back to article Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

The new version of the longest-established Linux desktop is here, and at last, it's possible to use Wayland – although not everything works yet. Xfce 4.20 was released over the weekend, bang on the schedule we mentioned in October. Along with a wide range of improvements, small features, and refinements, you can now run Xfce …

  1. nematoad Silver badge

    Still?

    ...it's possible to use Wayland – although not everything works yet.

    Haven't I heard that about Wayland for a long time now?

    Not being a developer the differences between Xorg and Wayland are meaningless to me and leads me to suspect that the Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel.

    I may be wrong, I often am, but if it ain't broke why fix it?

    And yes, I know that the difficulties are probably with XFCE and not Wayland but there does seem to be a long-running thread of "This is not yet implemented in Wayland."

    1. Chubango

      Re: Still?

      >Not being a developer the differences between Xorg and Wayland are meaningless to me and leads me to suspect that the Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel.

      The Wayland people are the Xorg people and they moved on from X11 for very good reasons; security, performance, and efficiency come to mind. More importantly, individual compositors/implementations like XFCE are completely separate from what the Wayland devs are doing. More mature compositors like anything wlroots-based, Plasma, and Gnome have largely got all their affairs in order in terms of features and performance.

      I've been a full-time Wayland user for years now (using Sway) and haven't encountered any Wayland-specific issues yet.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Still?

        All of the perceived issues with X were fixable via the existing extensions framework. Keith Packard pointed this out many years ago, but those that didn't understand X sought to re-implement it ... poorly. So now it's been sixteen years, and we still don't have a standalone Wayland implementation that has anything near feature parity with what X had at the point the Wayland project began. Wayland seeks to push so much functionality into the compositor and breaks the clear distinction window managers had that it's clear the developers don't understand modularity. So now we have over a dozen Wayland compositors, none of which can be considered feature complete.

        1. Chubango

          Re: Still?

          Wayland will never have feature parity with X11 because it doesn't aim to do that. You are entitled to your opinion, of course, but the X11 developers all shifted towards Wayland and X11 has only been in maintenance for years now—I think that they know better than you or I. You are free to contribute code to extend X11 and to reform it as you wish, like with any other FLOSS project, but it seems to me that no one wishes to for very valid technical reasons.

          In the interim, I'll continue to enjoy my tear-free multimonitor setups and sane security provisions instead of the mess that is X11.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Still?

            For a project that you claim is in maintenance, it sure puts out a lot of releases:

            https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/

            Reading the announcements, there's not just fixes but continued additions to things like the "Glamor" rendering accelerator.

            1. Chubango

              Re: Still?

              Choose a random month, avoiding cherry-picking, and you'll see the substance of those releases: bug fixes and minor changes. It's somewhat telling that a large portion of those commits refer to xwayland changes and how many of those are minor changes to modules and libraries. Compare it with Wayland's releases and further look at who is involved with commits and you get a better picture of things.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Still?

                We can both play that game. The releases you allude to are mostly bug fixes and clarifications, since development of actual features has been glacial. And it's of course worth pointing out that Wayland is just an incomplete protocol specification.

                The X.Org implementation of the X Window System is very mature code. It went through a couple of big modernisations, notably the breaking into separate components rather than the monolithic repository it used to be and the conversion to modern C. (The latter produced some very interesting write ups from Thomas Dickey).

                In comparison, the multiple implementations of the Wayland protocol have been painfully slow, since there wasn't a clear plan in the first place. It was intended to replace X, but if that was the case it would surely need a decent degree of feature parity, which objectively no implementation has.

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Still?

              Wow, Alan Coopersmith is still doing a lot of those updates. Great guy all around, I had the chance to meet him a few times years ago, when his email address was still @sun.com.

              I find it almost odd that Oracle let him continue working on this, but I'm sure happy for him!

      2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Still?

        > The Wayland people are the Xorg people

        This seems to me to be very disingenuous.

        The Wayland people are, AFAICT, a bunch of mainly Red Hat developers who were _maintaining_ X.org in recent years. This does not mean that they designed it or built it, and with the typical Linux tunnel vision, it is frequently forgotten that X.org is very far from the only X11 server, even on Linux.

