Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support while Mint 22.1 polishes desktop routine

The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around, is nearly ready – and should have preliminary, "minimally usable" Wayland support. The latest release schedule for Xfce indicates that version 4.20 [insert stoner joke here] should go into feature freeze next month, for a planned release on December 15 …

[Khaptain]

"Mint 22.1 will also replace some of Ubuntu's older tools and libraries used to handle Debian packages with its own new, in-house ones, which were introduced in the August blog post."

Let's pray that we don't break anything here, up until now everything appeared to be working correctly.

"Cinnamon 6.4 will have a new dark theme "

do we honestly need yet another dark theme ?

Mint is actually my favourite distro so I am only really nitpicking.

[Uncle Slacky]

Is MATE still active?

I thought MATE development had pretty much stopped, at least that was the reason the Solus team gave for switching to XFCE. From https://getsol.us/2023/07/08/solus-4-4-released/ :

"After evaluating MATE, we have concluded that it does not have a credible and active Wayland strategy, with the project itself effectively being on life support. As such, we have decided to sunset the MATE Edition."

[druck]

Re: Is MATE still active?

And this is why I will be sticking with MATE on everything from my Raspberry Pi's to my work laptop. I really don't care if they never touch MATE on Xorg ever again, as long as I never hear they are moving to Wayland "which isn't feature complete, but has the bare minimum to get by".

[Dan 55]

Re: Is MATE still active?

They started work in October 2023, after that post from Solus.

[devin3782]

Yes you'll take more dark themes god damn it, and bloody well use them and to make sure, we'll remove your light theme so there! I don't get the dark themes personally but clearly someone does so good for them.

I'm more excited about a new version of xfce though, I love the monitor profiles if only the other desktop environments had that.

The more annoying bit is the constant buggering about cinnamon has to do because of gnome

[Neil Barnes]

Well, given that every time I try and build something enthusiastic with GTK, the bloody thing updates to a new version before I finish (ok, it's not something I do regularly, but still...)

[nightflame2]

Usability Car Crash?

Does the new XFCE default theme still have default 1 pixel to resize the window?

INHO Cinnamon and Budgie are the best desktops. Am using Ubuntu Budgie at the moment.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Usability Car Crash?

[Author here]

> Does the new XFCE default theme still have default 1 pixel to resize the window?

I didn't mention a new Xfce default theme. (I mentioned a Cinnamon one.)

I am not sure if it will have one. In fact I am not sure Xfce _has_ a default theme it passesg to distros. Let's have a look...

OK, possibly it's Greybird (as used in Xubuntu).

https://www.xfce-look.org/p/1016618/

This is an actual FAQ.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156435/how-can-i-make-windows-easier-to-resize-in-xfce

MX Linux defaults to Xfce and offers themes with thicker borders. You just need to change the _window manager theme_ and not the whole desktop's theme.

Or, you can edit the theme, or pick a different WM theme leaving the overall theme alone, which reduces the visual impact.

[Mockup1974]

>The next version of Xfce, the oldest FOSS Unix desktop environment around

Actually that would be CDE, which has been FOSS for over a decade now and is ironically the desktop that early Xfce copied (as can be seen in the linked screenshots).

[Liam Proven]

> which has been FOSS for over a decade now

That's very debatable indeed.

You know I wrote about the FOSS release, right?

https://www.theregister.com/2012/08/09/cde_goes_opensource/

But it wasn't FOSS for, what, 30 years? It only became FOSS once it was already an irrelevance, a historical artifact.

Whereas XFCE 1 and 2 were the little-known niche versions, and it is only with version 3 that it became a significant player -- but, sadly, after KDE 1 was out and thus deprived it of its rightful place as the pre-eminent FOSS xNix desktop.

Also, v3 was the first FOSS release, which abandoned XForms and thus changed its name from XFCE to Xfce because the XF didn't stand for the same thing any more.

So, yes, both proprietary early on, and both FOSS now, but one achieved fame and domination of its segment as a proprietary tool and only went FOSS after it was all over, whereas the other achieved greatness only as a FOSS tool.

Comparison: Linux was not originally GPL. It was released under its own licence:

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Linux_0.01

Only 0.12 went GPL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12

Do we talk about the great Torvalds-licensed project? No. We talk about the GPL kernel that arguably made the GPL world-significant.

[Anonymous Coward]

"concerns" ... over Gtk?

"There are concerns that the MATE and Xfce teams may need to cooperate and take over maintaining the now-obsolescent Gtk 3 code themselves"

I'm not familiar with the various graphics toolkits out in the world, I'd be hard-pressed to even name more than "GTK" and "Qt"; so I'm likewise not conversant in the interoperability issues, ongoing dev and maintenance of same, and so on.

That said, why is XFCE (and MATE?) taking over those kind of duties for the toolkit they rely on characterized as a "concern"?

Is it the simple fact of the additional workload and maintenance burden? Fork/fragmentation? (i.e. "oh, yet another toolkit...")

Those seem like valid things to understand and address, there are probably others. But if the trade-off is some measure of control over a presumably core part of your software, maybe it's worth it?

I don't follow GNOME other than ElReg articles and such (XFCE user since GNOME3), so I'm not sure what "now-obsolescent Gtk 3" means in the practical sense. "Abandonware", EOL/EOS, no bug fixing, perhaps?

Seems like XFCE (and MATE?) will probably need to find/make their own path forward eventually, as GNOME (with Red Hat & IBM) presumably have their own priorities.

[Liam Proven]

Re: "concerns" ... over Gtk?

> That said, why is XFCE (and MATE?) taking over those kind of duties for the toolkit they rely on characterized as a "concern"?

This is solely me expressing my concern.

Gtk 1 and Gtk 2 are, AFAIK, basically dead now.

MATE and Xfce moved to Gtk 3 a few versions ago, at considerable effort over a period of years.

MATE, of course, is a fork of GNOME 2.32 released in 2010.

By the time they moved to Gtk 3, the Gtk maintainers had moved on to Gtk 4.

The small MATE team is trying to maintain the entire codebase of a desktop all of whose original developers (that is, doing it as their day job) have moved on to a new version. It is literal abandonware.

MATE could potentially drop all the accessory apps and just maintain the panel, file manager etc. because there are replacements for all the other bits from other projects.

This is what is happening to Unity in Ubuntu Unity these days. Ironically in quite a few cases by moving to MATE accessories.

But Gtk has moved on and the price of moving to Gtk 4 is pretty high. No more themes for instance. Decreasing or no support for accessibility (currently anyway) and I would guess no support for title bars, menu trees, and so on as GNOME is dropping all that stuff. Gtk is discussing dropping X11 support at some point soon, too.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/05/gtk_5_might_drop_x11/

It leaves them in a bit of a pickle, but right now, with efforts to adopt Wayland and so on nobody much is discussing this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "concerns" ... over Gtk?

Liam:

Quote: "But Gtk has moved on and the price of moving to Gtk 4 is pretty high."

Yes....but why is this? Answer: because there is ABSOLUTELY NO attempt at backward compatibility in GTK4.....NONE AT ALL!

You can see what other software developers think about this by looking at the comments of the Glade team....they flatly refuse to move off GTK3.

.....and as a Glade user myself -- and someone who has looked at moving my modest amount of GTK3 software -- I sympathise.

But this screw up has a simple reason....the team who wrote GTK4, and who rammed it down everyone's throats, are the same team who ditched Gnome2 for the hideous Gnome3. This team JUST KNOW WHAT'S BEST FOR EVERYONE ELSE.......