cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/64896415
For additional context, here’s Brian’s previous blog post about the first preview release of Xfwl4, where he describes his history with Xfce and the sponsorship.
https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/06/xfwl4s-first-preview-release
I’m still using xfce; after running into problems with Wayland the three times I tried it, I decided Wayland isn’t really for me. (In fairness one of those was nvidia being nvidia, but the other two are what I consider design deficiencies in Wayland itself)
Bear in mind that each desktop environment has its own implementation of Wayland, meaning each can offer vastly different user experiences. Gnome and KDE currently have the most polished and integrated Wayland compositors, and are the least likely to have any noticeable issues compared to X11, except for perhaps a few edge cases that have yet to be worked on.
Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce all still use experimental/buggy Wayland compositors, so if any of those desktop environments were the ones you experienced issues with Wayland on, I wouldn’t let that color your expectations of Wayland itself.
made up “fact”
Both KDE and Gnome have significantly more developers on hand to contribute toward implementing their own wayland compositors, and on recent versions, their wayland implementations have worked very well for me, even on Nvidia hardware, which I couldn’t say just a few years ago.
In comparison; Cinnamon’s Wayland backend is only just now becoming usable for most average tasks, Xfce’s effort is the focus of this post, which has only just gotten to an alpha state (still not ready at all for an average user or for distros to adopt as the default), and MATE has no developers on the project who have the necessary skills to make a Wayland compositor, so they are instead trying to integrate the Wayfire Wayland Window Manager instead.
This trips up a lot of people, you’re exactly right. Wayland on KDE, especially on a more up to date distros like Fedora or a rolling distro is great.