        X.org started out as a fork of XFree86. OpenBSD has Xenocara. NetBSD and FreeBSD have their own independent downstream forks of X.org. Every one of the dozens of proprietary UNIXes in the 1980s and 1990s had its own independent implementation, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Apple, Commodore, Atari and Acorn, as well as dozens of implementations on DOS, Windows 3 – DEC bundled Hummingbird eXceed with the PATHWORKS client and I deployed that in production -- Windows 9x, Windows NT, OS/2, QNX, BeOS, Haiku, RISC OS, and I would not at all be surprised on AmigaOS and ST TOS or at least MINT.

        X11 is one of the most widely-adopted industry standards there is. More very different computers running different OSes talk X11 than can read a .DOC file. There are probably more wildly different systems that can run an X server than can run some form of Vi or Emacs. More different CPU platforms from more vendors than have ever run all releases of DOS and Windows put together.

        One bunch of guys landed with the job of maintaining the main FOSS Linux version got tired of it and decided to do their own thing.

        Because of industry inertia, they have ended up owning the www.X.org website and being the people who run the standard, yes, but that's because proprietary paid Unix has collapsed and died. Nobody else bothered, the same as Mercedes and Audi and Ford don't cooperate on a website and a standards body for wheels.

        OF COURSE they all have wheels. They all design and make and fix wheels, they work with tyre companies, but you don't tend to find excited press releases about the radical new invention from the biggest maker of... the wheel.

        Wayland is not "the people who designed X11 decided to go in a new direction."

        Wayland is "the people who maintain wheels at Ford have decided to try a new type of solid tyre."

        Yes, there are advantages to solid tyres. But there also a lot of advantages to pneumatic tyres, which is why the whole world uses them, _despite of punctures happening_.

        And they forgot that although they make more cars than anyone, as well as their tin boxes with solid metal car wheels, there are also trains -- no tyres at all -- and bicycles and trucks and aeroplanes and prams and skateboards and roller-blades. They all need wheels as an integral component, they're all different, and they all need different types of wheel, most but not all with some kind of tyre, and what this car maker is doing is totally irrelevant and unimportant to them.

        Besides that, we're talking about one American manufacturer, and let's not forget VW here. (From a quick Google, the biggest car maker. I could be wrong. Only an example.)

        In this context: we're talking about Red Hat, and it is outsold 10x over by Apple machines (with no X11 as stock) and Apple Macs are outsold 10x over by Chromebooks (no X11 as stock).

        It is absolutely critical to consider the bigger picture.

        Red Hat is loud because it is rich (and American), but there are 10x as many Debian users as Red Hat and all its variants. And all of Linux is a rounding error in the world market for general-purpose desktop/laptop xNix computers with a FOSS basis.

        (Servers being largely irrelevant when it comes to Wayland.)

        1. MacroRodent
          Happy

          Re: Still?

          > Every one of the dozens of proprietary UNIXes in the 1980s and 1990s had its own independent implementation, including Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, Apple, Commodore, Atari and Acorn, as well as dozens of implementations on DOS, Windows 3

          I don't think the Unix versions were independent, just MIT X11 + whatever "value-added" the vendor wanted to add (often some proprietary desktop environment). DEC by the way added X11 to VAX/VMS and called it DECWindows, but it was still MIT X11 underneath.(DEC was also one of the major contributors to early X11). I actually at one time ran a remote DECWindows terminal window from a Unix workstation when I needed a session at the VAX, but that was a bit rude way of doing it, because of larger resource usage compared to a telnet session. So being a terminally nice guy I stopped doing it when I realised this.

          1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

            Re: Still?

            I just stole myself a VaxStation. Actually pretty fancy for its day, and it ran VMS & DECwindows. I suppose I could've tried to get it admission to the cluster, but after fighting with DeathNet Phase V I decided that was quite enough faffing about for one lifetime.

        2. Steve Graham

          Re: Still?

          So Wayland is the TRX wheel? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_TRX

        3. ovation1357

          Re: Still?

          Absolutely 100% spot on! I really wish Red Hat would kindly disappear up its own arse and stop letting a bunch of arrogant babies screw up everybody else's desktop because they think their way is superior.

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: Still?

      "at last, it's possible to use Wayland"

      wheeee...

      "Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel."

      The way POETTERING re-invented audio and init

      1. David 132 Silver badge

        Re: Still?

        >"Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel."

        > The way POETTERING re-invented audio and init

        AKA Poettering says, "the wheel is now triangular. But it WORKS FOR ME because my road surfaces are contoured perfectly to match and give a smooth ride with it. #WONTFIX. New in my Wheel v251.0: wheel now controls braking, signalling, and all fuel-delivery-related functions. Because I know better than anyone else."

