Xfwl4, Xfce’s Wayland compositor, released its second preview on August 10 as version 4.21.1, roughly seven weeks after the first preview.

Xfce has been the last of the major desktop environments to make the Wayland transition, and it has been taking a deliberately incremental route rather than a rewrite. Xfwl4 is the compositor half of that work.

Window management

The release adds horizontal and vertical window maximization as separate operations, and dedicated shortcuts for switching between windows of the same application.

Both are features that Xfwm4 users have had for years on X11. That is the pattern to expect from a preview series like this: the work is not inventing new capabilities, it is reaching parity with an existing window manager that people have been configuring to their preferences for a decade. The gap between “a Wayland compositor exists” and “existing Xfce users will switch” is made almost entirely of small features like these.

Input handling

Touchscreens can now be assigned to a specific monitor, and pointer devices support rotation and reflection.

Touchscreen-to-monitor mapping is essential on any multi-monitor setup that includes a touch display, since without it the touch input maps across the entire desktop area and lands nowhere near your finger. Pointer rotation and reflection matter for tablets and for displays mounted in non-standard orientations.

Fixes

The preview also corrects a long list of issues found in early testing:

• Wayland session-lock protocol handling
• Lock screen rendering
• Keyboard shortcut inhibition
• Layer-shell focus and tooltip placement
• Server-side decoration state
• Num Lock restoration
• Workspace activation state

Session lock and lock screen rendering are the ones that matter most. A lock screen that renders incorrectly on a compositor is not a cosmetic bug, it is a security-relevant failure, and getting that right early is the correct priority.

Should you try it

Not on a machine you depend on. This is a preview release of a compositor for a desktop environment whose Wayland session is still in development, and the project is clear about that.

It is worth watching if you use Xfce, because the trajectory now looks credible. With GNOME having dropped X11 entirely and KDE having completed its transition, Xfce and the lighter desktops are where the remaining X11 dependency is concentrated. Xfwl4 reaching a functional second preview is the strongest signal so far that Xfce has a path forward.