Xfwl4's First Preview Release –
Brian Tarricone
Xfwl4's First Preview Release
June 21, 2026 at 15:40
I’m pleased to announce the first preview release of xfwl4, Xfce’s<br>Wayland compositor.
After close to six months of work, I feel like it’s ready to get some<br>wider use, even though of course there will be bugs and missing<br>features. Think of this as an alpha release.
First off, I’d like to give a big thanks to the rest of the Xfce core<br>team for offering to sponsor this work. I’ve been an on-again off-again<br>Xfce developer since 2004 (more “off” than “on”, I suppose), and I<br>consider it a great privilege to have this work sponsored, giving me the<br>opportunity to focus solely on this project since the beginning of the<br>year. This is also a huge thank-you to all the supporters who have<br>generously donated to Xfce over the years.
Here are the essentials:
Source tarball .<br>Build and install instructions are in the README. Please pay careful<br>attention to build and runtime prerequisites.
Issue tracker .<br>Search the issue tracker first in case someone else has already filed a<br>similar issue. If not, and you file a new one, be sure to fill out<br>every part of the issue template.
Git repository . If you’ve<br>found an issue, it would be helpful if you could ensure it’s still<br>present on git main. You can also try any fixes and features I’ve added<br>since the release. Be sure to clone it with --recursive.
The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce<br>desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the<br>two without even knowing there’s a difference. In reality, of course,<br>it won’t be quite that seamless, and there’s still more work to be done<br>to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at<br>it, at the very least.
The issue tracker will give you a decent idea of things that are not<br>implemented yet or are known to be broken, but here is a list of notable<br>things that won’t work, so you aren’t surprised:
The “Mouse and Touchpad” settings dialog (but whatever settings you’ve<br>set under X11 will be applied under xfwl4)<br>(issue).
The “Workspaces” settings dialog<br>(issue).
Screen margins<br>(issue).
xfdesktop’s minimized window icon view, and the middle-click window<br>menu (issue and<br>issue).
Pager thumbnails in the panel (no tracking issue yet).
Taskbar apps can only change maximize/minimize/fullscreen state<br>(issue and<br>issue).
Keyboard shortcuts for application/application-window switching<br>(regular all-window cycling works fine)<br>(issue).
Most (all?) apps will not be able to restore their window positions or<br>workspace on startup<br>(issue and<br>issue).
(This is not an exhaustive list, just a few things I thought worth<br>calling out.)
Over the coming weeks and months, I plan to write a blog series on how I<br>built xfwl4. I’ll update this to link each new post here as they’re<br>published. Anyhow, give it a spin!