Xfce 4.20 Aiming For Usable Wayland Support While Maintaining X11 Compatibility

Xfce developers have updated their Wayland roadmap this week to reflect their latest plans around the Xfce 4.20 release.

The updated Xfce Wayland roadmap page now reads:

"For Xfce 4.20, the plan is, to add preliminary support to Wayland to core components without losing X11 support. This doesn't mean that by the next major release an Xfce session on Wayland will offer all existing features, but we hope it will be minimally usable. We also intend to continue refining our applications to work acceptably on Wayland (those that already work or can be made to work with low effort).
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It is not clear yet which Xfce release will target a complete Xfce Wayland transition (or if such a transition will happen at all)."

The long-term goals for Xfce on Wayland include not depending upon XWayland, using the wlroots Wayland compositor library over libmutter, and maintaining X11 compatibility for the foreseeable future. Wayland developers are leveraging wlroots for doing much of their heavy lifting.

More details on the Xfce Wayland plans can be found via the Xfce.org Wiki. The Xfce GitLab is tracking the milestone changes for Xfce 4.20. The Xfce 4.20 schedule remains "TODO" at this point.