Xfce 4.20 has been released on Tumbleweed

Hi there, we are pleased to announce that we have finished our work on making Xfce 4.20 ready to be used on Factory/Tumbleweed. One of the next snapshots for Tumbleweed will bring it to you. The new release is a major release which will bring new features, but also several bugfixes. A major effort in this release is the introduction of Wayland experimental support; since Xfce does not (yet) have its own compositor, you'll get "labwc" installed when you try out the new package xfce4-session-wayland-experimental Please note that this really is only an experimental package - it is by no means ready for your daily work! If you give it a try, we'd appreciate if you tell us your experience on xfce@lists.opensuse.org ! For a detailed list of changes between Xfce 4.18 and 4.20 please take a look at the following blog: <https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html> Yours sincerly, the openSUSE Xfce team

Dear Manfred, Thanks for providing Xfce 4.20 to TW! According to the discussion in the openSUSE Forum, https://forums.opensuse.org/t/xfce-installation-query/181575/8, people lost their Wayland session when switching from the Xfce repo to TW, since xfce4-session-wayland-experimental isn't being pulled in automatically. Is this on purpose? Thank you! Best regards, Frank

Hi Frank, On Mon, 06 Jan 2025, 00:05:43 +0100, Frank Krüger via openSUSE Factory wrote:
Dear Manfred,
Thanks for providing Xfce 4.20 to TW! According to the discussion in the openSUSE Forum, https://forums.opensuse.org/t/xfce-installation-query/181575/8, people lost their Wayland session when switching from the Xfce repo to TW, since xfce4-session-wayland-experimental isn't being pulled in automatically.
Are you saying that people had xfce4-session-wayland-experimental installed from X11:xfce when they switched to Tumbleweed using something like this: sudo zypper dup --allow-vendor-change
Is this on purpose? Thank you!
It is definitely not on purpose, but, to be honest, we thought if someone is brave enough to try out the experimental thing, they probably install that package manually. Can you please clarify if the package got removed during the switch? If so, that would definitely be a bug!
Best regards, Frank
Cheers. l8er manfred

Hello, Manfred Hollstein wrote:
Hi Frank,
On Mon, 06 Jan 2025, 00:05:43 +0100, Frank Krüger via openSUSE Factory wrote:
Dear Manfred, Thanks for providing Xfce 4.20 to TW! According to the discussion in the openSUSE Forum, https://forums.opensuse.org/t/xfce-installation-query/181575/8, people lost their Wayland session when switching from the Xfce repo to TW, since xfce4-session-wayland-experimental isn't being pulled in automatically. Is this on purpose? Thank you! It is definitely not on purpose, but, to be honest, we thought if someone is brave enough to try out the experimental thing, they probably install that package manually. Can you please clarify if the package got removed during the switch? If so, that would definitely be a bug! Best regards, Frank Cheers.
Correct because it's still an experimental feature, we didn't want to add a dependency to the new xfce4-session-wayland-experimental thinking people should just install this manually. We could add it as a soft dependency with Recommends: xfce4-session-wayland-experimental in the xfce4-session package, but does it really make sense at this stage? Regarding the issue, switching vendor should not remove a package that is already installed. xfce4-session-wayland-experimental simply pulls labwc and xwayland which are needed for the Wayland session to load. Maurizio

13.01.2025 11:15, Maurizio Galli wrote:
Regarding the issue, switching vendor should not remove a package that is already installed. xfce4-session-wayland-experimental simply pulls labwc and xwayland which are needed for the Wayland session to load.
It turned out user on forums used X11:xfce:rat which does even have this package.

The libexo 4.20 RPM reintroduced a dependency on perl-URI which was removed from the 4.18 RPM back in May. Could it be removed? Thanks,

On Mon, 06 Jan 2025, 22:08:16 +0100, stephane.billiart@gmail.com wrote:
The libexo 4.20 RPM reintroduced a dependency on perl-URI which was removed from the 4.18 RPM back in May. Could it be removed?
Will be fixed when this SR gets accepted: <https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1235525> Cheers. l8er manfred

Hello Manfred Many thanks to all for all the effort put into this! The wayland support might be critical for Leap 16, depending on whether SLES folks drop Xorg completely or not. Feature for SLES 16 being Wayland only exists for quite a while, but the implementation is lacking. Lubos On Tue, Dec 31, 2024 at 12:48 PM Manfred Hollstein <mhollstein@t-online.de> wrote:
Hi there,
we are pleased to announce that we have finished our work on making Xfce 4.20 ready to be used on Factory/Tumbleweed. One of the next snapshots for Tumbleweed will bring it to you.
The new release is a major release which will bring new features, but also several bugfixes. A major effort in this release is the introduction of Wayland experimental support; since Xfce does not (yet) have its own compositor, you'll get "labwc" installed when you try out the new package
xfce4-session-wayland-experimental
Please note that this really is only an experimental package - it is by no means ready for your daily work! If you give it a try, we'd appreciate if you tell us your experience on xfce@lists.opensuse.org !
For a detailed list of changes between Xfce 4.18 and 4.20 please take a look at the following blog:
<https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html>
Yours sincerly, the openSUSE Xfce team
-- Best regards Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager

Hi Lubos, On Tue, 07 Jan 2025, 12:15:22 +0100, Lubos Kocman via openSUSE Factory wrote:
Hello Manfred
Many thanks to all for all the effort put into this!
Sure, no problem!
The wayland support might be critical for Leap 16, depending on whether SLES folks drop Xorg completely or not. Feature for SLES 16 being Wayland only exists for quite a while, but the implementation is lacking.
TBH, I wouldn't recommend SUSE dropping Xorg in favour of Wayland for Xfce! The package is called "xfce4-session-wayland-experimental" for a reason... ;-)
Lubos
Cheers. l8er manfred

07.01.2025 16:20, Manfred Hollstein wrote:
The wayland support might be critical for Leap 16, depending on whether SLES folks drop Xorg completely or not. Feature for SLES 16 being Wayland only exists for quite a while, but the implementation is lacking.
TBH, I wouldn't recommend SUSE dropping Xorg in favour of Wayland for Xfce! The package is called "xfce4-session-wayland-experimental" for a reason... ;-)
Xfce is not even part of SLE (it is available via package hub). So, if SLE will drop Xorg support, there is not much you can do. I suppose, Xorg will have to become available via package hub too if you want/need it.

As said, it was requested but no work was done on it. If that's still the case until April (Beta), we will simply keep Xorg. Agama install media is still using Xorg as an example. Lubos On Tue, Jan 7, 2025 at 2:25 PM Andrei Borzenkov <arvidjaar@gmail.com> wrote:
07.01.2025 16:20, Manfred Hollstein wrote:
The wayland support might be critical for Leap 16, depending on whether
SLES
folks drop Xorg completely or not. Feature for SLES 16 being Wayland only exists for quite a while, but the implementation is lacking.
TBH, I wouldn't recommend SUSE dropping Xorg in favour of Wayland for Xfce! The package is called "xfce4-session-wayland-experimental" for a reason... ;-)
Xfce is not even part of SLE (it is available via package hub). So, if SLE will drop Xorg support, there is not much you can do. I suppose, Xorg will have to become available via package hub too if you want/need it.
-- Best regards Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager
participants (6)
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Andrei Borzenkov
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Frank Krüger
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Lubos Kocman
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Manfred Hollstein
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Maurizio Galli
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stephane.billiart@gmail.com