Xfce4 & Wayland tips

General system Community contributions
1

Those of us who use Xfce4 with Wayland, let’s share some tips to fellow users.

Enable touchpad natural scrolling

Looks like many touchpad settings (like natural scrolling) depends on the wayland compositor.
This fix works with labwc.

Add

  <libinput>
    <device>
      <naturalScroll>yes</naturalScroll>
    </device>
  </libinput>

right before the </labwc_config> line in the end of the file.

Note that this may work with a mouse too, but currently I can’t test it. If not, probably there’s a simple way to fix it - see the manual page:

man labwc-config
2

Not brave enough yet :fearful: but thank you for this :+1:

3

Fear not, Xfce with labwc is easy.
And the bonus: it is quite fast!

4

Maybe I’ll give it a try once the :soccer_ball: World Cup is over and releases me from its clammy grip on my free time.

5

I hear you!

6

I believe it will.

You should have a /usr/share/doc/labwc/rc.xml.all file; it’s a complete rc.xml with all the options and annotations. The libinput section is pretty extensive, and (as I understand it) separate libinput sections can be made for any device listed with:

libinput list-devices

Here is mine for the touchpad. I usually have a mouse attached, so I disable the touchpad when a mouse is attached:

  <libinput>
    <device category="DELL097A:00 04F3:30C4 Touchpad">
      <sendEventsMode>disabledOnExternalMouse</sendEventsMode>
      <naturalScroll>yes</naturalScroll>
      <leftHanded>no</leftHanded>
      <pointerSpeed></pointerSpeed>
      <accelProfile></accelProfile>
      <tap>yes</tap>
      <tapButtonMap></tapButtonMap>
      <tapAndDrag></tapAndDrag>
      <dragLock></dragLock>
      <middleEmulation>yes</middleEmulation>
      <disableWhileTyping>yes</disableWhileTyping>
    </device>
  </libinput>

You should be able to make a separate section for a mouse.

7

Just to add, for the command you mentioned above package libinput-tools is needed.

8

Just want to make sure that switching between Wayland and X is as simple as the Arch wiki seems to say. If so, it would be interesting to check it out. Looks like the in house XFCE compositor is in first stage alpha i.e. currently only useful for those who want to help out the developer by being guinea pigs.

9

True, the development with the official compositor for Xfce is still considered alpha quality.

But labwc has been around for quite a while, and it is updating rather frequently. Each update has made it better. I have been using it for a long time already without issues other than some features (that I’d rarely use) which are not yet implemented.

Actually, X with Xfce4 has had problems lately…

10

Thanks, I think I’ll give it a try.

11

Hope you’ll enjoy it!

12

I tried it last year, but when I noticed I could not use workspaces, I got back to X.

13

Here they seem to work, although I’m not using them much.

14

It was a problem before, I just installed Labwc and it’s working now. :grinning_face:

15

The main wonky thing I’ve noticed is that for some reason Firefox minimizes when another window is selected/program launched. Note a gamebreaker but a bit annoying since I like alt-tabbing windows.

16

That doesn’t happen here (with Xfce & labwc), alt-tabbing works as expected.
May be some setting with labwc. There are lots of documentation on the man pages too (man labwc and some other pages for labwc).