Display (login) manager for XFCE and Wayland
AFAICT, XFCE uses GTK and I see GTK Wayland libraries installed. I'm currently using LightDM. What Display Manager would allow me to try out Wayland with XFCE? TIA, Jeffrey
On 14.07.2021 02:17, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
AFAICT, XFCE uses GTK and I see GTK Wayland libraries installed. I'm currently using LightDM. What Display Manager would allow me to try out Wayland with XFCE?
It has nothing to do with display manager. Display manager just queries your credentials (login/password) and starts Xfce session. Wayland needs Wayland composer - this is analogous to X11 server. Composer is the program that manages your display and it runs as part of user session. Xfce does not have any. KDE or GNOME implement Wayland composer as part of main session binary. Theoretically it is possible to use independent Wayland composer (like Weston or sway), but - you probably need to integrate it into startup sequence yourself - toolkit supporting Wayland does not mean every program using this toolkit automatically runs (at least, reasonably well) under Wayland. Look in Xfce wiki for support status. Middle ground would be to start composer and run Xfce session under Xwayland. So you still can run native Wayland applications. But it has a lot of drawbacks - Xfce can no more control hardware like display settings - interoperability between X11 and wayland applications (like copy'n'paste) - ability to perform screenshots, share screen etc is probably limited to Xwayland part unless you have some extra Wayland application which in this case runs outside of Xfce session
On 7/14/21 1:53 PM, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
On 14.07.2021 02:17, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:
AFAICT, XFCE uses GTK and I see GTK Wayland libraries installed. I'm currently using LightDM. What Display Manager would allow me to try out Wayland with XFCE?
It has nothing to do with display manager. Display manager just queries your credentials (login/password) and starts Xfce session. Wayland needs Wayland composer - this is analogous to X11 server. Composer is the program that manages your display and it runs as part of user session. Xfce does not have any. KDE or GNOME implement Wayland composer as part of main session binary.
Theoretically it is possible to use independent Wayland composer (like Weston or sway), but
- you probably need to integrate it into startup sequence yourself - toolkit supporting Wayland does not mean every program using this toolkit automatically runs (at least, reasonably well) under Wayland. Look in Xfce wiki for support status.
Middle ground would be to start composer and run Xfce session under Xwayland. So you still can run native Wayland applications. But it has a lot of drawbacks
- Xfce can no more control hardware like display settings - interoperability between X11 and wayland applications (like copy'n'paste) - ability to perform screenshots, share screen etc is probably limited to Xwayland part unless you have some extra Wayland application which in this case runs outside of Xfce session
Yeah to simplify this, the gtk libs mostly allow gtk "Client" applications to run under wayland, which means stuff like PCManFM would run in gnome / kde running wayland. To make xfce run properly under wayland you would need it to implement they wayland "Server" protocols instead of using X11 libraries, It seems the xfce project recently put together a roadmap toward starting to do this https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B
participants (3)
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Andrei Borzenkov -
Jeffrey Taylor -
Simon Lees