Whonix Xfce Development

Development
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sudoers exception for livecheck /etc/sudoers.d/whonix-xfce-desktop-config is insufficient. Currently only works for user user. Does not work for any other user account such as user2.

Would it be an issue if we allowed ALL, i.e.

ALL ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/lsblk --noheadings --all --raw --output RO

?

%sudo would be safe, but that doesn’t help in all cases. I.e.

%sudo ALL=NOPASSWD: /bin/lsblk --noheadings --all --raw --output RO

What other alternatives are there to permit desktop login users too?

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This is a blessing to avoid accidental window roll up, a feature I don’t need (there’s minimize):

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Days of Xfce might be counted due Xfce not supporting Wayland.

Not sure if releng:wayland_roadmap [Xfce Wiki] is even a clear commitment towards Wayland:

This is a work in progress and does not imply any future implementation commitments.

related:

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https://alexxcons.github.io/blogpost_14.html

XFCE 4.20 released with experimental wayland support (no X11/xwayland needed for xfce to function).

Available in Trixie.

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Quoting the linked blog:

Plans are underway to add Wayland support to Xfwm4 while preserving its existing X11 functionality. However, such a restructurization will be a major effort and we cannot tell yet when/if it will be done, so please don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

This is rather unfortunate given the timing we want for switching to Wayland. Any configuration options that have to do with the window manager aren’t going to be easily doable (yet?) until Xfce either adopts an “official” Wayland compositor, or makes Xfwm4 into one. Some of the missing pieces (keyboard and mouse settings mainly) may also be rather frustrating to live without, and I’m not sure users will be thrilled with having to resort to editing text files to configure things like their keyboard layout. Xfce 4.20 is in Trixie, but it’s also all that we’ll get in Trixie because Trixie is in Final Freeze.

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After playing around with it in a VM, it looks like LXQt’s Wayland support in Trixie is missing more-or-less the same things as Xfce’s. So there may be really no point in porting to LXQt, maybe Xfce is the way to go.

Edit: Turns out LXQt still lets me set a desktop wallpaper on Wayland. Xfce doesn’t. That… could be a problem for Xfce.

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Reached to the same point, LXQt is not purely and fully functional wayland yet.

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More issues with Xfce + Wayland (beyond just the wallpaper config not existing):

  • Right-click menus on the panel don’t show up where they’re supposed to. They oftentimes get close (they appear on the far-left edge of whatever widget you right clicked on) but they don’t appear in the right location.
  • Screen resolution resizing support actually exists, but is buggy - if you change to a new resolution, then click “Restore the previous configuration”, the screen may go black. This can also happen if you fail to confirm your resolution change within ten seconds.
  • No compositor-specific integrations yet AFAICT (there are some base labwc configuration files but that’s about it).
  • Other users who have used Xfce + Wayland a lot more extensively than I have encountered many more problems. https://www.reddit.com/r/xfce/comments/1ha4ht7/im_tried_xfce_on_wayland/

Given that I’ve seen multiple LXQt users happily using Wayland, the Wayland experience on LXQt has seemed pretty solid in my testing, and Xfce is still buggy in this environment, I don’t think Xfce is suitable for us.

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