        1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

          Re: Still?

          Thanks, I just stabbed myself in the face with the tweezers because I was laughing so much.

          1. David 132 Silver badge
            Happy

            Re: Still?

            Do you uh, often read the Reg whilst using tweezers? Shouldn’t you be concentrating on the anaesthetised patient in front of you?

            1. Vometia has insomnia. Again.

              Re: Still?

              More a case of plucking my eyebrows, which sadly don't pluck themselves. A pertinent question might be why I was trying to multitask when I know I'm barely even a single-tasking system.

    3. RAMChYLD

      Re: Still?

      > but if it ain't broke why fix it?

      Because X is designed for over-the-network use with thin client X Terminals instead of locally. As a result there are plenty of layers to contend with, and thus incurs latency which isn't great for gaming (in theory, but in practice I couldn't really tell the difference except games tend to cause my screen to fill up with garbage for a few seconds when launching).

      Wayland is designed for a more traditional local hardware use. So the latency should be way less.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        Re: Still? @RAMChYLD

        X11 predates X-Terminals by quite a long way. It actually goes back to when you would have a full function workstation on your desk, and other distant systems that you may have wanted to run graphical programs on. The premise was that you could run your graphical applications on your big and very expensive servers that were centrally controlled, and display it on your workstations, which may still have been expensive, but were cheaper than the central systems. And to cap it all, you didn't need to have like systems as both distant and near. As long as they both understood X11, it would work.

        X-Terminals came along when it became possible to create an appliance which would run the X11 protocol at a more affordable price than a full blown workstation. But in the early days, the cost of a reasonable monitor was the lions share of the cost of deploying an X-Terminals.

        X11 is not as inefficient as you might think. The shared-memory transport when running the client and server on the same system is actually pretty efficient, and bypasses the network completely. But the X model of display, where clients could not directly manipulate the fonts and frame buffer that the server could use did not suit a certain type of application developer, because they had to pay attention to the fonts that the Server had, and use the graphic primitives that X provided, rather than just drawing directly into the frame buffer (which is what a lot of PC application developers did in the early days). If they could have bothered to properly learn how X worked, rather than just trying to hammer a square shaped block into a round hole, they would have found that provided you could accept the limitations, X was incredibly efficient.

        So instead, they just constructed pixmaps in the client processes memory, and then blitted 100's or 1000's of KB of data across the transport layer. It's not surprising that THEIR clients were slow!

        X11 has many flaws, security being one of them that was never fixed in the core protocol. But many of these these were fixable, and a lot of barriers were overcome (like the extensions that allow video to run more efficiently when the client and server were on the same system). But it's interesting that people are having to re-invent the wheel when it comes to running remote clients, which many people still want (me included). Waypipe looks a lot like the running X11 through an SSH tunnel, only in a more complicated way.

        Also, for me, still running on heterogeneous estates where legacy UNIX systems will NEVER get wayland clients, without the nod to X11 that is Xwayland, it will never really fly.

      2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

        Re: Still?

        I just discovered X11 forwarding in ssh. It's works as a kind of remote access, putting windows from one session in another. Modern apps that don't realise this is going on can max out your LAN link, but it does work!

    4. TVU

      Re: Still?

      "This is not yet implemented in Wayland."

      Indeed, and it reminds me of a very relevent comment from another forum:

      "You failed to read the fine print at the bottom of all the wayland promises over the past 12 years:

      "It will improve your performance. Next year. Or the year after that. Or maybe the year after that. If you have the right hardware. And the right desktop. On certain tasks with certain apps. Maybe. Depends on the alignment of the stars and the moon, and if Jupiter is in the 2nd house"."

    5. gfx

      Re: Still?

      Wacom support in Wayland is not trouble free. I usually try Wayland with every major update but switch back to X11 after encountering something that doesn't click nicely.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh

    Wayland is still a big DONTCARE for me, at least as long as X11 support is still there because I'm not gonna run Wayland. X over SSH is just too useful to lose.

    I do wish somebody would build a distro with the ACTUAL industry standard GUI with proper key commands as defined by Apple in Human Interface Guidelines - the REAL HIG, before the dock showed up and ruined them. The menu bar belongs at the top of the screen, the trash can belongs in the bottom right corner, and the control key ALREADY HAD A FUNCTION before Micro$loth co-opted it instead of using a proper command key.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Meh

      > I do wish somebody would build a distro with the ACTUAL industry standard GUI with proper key commands as defined by Apple in Human Interface Guidelines

      Oh *hell* yes.

