Xfce XFCE under Wayland - first impressions

fmc000 · 2024-12-23T13:13:44+0000

I just upgraded my XFCE installation to 4.20. Good job as usual by the devs and kudos to the FreeBSD Maintainer Guido (I don't know his handle here, sorry) and to olivierd for their amazing work. As expected the standard X11 implementation runs flawlessly just out of the box, so let's talk about Wayland.

I used x11-wm/labwc as the compositor and x11/sddm is able to launch the Wayland session included in XFCE 4.20 just fine, provided that labwc can be started as a standalone WM without the help of XFCE or SDDM. After the first start you have to dedicate a couple of minutes to configure the screens (by default they are mirrored), reposition the panel and few other stuff. As expected, keybindings and mouse/touchpad properties must be defined in the labwc config file and they work perfectly under XFCE. In my experience labwc is way faster then xfwm4.

In my installation the XFCE screenshot program is able to capture ony the screen on which the program window is opened, whilst under X11 both my screens are captured. I haven't dedicated too much time to it so maybe it can be made to work the same way, I don't know.

The screenlock program xflock4 does not work under Wayland, I used x11/swaylock as a replacement and it works just fine.

If I set my main monitor refresh rate to 74.97Hz it just turns off so it looks like labwc is not able to manage two different refresh rates, at least in my case. Setting the refresh rate back to 60Hz revives it again but everything must be reconfigured from the start.

Suspend/resume seem to work just fine but sysutils/xfce4-power-manager made a mess with my monitors when trying to put them to sleep (and it failed). The order was reset to the default, the panel disappeared and few other stuff needed to be fixed again. I did not dig deep enough to understand what actually happened, for now I went back to X11 and xfwm4, I will try debug it further during the Holydays.

Also logout doesn't work, to get back to SDDM I had to issue a labwc -e command from the terminal.

Hope other people will comment here posting their impressions, tweaks and so on.

drr · 2024-12-23T23:29:32+0000

fmc000, is it possible to start the Xfce wayland session without SDDM, from the shell?

Another unrelated issue: Xfce 4.20 release notes indicates that 'About Dialog' now shows the distribution logo. It doesn't seem to be working for me; instead of FreeBSD logo, the dialog shows a PC icon.

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T05:09:34+0000

drr said:
fmc000, is it possible to start the Xfce wayland session without SDDM, from the shell?

Another unrelated issue: Xfce 4.20 release notes indicates that 'About Dialog' now shows the distribution logo. It doesn't seem to be working for me; instead of FreeBSD logo, the dialog shows a PC icon.

For the first question: I don't know, I never tried and probably never will, sorry. For the second question: it looks like the "About" dialog is looking for /usr/local/share/xfce4/vendorinfo, which is missing.

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T08:12:17+0000

I found another thing that does not work as expected: sysutils/xfce4-power-manager does not turn off the external display but only the laptop panel, therefore windows that were open on the panel are migrated to the other monitor, "the worst of both worlds". For now I disabled the display power management.

olivierd · 2024-12-24T09:21:07+0000

drr said:
fmc000, is it possible to start the Xfce wayland session without SDDM, from the shell?

Another unrelated issue: Xfce 4.20 release notes indicates that 'About Dialog' now shows the distribution logo. It doesn't seem to be working for me; instead of FreeBSD logo, the dialog shows a PC icon.

If you want FreeBSD logo in about window, you must put an image into /usr/local/share/pixmaps/ directory. Name of image must be "vendor-logo.png" (extension doesn't matter, and where "vendor" is freebsd).

You can also modify /var/run/os-release (but this is not a good idea) in order to add LOGO entry, by default this key is searched first.

/usr/local/bin/startxfce4 has an option (--wayland) for that purpose.

Code:

startxfce4 --wayland wayfire # or labwc

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T10:59:24+0000

olivierd said:
If you want FreeBSD logo in about window, you must put an image into /usr/local/share/pixmaps/ directory. Name of image must be "vendor-logo.png" (extension doesn't matter, and where "vendor" is freebsd).

