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⇱ Xfwl4 Being Developed As New Wayland Compositor For Xfce - Phoronix


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Xfwl4 Being Developed As New Wayland Compositor For Xfce

Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 27 January 2026 at 08:17 AM EST. 88 Comments
Xfce developers are using their donations from the community to fund a longtime core developer to create Xfwl4, an entirely new Wayland compositor for Xfce.

Xfce is developing Xfwl4 as "an important investment in Xfce's future" with the plans being for Xfwl4 to have the same functionality and behavior as Xfwm4 for feature parity between X11 and Wayland.

Xfwl4 is being developed in the Rust programming language and not based on existing Xfwm4 code. Xfwl4 will rely on Smithay to help in constructing this new Xfce Wayland compositor.

👁 Xfwl4


On their road-map does include XWayland support, protocols like xdg-session-management, and other improvements around Xfce on Wayland.

More details on the development of this new Rust-based Xfce Wayland compositor can be found via this blog post. The Xfwl4 code can be found on gitlab.xfce.org.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.