      I was sure I remembered seeing one, in the '90s, called "Sparta" or "Scorpio" or something, but I can't find a trace of it now. I even Asked HN:

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29937562

      Zilch.

      It was a relatively small UI in a small OS. The original fitted onto a 400kB boot disk with a bit of room to spare. How hard could it be?

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Thumb Up

        Re: Meh

        Buried in an obscure folder deep in my NAS, not quite in the metaphorical locked filing cabinet behind a "beware of the leopard" sign, but close... I have a PDF copy of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines document from 1987. I refer to it quite often. It is surprising how much of it is still relevant - and depressing how little of it seems to still be in the industry's muscle-memory.

    2. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

      Re: Meh

      GNOME actually had a proper set of Human Interface Guidelines back in version 2.x. When Sun Microsystems opted for GNOME to replace the clunky Common Desktop Environment, they put a lot of work into documentation, just as they had done back in the days of their Open Look interface (I still have both volumes of those guidelines in my bookshelf). Sadly GNOME 3.x broke with those guidelines and we ended up with the horrors of the GNOME Shell and things like "client side decorations".

      1. ovation1357

        Re: Meh

        Exactly. What we get now is, frankly, awful. I don't really care what the GNOME 3 / Shell desktop environment does in its own bubble, but I'm furious that they're leaking nasty UI changes which break most other desktops.

    3. ovation1357

      Re: Meh

      When you say "the menu bar belongs at the top of the screen", if you mean like it is/was in macOS then I'm going to politely and very strongly disagree with you because each window should have its own menu bar and not just one bar which switches context based on the window in focus (which might be a very long way away from the top of the screen and thus a big chore for a mouse user).

      However I'm a big advocate of user choice and I'll defend your right to have it the way you prefer so long as it's customisable and I can still have my menus where I want them.

      This is the killer problem with GNOME and Wayland's ecosystem: All choice is being squeezed out and their interpretation of The One True Interface is being slowly forced onto everybody.

      In my world CSDs are a terrible thing and buttons embedded in title bars are an abomination - I could live with them being an option but now they're irrevocably baked into a lot of core libraries and utilities used across all distros and have ruined the UI in great desktops like XDFC and MATE

  3. corb

    I'll wait for XFWM4 to move to Wayland. I agree that when I use Wayland on a desktop it doesn't offer me an obvious advantage. But, I spend most of my time pushing the cursor around with a laptop touchpad, not using keyboard shortcuts. Gnome and KDE feel more fluid on Wayland than X11. But, since I use XFCE, that matters little to me. (For what it's worth, XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon -- all X11 -- feel faster on their Fedora spins than on their Ubuntu and Mint counterparts.)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Swings and roundabouts

    Wayland does some things better than X11. X11 does some things better than Wayland. Neither does everything. Cue yet another *nix bitchfight.

    I always irritate commentards when I assert - from hard experience in places I do not care to dwell on - that a true secure remote desktop must run a graphical service on the server in the secure zone and run a rendering client on the user device. How to annoy both camps at the same time!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Swings and roundabouts

      > run a rendering client on the user device

      What? You want to keep building up and tearing down the rendering engine within client processes that come and go?

      And if you don't have one display server at the User's device, how are you ever going to provide a coherent experience, providing a way for a client process (e.g. a word processor) to have its output moved across monitors, between graphics cards, let alone interact consistently with the outputs from other clients (e.g. a spreadsheet)?

      Or, by "secure remote desktop", do you mean we must always be limited to something that looks/behaves like RDP or VNC, or even just an old fashioned remote terminal, effectively little more than a really long VGA cable to a port on the mainframe?[1]

      [1] ok, mixing my hardware metaphors a bit, but how many would remember the names (numbers!) of the old terminal cards in the big box and a long lead to the green screen and keyboard on your desk?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Swings and roundabouts

        > You want to keep building up and tearing down the rendering engine

        Stop bullshitting and start thinking.

        Maybe, just maybe, the paradigm is similar to say a web browser, where the browser initiates the connection and the server then send it a stream which the client browser renders. Not that HTML has proved a wise choice for the desktop GUI, but I don't want to make this too complicated for you.

