LXDE - Wayland support

Development
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This might not be the real LXQt but a fork by RPi.

Relevant quotes:

Wayland

The most important of these is the move to using Wayland rather than X11 as the display system.

For Bookworm, we are using a compositor called Wayfire. This uses a standard Wayland library called wlroots, which is used by several modern Wayland compositors. And because Wayfire works a lot better as a Wayland compositor on Raspberry Pi than Mutter did, Wayland is now the default mode of operation for the desktop. (With one caveat — for now, Wayland is only the default on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5. The performance of Wayfire on earlier platforms is still being optimised, so for now they will continue to run the old X11 display server and the Openbox window manager, but at some point these platforms will also be switched to Wayfire.)

There is still a taskbar at the top of the screen that allows you to launch applications and see the status of various systems, but this is a totally new application. Under Bullseye, this was an application called lxpanel , but this has now been replaced with wf-panel-pi (short for “wayfire panel for Raspberry Pi”).

This was based on wf-shell, the example panel application from the authors of Wayfire, but we have extensively modified it to look and work like lxpanel. The largest part of this work was to port all the existing lxpanel plugins — the icons which control volume, network, Bluetooth, etc — so that they now all work with wf-panel-pi.

The desktop background itself is still drawn by the old pcmanfm file manager which was used under Bullseye, but this has been modified so that it uses Wayland as its display protocol rather than X11, so is now a native Wayland application.

Are the required packages are available from packages.debian.org or only available as a RPi specific fork?

Wayfire is in Debian.

I cannot find wf-shell in Debian yet but it might be being worked on as per:

When not using a (minimal) desktop environment (DE) (such as Xfce), if we’d create our own DE based on Wayland, we’d need at least:

  • compositor
  • taskbar
  • start menu
  • systray

Also:

  • display manager
  • change gamma
  • change screen resolution
  • screensaver (Kicksecure)
  • screenlock (Kicksecure)
  • switch keyboard layout settings

And not sure what else. It seems rather complex to roll out one’s own DE. In this case depending on much LXQt (in Debian) supports Wayland already. If it’s really only a few pieces missing which we then can take from elsewhere, that’s an option. Still many unanswered questions.

2 Likes
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Custom Desktop Environment - Wayland support

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Moved your to its own topic. @neo0xff Because that wouldn’t be a port to LXDE if we roll our own custom DE. Moved here:

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This isn’t actually LXDE’s Wayland support which above blog post talks about. RPi is using Wayfire. That is yet another approach towards Wayland support.

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