Works like a charm!

drr · 2024-12-24T14:03:36+0000

Thanks fmc000 and olivierd . After installing labwc and starting seatd, I am able to launch Xfce wayland session with startxfce4 --wayland from the shell.

Keyboard shortcuts, keyboard and mouse settings and workspaces do not seem to work for me in the wayland session. Also, windows with CSD uses my gtk theme's window decoration, while other windows do not. I think labwc needs openbox themes for window decoration; I will try another gtk theme to check this.

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T14:27:26+0000

drr said:
Keyboard shortcuts, keyboard and mouse settings and workspaces do not seem to work for me in the wayland session. Also, windows with CSD uses my gtk theme's window decoration, while other windows do not. I think labwc needs openbox themes for window decoration; I will try another gtk theme to check this.

Yes to all of this. All you mentioned in Wayland is responsability of the compositor and the DE can't do anything about it. Keyboard and mouse settings are managed inside the labwc config file and I believe that workspace support is still lacking a bit in Wayland but I'm no expert in this because I don't use them.

You can download and build https://github.com/labwc/labwc-tweaks-gtk to have some sort of GUI to manage a few options.

scottro · 2024-12-24T15:23:48+0000

labwc uses $HOME/.config/labwc/rc.xml for keyboard shortcuts. Most will work like openbox ones. There is also
https://www.mankier.com/5/labwc-actions which gives all the actions, some of which differ from openbox--I don't remember which, but, for example, one works with up, down, left, and right, the other uses north, south, east, west (or something like that), the link above gives labwc's actions.

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T16:35:52+0000

fmc000 said:
Works like a charm!

Something like this:

(and yes, I'm back to X11. As the devs have said, Wayland is too experimental to be actually productive nowadays. Maybe in the future, who knows).

drr · 2024-12-24T17:21:51+0000

drr said:
I think labwc needs openbox themes for window decoration; I will try another gtk theme to check this.

This seems to require some configuration and I have not figured it yet.

In the meantime, I could get Xfce wayand session to start with wayfire from the shell with startxfce4 --wayland wayfire, after creating a ~/.config/wayfire.ini as described in the Xfce wiki. With wayfire, window decoration from xfwm works correctly on all applications, both with and without CSD.

fmc000 · 2024-12-24T17:39:29+0000

drr said:
This seems to require some configuration and I have not figured it yet.

In the meantime, I could get Xfce wayand session to start with wayfire from the shell with startxfce4 --wayland wayfire, after creating a ~/.config/wayfire.ini as described in the Xfce wiki. With wayfire, window decoration from xfwm works correctly on all applications, both with and without CSD.

It would be nice if you could post some of your impressions of using Wayfire under XFCE.

drr · 2024-12-24T18:33:46+0000

fmc000 said:
It would be nice if you could post some of your impressions of using Wayfire under XFCE.

During the short time I used it before going back to Xorg, it was very responsive and felt snappier than the previous session with labwc. The default Wayfire effects such as wobble, zoom, and the cube worked fine; I did not change any Wayfire settings.

While Xfce workspaces did not work, the Wayfire workspaces worked fine, including the overview, moving between workspaces and moving windows between workspaces. When going back to Xorg from labwc, Xfce workspaces were automatically reset to just one workspace. This did not happen with Wayfire; Xfce workspace settings were preserved in the Xorg session.

Xfce screenhooter also worked with Wayfire, though only the 'entire screen' option was available; the 'window' and 'region' options were disabled.

As I mentioned in my previous post, xfwm and CSD window decorations worked correctly under Wayfire based on my gtk theme. However, all window corners were rounded by default.

The logout icon in Xfce's whisker menu complained about dbus and a session manager not being found, and I could not figure out a command to exit Wayfire. I had to 'Alt+Ctrl+Backspace' to exit Wayfire to end the Xfce session.