        But of course, I have already upset you, so you'll downvote this too.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Swings and roundabouts

          Downvoted for being needlessly rude and abusive to the OP.

          A simple “no, that’s not what I was implying, let me clarify” would have been infinitely more mature. But hey, this is the Internet, so casual rudeness to strangers is de rigeur I suppose.

  5. weladenwow

    I use Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon Desktop. For the last three years as volunteer Sec for a mens shed. It's brilliant. It works. It's x11. It's updated continuously. On my 10-year old HP with 16 G and 2Tb it keep going with many tasks in a very usable way. I'm sure that when Wayland desktops can equal that, I will be as happy as I am now. When. It will take a long time I believe, and will be xwayland on Wayland for a long time. Hand-crafting text Configs is not my bag. Doing documents, e-mails, PDFs,

    That's my bag.

    What's yours?

  6. keithpeter Silver badge
    Pint

    Gradualist

    Slackware64 live iso generated today has xfce 4.20. Works fine under X11. Wayland session a bit of a mixed bag on a low spec core duo test machine, panel crashing because I added widgets that are not yet compatible (as mentioned in OA) and so on.

    Icon: I like gradual changes and loose coupled modules.

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: Gradualist

      Core Duo - ah yes, the processor Intel would rather we all forgot.

      Core 2 Duo was where things started to get interesting after the nightmare that was the late-stage P4P microarchitecture ("150W heat dissipation for a desktop CPU? No problem! We'll just spec bigger heatsinks!"). I still fondly remember the rave reviews on Hexus.net and elsewhere when C2D/Conroe launched.

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: Gradualist

        Ah, its a Thinkpad X61s so a core 2 duo processor, well spotted.

        Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 1.6 GHz. It copes with Plasma 5 surprisingly well from the Slackware64 current live iso. I'll try a 'pure wayland' plasma session for lutz later on.

        Seriously: I can still get some use out of an ancient laptop using software that is free. Not bad eh?

        1. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

          Re: Gradualist

          The X3100 graphics in the X61 is quite a limited chipset, it may be a bit slow. Although mine did cope fine with both Windows Vista and 7 so it'll probably be OK.

  7. jaypyahoo

    Plus it works well with all BSDs

  8. Kingneutron

    NO virtual desktops??

    If it doesn't support virtual desktops, it's useless to me. XFCE is my primary WM and I respect their work, but I wouldn't even have bothered to release it yet without VD support.

    1. Yankee Doodle Doofus Bronze badge

      Re: NO virtual desktops??

      They state very clearly that the Wayland support is experimental. Consider it a beta (or even alpha) release, meant to help find issues with what is currently there. If it's not suitable for daily use by you, then don't use it.

  9. BinkyTheMagicPaperclip Silver badge

    Labwc still has issues last time I looked

    I switched to Labwc under FreeBSD because I figured I should check out Wayland instead of carrying on using Xorg. Mostly it's been fairly painless, but this browsing box is mostly used for Firefox, Libreoffice, and 'Xterms' (alacrittys) so not exactly stressing the system.

    Labwc does not have support for manipulating layers, so if you start a clock it can't be moved! It's OK as a compositor, but I don't like it as much as the cwm window manager I used on X. Just spent another ten minutes fruitlessly attempting to move a wlclock instance. There's a reference to 'sway move to' which a) I can't find and b) this isn't sway. Also references that it's a security feature - I don't care, I need to click on a clock and move it to where I want. As a result I'm using a physical clock instead, which is frankly ridiculous.

    Still, it's better than Hikari, FreeBSD's preferred Wayland compositor. Because the Wayland compositor design is fundamentally broken, it's lacking support for several of the more recent Wayland protocols.

    What Wayland needs is :

    One compositor.

    A model where everything can be built on that compositor, from complex desktop environments to single developer coded window managers

    Shared library based design so support for new protocols flows down from the base functionality, to whatever complex additions have been added by other people to make it their own product

    Standardised configuration file, at least to perform initial hardware setup, additional configuration for desktop features can be in other files.

    As it stands the 'reference' Weston compositor runs on Linux and.. more Linux. Not much of a reference if it isn't tested elsewhere! The wlroots compositor library helps develop your own compositor but protocol updates in wlroots do not automatically pass through to the custom compositor.

