I personally do not hink it is a great decision. xfce is not really large enough to afford making a wayland compositor. smithay lets you start from 10 or 20, instead of 0, but you still need to get to 100. They should have probably chosen something like wayfire/labwc or some other wayland floating wm. Though I wish them good luck, I used to use xfce, and loved it.
Wayfire is mainly C++, and Labwc is written in C, neither of which seemed to be a desirable language for the dev willing to take on this task. It seems like they really wanted to work with Rust, which left Smithay. It may be more work, but perhaps the dev was willing to take on the extra work if overall it was more enjoyable for them to use make the project in their preferred language.
if that is the case, then it is great. I personally am a rust fan, and use a smithay based wm (niri). and that is basically a single man project, but with active community support. XFCE can pull more man power, but still feels like wasted effort. if just the lang was the choice, they could have considered cosmic wm. it is mroe heavy than xfce needs, but they would have probably had an easier time.
I personally do not hink it is a great decision. xfce is not really large enough to afford making a wayland compositor. smithay lets you start from 10 or 20, instead of 0, but you still need to get to 100. They should have probably chosen something like wayfire/labwc or some other wayland floating wm. Though I wish them good luck, I used to use xfce, and loved it.
Wayfire is mainly C++, and Labwc is written in C, neither of which seemed to be a desirable language for the dev willing to take on this task. It seems like they really wanted to work with Rust, which left Smithay. It may be more work, but perhaps the dev was willing to take on the extra work if overall it was more enjoyable for them to use make the project in their preferred language.
if that is the case, then it is great. I personally am a rust fan, and use a smithay based wm (niri). and that is basically a single man project, but with active community support. XFCE can pull more man power, but still feels like wasted effort. if just the lang was the choice, they could have considered cosmic wm. it is mroe heavy than xfce needs, but they would have probably had an easier time.
Xfce’s lightness is sort’ve a major reason for it to exist, without that it would kinda just become a duplication of effort of the Cinnamon DE, IMHO.