xfce-4.20 exo garcon libxfce4ui libxfce4util thunar thunar-volman tumbler xfce4-appfinder xfce4-dev-tools xfce4-panel xfce4-power-manager xfce4-session xfce4-settings xfconf xfdesktop xfwm4

[ken@…]

Release announcement at ​https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html

Wayland support is experimental. For the moment, labwce is the preferred compositor.

Trying to build the pre1 version on an existing 4.18, using BLFS-12.2 I noted:

1. xfce4-dev-tools is needed as the initial xfce package.

2. Although some posts suggested that meson/ninja would be used, I had to use configure for all xfce packages.

3. libdbusmenu has been built as a dep by distros for some years, and now shows in the configure output. It is unclear if it is actually needed (unmaintained, possible dep for libxfce4-panel.).

4. My build order for pre1 was dev-tools, libxfce4util, xfconf libxfce4ui, exo, garcon, libxfce4windowing, xfce4-panel, thunar, thunar-volman, tumbler, xfce4-appfinder, xfce4-power-manager, xfce4-settings, xfdesktop, xfwm4, xfce4-session.

I did not rebuild any later applications, they seemed to minimally work, possibly using xwayland (did not test audio).

I also threw in gtk-layer-shell (unsure if beneficial) and many packages, mostly from Python, to test the extras such as dbusmenu. On a second attempt I dropped dbusmenu and its test deps without any change i nthe results.

5. Xwayland appears to read ~/.xinitrc - xscreensaver was started, which is most unpleasant (at best, screen keeps blanking) - you might get a warning on the initial boot, before the screen blanks for the compositor.

6. At the moment there is only one workspace (workspace0) - for me, that would make it unusable (doesn't everyone run multiple workspaces with different apps on each ?)

7. Critically, I could not get the session to connect to dbus (on sysvinit) and made no progress on that. The result is that I could switch to the next tty and kill the compositor after logging in, but I could not save anything in the session.

8. Keyboard settings are under the control of the compositor, labwce grabs a menu key - I did not investigate how configurable labwc is. Before being told that a fix for workspaces using labwce would come after the release, I tried wayfire as the compositor: different deps, nicer keyboard handling for switching groups (I use the Menu among other special keys), but very visual changes to windows when moving to a different window.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 1c093e047a.