    Then there's the custom config file. Want to do notable things with multiple monitors? You can in Weston. Not in Labwc though, have to start the compositor and then run appropriate programs to call the relevant Wayland protocol, to manipulate monitors. This is manageable (labwc has an autostart config file) but again there's no standardisation, at least in Xorg everyone customised xorg.conf.

  10. John_Ericsson

    The worst case scenario is going to happen. Both wayland and Xorg are going to have to be installed side by side for decades to come. Wayland is a vanity project. They pride themselves in doing it their way with little regard for real world needs

  11. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

    XFCE borders

    Have they fixed the 1-pixel-wide borders on windows yet? At the moment, resizing a window is a hand-to-eye co-ordination test.

    1. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Re: XFCE borders

      Have they fixed the "x.org crashes if you try to display a large font" bug?

      Open the word process orf your choice. Type "Experiment" and make it a nice big font to save time. 72pt, say. Zoom in the page view a couple of times. Wait for x.org to restart and log in again.

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Windows

        Re: XFCE borders

        LibreOffice: doesn't crash but the letters stop rendering in black after about 250% or so on my particular screen/version.

        In Impress put a text box on a slide and drawing some objects near it: letters disappear around 280% zoom from 72point word, drawing objects stay visible. With a filled object (rhombus) behind the text box you can see the text box letters as white filled shapes in front. At around 2000+% zoom the text box letters start to be rendered in black again.

        Where do you start with that one! Doesn't affect Inkscape, Atril or gv so specific to how office programs render?

    2. gfx

      Re: XFCE borders

      Try the Alt key with the right mouse button it resizes. Alt - left mouse button moves the window.

      Windows key + arrows/keys on the numpad moves a window to different half of a screen. (tiling)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks for all the guppies

    I just ran up the latest raspbian, which now features wayland, on a new small monitor. No matter what I scaled the config, I couldn't read many of the menus etc. So I put x back on and bingo, can read everything and scale to my desires. So I am apprehensive about waylands mass adoption.

    XFCE has been on my x61 too. It's an old and heavily used tiny beast. I've since adopted it on all my machines. It works well enough and it's easy on the resources. The x61 can't handle the new 6x kernels, so this is its last year in my radio shack :( A new "mini PC" will take the x61's place, I doubt it will live anywhere as long as this old x61.

    I hope the new release will LET ME USE SECOND MONITOR ON MY LEFT! Gaahhhhh

    Like the author mentioned, I am not in this for eye candy. I really just want it to work well. I hope the folks at Mint will step lightly into these waters.

    Regards!

  13. GNU Enjoyer
    Angel

    I'd just like to interject for a moment

    It's a Xorg/X11 desktop environment, considering that Linux does not operate on its own; https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/init/main.c#n1522 and Xfce4 works on many OS's that have Xorg, from systemd/Linux, to GNU/Linux to the BSDs (GNU/Hurd when?).

    Xfce4 isn't an OS, isn't proprietary and will not pass the proprietary POSIX compliance tests and therefore wouldn't qualify for the Unix trademark (unless you were to pay the trademark holders enough to get a pass).

    >Among FOSS desktop environments

    Xfce4 is free software, with some libraries dual licensed GPLv2-or-later & LGPL-2 (or 2.1)-or-later and most programs licensed GPLv2-or-later.

    I enjoy xfce4 as it tends to work (until updates break it and then well you just recompile every xfce4 package, which doesn't take too long).

  14. ovation1357

    > There are new toolbar buttons and the option

    > of GNOME-style "Client Side Decorations"

    No, No, NO! Stop it now!

    GNOME 3 is a horrible, retrograde step and these UI horrors such as "hamburger" menus and other buttons embedded into massive Title bars need to be vigorously opposed in other desktops and GTK3+ applications.

    This kind of UI might be great on a touchscreen device but it's horrific for mouse+keyboard users and allowing it to become the norm on non-gnome desktops is a really bad thing (sadly the rot began quite a few years ago and is now almost impossible to reverse).

    If XFCE wants to drink the so-called Kool Aid of Wayland and include compatibility with it then so be it, but even in the X11 versions they've already accepted hamburger menus and CSDs which is a huge letdown to their core user base, who I believe are mainly power users who want a functional and stable DE without gimmicks and with long-term stable UI standards.

    I'm a MATE user myself as I find XFCE a little too minimal for my needs but I'm in the same boat with many of the utilities and core software introducing weird touch-centric UI changes which aren't optional or configurable. It really sucks right now.

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