xfwm4 has tearing (even with composition enabled) and compton is unmaintained and currently has problems with gtk 3 CSDs and shadows in QT applications. Xfwm also doesn't allow decent resizing on modern displays because of the 1 px border. It also seems very unlikely that the xfce team will ever make xf4wm compatible with wayland. Performance wise they are almost the same. This would need changes in xfwm4-settings and a fix for the workspace transition.
(In reply to grasm from comment #0) > xfwm4 has tearing (even with composition xfwm in 4.13 has optional support for XPresent or GL and is tear free on all hardware I was able to try. > enabled) and compton is > unmaintained and currently has problems with gtk 3 CSDs and shadows in QT Compton is really irrelevant here. > applications. Xfwm also doesn't allow decent resizing on modern displays > because of the 1 px border. It has a 1 pixel border because your distribution has changed the default theme and picked one with 1 pixel, blame your distribution for that, not upstream. FWIW, we have 3 variants of the default theme, “Default”, “Default-hdpi” and “Default-xhdpi”, with borders ranging from 3 pixels (for Default) to 12 pixels for xhdpi. Also, you can resize the windows without even using the borders by using Alt+RMB. > It also seems very unlikely that the xfce team > will ever make xf4wm compatible with wayland. This is correct, yet I don't see this as a major issue, X11 is not going away any time soon. Xfce is an X11 desktop, it's not a Wayland compositor. Besides, there is a lot more than just mutter to make xfce a Wayland desktop. > Performance wise they are > almost the same. This would need changes in xfwm4-settings and a fix for the > workspace transition. No, there is a lot more to do that just that. Basically, in Wayland, there is no protocol for various applications to manipulate the stack, focus or even place themselves on screen (there is no global coordinates). That means that the panel, for example, and all its plugins would need to be part of the Wayland copmpositor. So that means you'd need to turn the panel into a “shell” similar to gnome-shell. Also, GNOME devs made it very cleear that they have no interest in making libmutter API or ABI stable, so you'll have to adjust the code for each new GNOME release. mutter really is a base component for gnome-shell. So, long story short, I am not planning to ditch xfwm4. Better use GNOME if that's wh.at you want, it's a perfectly decent desktop environment (to which I contribute as well)
I didn't mean that adding wayland support to xfce is easy but adding (optional) mutter support to xfce is very easy. It would be sufficient to just use the default libmutter plugin, add the application shortcut support to the default plugin (maybe also add a small window cycling animation and workspace switch animation/widget) and then change the xfwm settings dialog to update the wm shortcuts in dconf. I would even be willing to add&maintain it myself but forking seems a bit overkill and maintaining without any support a bit painful.
Please do not reopen, it's useless. You can use whatever window manager suits your need, there is no point in asking devs to ditch years of hard work just because you feel it's a good idea...
ok, thanks for answering :)
My point being, ditching xfwm4 for mutter would be pretty useless and wouldn't bring us much... As a window manager or even compositor manager, I don't see mutter being far superior to xfwm4 that it would justify the change, mutter is a lot more complex and the code base is order of magnitude larger than xfwm4's. Yet, if you can come up with patches that would turn xfce-panel into a shell using libmutter, dropping X11 requirement at the same time, that would bring a fully functional Wayland desktop, then please reopen this bug :)