Xfce 4.20 with experimental Wayland support released

After two years of intense development, the third major Linux desktop environment has released a new version: Xfce 4.20 is here. The major focus of this release cycle was getting Xfce ready for Wayland, and they’ve achieved quite a bit of that goal, but support for it is still experimental.

Thanks to Brian and Gaël almost all Xfce components are able to run on Wayland windowing, while still keeping support for X11 windowing.

This major effort was achieved by abstracting away any X11/Wayland windowing specific calls and making use of Wayland/Wlroots protocols. A whole new Xfce library, “libxfce4windowing” was introduced during that process. XWayland will not be required to run any of the ported Xfce components.
↫ Xfce development team

A major gap in Xfce’s Wayland support is the fact that Xfwm4 has not been ported to Wayland yet, so the team suggests using Labwc or Wayfire instead if you want to dive into using Xfce on Wayland. While there are plans to port Xfwm4 over to Wayland, this requires a major restructuring and they’re not going to set any timelines or expectations for when this will be completed. Regardless, this is an excellent achievement and solid progress for Xfce on Wayland, which is pretty much a requirement for Xfce (and other desktop environments) te remain relevant going forward.

Of course, while Wayland is a major focus this release, there’s a lot more here, too – and that’s not doing the Xfce developers justice. Xfce 4.20 comes packed with so many new features, enchancements, and bug fixes across the board that I have no idea where to start. I like the large number of changes to Thunar, like the ability to use symoblic icons in the sidebar, optimising it for small window sizes, automatically opening folders when dragging and dropping, and so much more. They’ve also done another pass to update any remaining icons not working well on HiDPI displays, removing any instances where you’d encounter fuzzy icons.

I can’t wait to give Xfce 4.20 a go once it lands in Fedora Xfce.