Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
No blame on the XFCE devs because they’re trying to get a lot done with few people, but XFCE just managed to transition to GTK3, I wouldn’t hold my breath for comprehensive Wayland support any time soon.
They’ve made great strides towards Wayland support, considering that the vast majority of the work is being done by 1 guy.
It’s not just a lack of devs that’s contributing to slow development time either, it’s also the fact their goal is to port every single component to native Wayland without relying on Xwayland at all; which is obviously going to take way longer than just porting the essentials and saying “fuck it, use Xwayland”.