The Xfce development team has announced the release of Xfce 4.20, a pre-release of the popular lightweight desktop environment with experimental support for Wayland. Before the official release, scheduled for December 15, one or two more test releases are planned.
One of the key new features of the Xfce 4.20 branch is experimental support for working with the Wayland protocol. To abstract the work over Wayland and X11, the new libxfce4windowing library is used, which provides a graphics-independent layer that implements window management components. In Wayland sessions, the wlroots library, developed by the Sway project, has been activated instead of libmutter.
The Xfce 4.20 Wayland session supports the full range of available features, but is marked as requiring further development for daily use. Support for Wayland is available in almost all Xfce components and applications. X11 support is not planned to be removed in the near future.
In addition, the Xfce development team has announced a contest for creating new desktop wallpapers for the Xfce 4.20 release. The mandatory condition is to include an unmodified image of the Xfce mouse. Works are accepted until November 15, and the winner will be selected based on community voting.
To learn more, read the full announcement on the [Linux News](https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62160) website.