XLibre Version Currently Planned to be Released?

Interfaces like XFCE, LXQT and Budgie will soon be usable on Wayland thanks to compositors like Labwc and Wayfire.

But some things have not yet been fully ported to Wayland.

There is also the possibility of creating your own compositors in the future thanks to wlroots.

3 Likes

Will Xfce be available through XWayland in Ubuntu?

As already commented, that isn’t “an app”, as an user would consider. Yes, I know that technically a X11 desktop is comprised of several “special” X11 apps, like the window manager, dock, bars, desktop icons
 which can’t work as expected under Wayland because they need to “pose” in special ways, but that isn’t what we are talking about anyway (check the original message: “I use several programs that require Xorg”
 if that people were talking about XFCE, should have said “I use a desktop environment that requires Xorg”). Anyway, since Xorg will continue to exist, if you want to stick to a X11 desktop, just install a X11 login manager instead of GDM
 et voila! You don’t “need” XLibre (also, XFCE is working on migrating to wayland: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap ).

And, of course, remember that there is also WayBack ( GitHub - kaniini/wayback: experimental X11 compatibility layer ), designed to allow to run your X11 desktop directly under Wayland.

Anyway, if you specifically want to use Xlibre right now, remember that you can always compile it in your system, create the .deb packages, and upload them to a public PPA, where all the community will be able to use and enjoy them under Ubuntu. You aren’t restrained to what Canonical does or doesn’t do. That’s the magic of free software :wink:

EDIT: and don’t get me wrong: I am happy that people makes forks from projects, and I’ll love to see XLibre to fly high and fast. My point is that, in my opinion, first, it’s not the “XOrg debacle” that a lot of people think it is, and second, XLibre is still a very, very young project. Again, in my personal opinion, in a year or two it would make sense to take decisions about it, but at this moment I think that is too soon.

2 Likes

At least in my personal experience, the last few versions of Raspberry Pi OS - which use Wayland with LXDE via labwc - have worked flawlessly. Not sure what compositors are LxQt and XFCE considering, but it seems to be perfectly viable.

2 Likes

No. XWayland is for apps. Things that run in a window, broadly. It is no use for X11 desktops and never will be.

There is a new project to do that, called Wayback:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/24/wayback_01_released/

I have no idea if Ubuntu will ever adopt it though. If it does, not for a year or 2, probably, at the earliest.

2 Likes

It’d be nice to have both.

I wanna setup Trinity desktop and Unity 7 with XLibre, since those definitely won’t get Wayland.

Some updates:
The Xlibre project continues to be refined and will be releasing 25.1 this month, which will be considered their first stable release which they will submit to Debian and Ubuntu to be added to their repositories - might only make it to the testing distros and maybe backports at first. Significant improvements have been made to stability and ease of install, such as no longer needing an ignoreABI flag or even an xorg.conf file

The original xlibre-deb repository for Ubuntu and Debain was abandoned as the owner vanished off the face of the earth, there is now a new xlibre-debian one made by members closer to the main team, with a couple core team members having co-ownership to ensure the repository stays supported. However while the old repository supported all current Ubuntu, Debian, and Devuan distros and their arm64 versions, the xlibre-debian only targets Debian 13 and the latest version of Devuan, so it will not work on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or older as there are package version restrictions such as needing libxau6 1.0.11 but 24.04 only has 1.0.9. it does however work with Ubuntu 25.10 and will work with 26.04 LTS, assuming Xlibre is not added to official repositories by then.

Additionally with KDE dropping support for X11 in future versions, KDE Plasma is currently being forked (with the KDE team’s blessings) and rebranded as Sonic-DE. My understanding is that it is working well but you have to compile it from scratch or install arch so you can get it from the AUR. They are working on removing Wayland specific code and otherwise debloating KDE, and are working with the Xlibre team to include integrations, such as allowing workspaces to have their own Xnamespace so that they can be isolated like Wayland apps are - but in a limited way where apps on the same workspace can still access each other