The Xfce project is working on a brand-new Wayland compositor for their lightweight desktop environment, which will be used as an alternative to the current window manager to support Wayland sessions.

Meet Xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce designed to offer the same functionality and behavior as Xfwm4, but for Wayland sessions, not X11. Therefore, future Xfce releases will ship with both Xfwm4 and Xfwl4 to provide users with support for X11 and Wayland sessions and ensure a seamless transition between them.

The work will be led by Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone, who plans to reuse the existing configuration dialogs and xfconf settings from the Xfwm4 window manager, which is currently used on the latest Xfce 4.20 release. However, the dev said that Xfwl4 won’t be based on the existing Xfwm4 code.