xfwl4: Xfce's Wayland Compositor

xfwl4 will be Xfce's Wayland compositor.

It is currently heavily under development. While many xfwm4 (and other desktop environment) features are implemented, some things are not implemented yet, and I'm sure there are bugs in what's there.

xfwl4 is written in Rust, targeting compiler version 1.90.0 and above. If your distro does not provide rustc/cargo packages, or provides packages that are too old, you can use rustup to install a current toolchain.

Additionally, you will need the following development packages installed (names may differ depending on your distro):

• gettext
• libdisplay-info-dev >= 0.3.0
• libdrm-dev
• libgbm-dev
• libgtk-3-dev
• libinput-dev >= 1.28.0
• libpixman-1-dev
• libseat-dev
• libudev-dev
• libxfce4ui-2-0 >= 4.21.4
• libxfconf-0-dev >= 4.21.2
• libxkbcommon-dev
• meson >= 0.57.0
• xwayland

You may not need some of these if you disable some features of the application.

You will also need these versions of the following Xfce components installed:

• xfwm4 (any version)
  • xfwl4 uses xfwm4's themes and will not start without them. You can also use xfwm4's settings dialogs to configure xfwl4's window management behavior.
• libxfce4windowing (git rev 38e4af2 or newer)
  • Support for a custom protocol around listing and managing other apps' windows. Needed for the panel's tasklist/windowlist and for xfdesktop's minimized app icon view.
• xfce4-settings (git rev 1e629dfb or newer)
  • Wayland-related fixes for Display, Keyboard, and Mouse and Touchpad settings.
• xfdesktop (4.21.0 or newer)
  • Fixes for the settings dialog while running under Wayland.

If you are using older versions, some functionality may not work, or may not work properly.

The repository makes use of git submodules; make sure you clone with --recursive, or, if you already have a checkout without the submodules, run git submodule update --init.

For "proper" build and install, use meson:

To build and install a release-optimized version of xfwl4:

meson setup --wipe --buildtype=release build
meson compile -Cbuild
meson install -Cbuild

To build and install a debug build of xfwl4:

meson setup --wipe build
meson compile -Cbuild
meson install -Cbuild

See meson_options.txt for -D options you can pass to meson setup to change what features are enabled in the project.

You can pass --prefix, --bindir, etc. to meson setup, and --destdir to meson install to change install behavior.

xfwl4's build system does not use meson's built-in support for Rust; instead it runs cargo directly in order to take advantage of cargo's dependency resolution, and for fetching dependencies from crates.io.

If you are just doing development or testing, you can use the regular cargo commands (cargo build, cargo test, cargo run directly to build, test, and run the project.

You will need xfwm4's themes installed in one of the search paths (~/.themes, ~/.local/share/themes, $XDG_DATA_DIRS/themes) in order for xfwl4 to find them.

If you plan to contribute, read the contributing document first.

xfwl4 expects that a D-Bus session bus is running. It will try to start one if it is not, but it's recommended that you set up your OS to start a session bus on user login, or, if that's not possible or feasible, you can prefix commands to start xfwl4 with dbus-run-session, which will start the bus, run the specified command, and then stop it when xfwl4 quits.

If you're running from the source tree, you can use cargo run, or run target/debug/xfwl4 (or target/release/xfwl4) directly.

If you've installed via meson to somewhere in your PATH, you can simply run xfwl4 in order to start the compositor.

If started from a TTY, it will run as a full session on the TTY, and it will update the systemd user session's (if any) and dbus session bus's activation environment to reflect the Wayland session. If you don't want it to do this (perhaps you are running an X11 session on another TTY and are just playing around with xfwl4), pass --no-session to xfwl4. In this mode, it will also not start any desktop services like xfsettingsd or xfce4-session (well, currently there is no mode where it will run those programs, but eventually it will).

If started under an existing Wayland or X11 session, it will run windowed inside your existing session, as a standalone compositor without touching your user session. Note that I barely ever run it this way, so it probably doesn't work well, and I'm not prioritizing issues with nested mode.

See xfwl4 --help for other options, and for how to override the backend selection.

Dockerfile.cargo and Dockerfile.meson are not useful for regular use. They're only there to ensure the project builds properly on a "clean" system with a Rust version matching the MSRV.

See the xfwl4 FAQ or visit us on Matrix. Note that there is no user support at this time; you are on your own getting things working until there is a published release.