4 ms·

Is there anything similar for Wayland? Its protocol looks considerably more complex than Xorg's, and so are most resources to learn it.

phendrenad2 5y ago
Most of the concepts here are the same for wayland. The only difference is, Wayland handles compositing, whereas in x11 compositing is a pluggable component.
- yissp 5y ago
  A Wayland compositor is responsible for quite a bit more than an X11 window manager. Compositing, as you mentioned, but also display modesetting, input handling, clipboard management, and so on. Although, of course, one can use a library like wlroots or libweston to handle most of that stuff if you just want to focus on the desktop experience.
ximm 5y ago
I think the dwl codebase is an excellent read: https://github.com/djpohly/dwl https://github.com/djpohly/dwl
samus 5y ago
It's quite ardous and unfun, but the wlroots project does most of the heavy lifting. For beginners it's probably useful to create a toy WM using wlroots[0] and dig deeper from there[1]. [0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master/tinywl https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/wikis/Getting-started#additional-resources https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/wikis/Getti...
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  The last time I used wlroots, via sway, I encountered a bug where I experienced 'multicolored snow' when watching a video in firefox. I wanted to record a video of it to report a bug, but of course that wasn't possible because screen sharing / recording still isn't well supported. Back to gnome I went, and I still don't think wayland is ready for primetime on smaller window managers
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    Screensharing on wlroots compositors has been possible since May 2020 (the first release of xdpw).
- ashkankiani 5y ago
  sway and wlroots have some of the worst error handling I've ever seen in C code. The number of null pointer bugs and assertion bugs is just mind-boggling. I don't really understand how hard it is to just gracefully handle errors. Literally no one would prefer to crash their entire desktop environment rather than have it silently skip over errors and output them to a log. I recently used i3 again because my office computer has an NVIDIA GPU and sway doesn't support NVIDIA (yes I'm aware of the new GBM API, it's not ready yet and I don't care anymore anyway). It made me realize how much more gracefully i3 handles a lot of things, and also a few things it really doesn't (but that's more the fault of X11, not i3). It's disappointing that the defacto library for Wayland is wlroots given those bugs.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I don't know where you heard that, but wlroots is not the defacto standard, there are several other libraries. Off the top of my head, there is libweston, mutter, mir, qtwayland, smithay, and probably some others aimed at embedded that I can't remember... Edit: also this one somebody wrote in HTML5 and typescript https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      Not sure why this is downvoted. wlroots wants to be a de-facto standard, and the devs have put in a lot of effort to document how to use it. But it's far from a true de facto standard, since most wayland window managers use their own library.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Most of the concepts here are the same for wayland. The only difference is, Wayland handles compositing, whereas in x11 compositing is a pluggable component.

yissp 5y ago
A Wayland compositor is responsible for quite a bit more than an X11 window manager. Compositing, as you mentioned, but also display modesetting, input handling, clipboard management, and so on. Although, of course, one can use a library like wlroots or libweston to handle most of that stuff if you just want to focus on the desktop experience.

ximm 5y ago

I think the dwl codebase is an excellent read: https://github.com/djpohly/dwl https://github.com/djpohly/dwl

samus 5y ago

It's quite ardous and unfun, but the wlroots project does most of the heavy lifting. For beginners it's probably useful to create a toy WM using wlroots[0] and dig deeper from there[1]. [0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master/tinywl https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/tree/master... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/wikis/Getting-started#additional-resources https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/wikis/Getti...

wing-_-nuts 5y ago
The last time I used wlroots, via sway, I encountered a bug where I experienced 'multicolored snow' when watching a video in firefox. I wanted to record a video of it to report a bug, but of course that wasn't possible because screen sharing / recording still isn't well supported. Back to gnome I went, and I still don't think wayland is ready for primetime on smaller window managers
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Screensharing on wlroots compositors has been possible since May 2020 (the first release of xdpw).
ashkankiani 5y ago
sway and wlroots have some of the worst error handling I've ever seen in C code. The number of null pointer bugs and assertion bugs is just mind-boggling. I don't really understand how hard it is to just gracefully handle errors. Literally no one would prefer to crash their entire desktop environment rather than have it silently skip over errors and output them to a log. I recently used i3 again because my office computer has an NVIDIA GPU and sway doesn't support NVIDIA (yes I'm aware of the new GBM API, it's not ready yet and I don't care anymore anyway). It made me realize how much more gracefully i3 handles a lot of things, and also a few things it really doesn't (but that's more the fault of X11, not i3). It's disappointing that the defacto library for Wayland is wlroots given those bugs.
- md8z 5y ago
  I don't know where you heard that, but wlroots is not the defacto standard, there are several other libraries. Off the top of my head, there is libweston, mutter, mir, qtwayland, smithay, and probably some others aimed at embedded that I can't remember... Edit: also this one somebody wrote in HTML5 and typescript https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    Not sure why this is downvoted. wlroots wants to be a de-facto standard, and the devs have put in a lot of effort to document how to use it. But it's far from a true de facto standard, since most wayland window managers use their own library.