgie Switches to an Xfce Approach to Wayland

Last January the Register reported that the Budgie desktop environment was planning to switch from using GNOME to Enlightenment. But this week Budgie's project lead David Mohammed and packaging guru Sam Lane 'passed on news of a rift — and indeed possible divorce — between Budgie and Enlightenment,' the Register reported. 'And it's caused by Wayland.'

The development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie's Wayland future...

While Enlightenment does have some Wayland support, in the project's own words this is 'still considered experimental and not for regular end users.' Mohammed told us... 'Progress though towards a full implementation currently doesn't fit into the deemed urgent nature to move to Wayland (Red Hat dropping further X11 development, and questions as to any organisation stepping up, etc.)'

So, instead, Budgie is exploring different ways to build a Wayland-only environment. For now, as we mentioned when looking at Ubuntu's 23.10 release, there's a new windowing library, Magpie. Magpie 0.9 is what the project describes as 'a soft-fork of GNOME's mutter at version 43' — the term soft fork meaning it's a temporary means to an end, rather than intended to form an on-going independent continuation.

For the future, though, Mohammed told us... '[T]he Budgie team has been evaluating options to move forward. XFCE are doing some really great work in this area with libxfce4windowing — a compatibility layer bridging Wayland and X11, allowing the move in a logical direction without needing a big-bang approach. To date, most of the current codebase has already been reworked and is ready for a Wayland-only approach without impacting further development and enhancements.'
Mohammed later told the Register, 'It makes sense for the more dynamic smaller projects to work together where there are shared aims.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.