Wayland and Xfce

[Andrzej]

On 24/03/2022 15:54, David Rosenstrauch wrote:
> Just curious what's the latest with XFCE 4.18 plans?  I looked at the 
> release roadmap (https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.18/roadmap) but it 
> looks like no updates since about a year ago.  Plus I see the comment 
> below about nobody currently working on the wayland roadmap.  Is a 
> 4.18 release still planned at some point?
>
It is ultimately up to active contributors (so, not me) to decide what 
whey want to work on.

My own opinion is Xfce should avoid Wayland. As of now, it provides 
little value and changes required to support it would be very damaging 
to the experience of existing Xfce4 users. Basically all of xfwm4, 
xfdesktop4, xfce4-notifyd, xfce4-panel and most of its plugins would 
have to be forked and combined in a single shell-like executable. That 
is doable but it should really be done separately and under a different 
project name to avoid a situation similar to Gnome2->3 transition.

A bigger question is what to do with Gtk4. It has a larger and more 
immediate impact on the project than Wayland. Gtk is becoming unusable 
to 3rd-party (non-Gnome) projects and the trend is accelerating. We 
could, just like we have done it with Gtk2->3 transition, wait a few 
years and hope Gtk4 will mature to something more stable and less tied 
to Gnome (unlikely to happen this time). IMO a better approach would be 
to come together with Mate and Cinnamon developers and co-maintain Gtk3. 
In a medium/long term that would require less work than porting all of 
Xfce4 to new Gtk versions and dealing with incompatibilities and removed 
features.

Thanks,

Andrzej