4 ms·
I just need Awesome ported to Wayland, but it's apparently difficult for Wayland reasons I no longer recall.
by eximius 4y ago
I just need Awesome ported to Wayland, but it's apparently difficult for Wayland reasons I no longer recall.
- kaba0 4y agoI don’t think there is anything in wayland that would make the porting hard.
- herewulf 4y agoDepends on how tightly coupled the WM is to X. My chosen tiling WM (StumpWM) is not easily portable. The development discussion has been that it's easier to rewrite. I used xmonad for years before that.. Well, it's in the name. It's not getting ported to Wayland. Not easily anyway.
- eximius 4y agoHm, I might be conflating the only project I was aware of that was trying to do that... with the problems they ran into with Rust/Wayland interop. Wayland has lifecycle assumptions that break Rust's assumptions without a gratuitous amount of unergonomic wrapper code, or something. (Which is concerning in some ways...)
- pengaru 4y agoPorting a plain Xlib/xcb window manager to wayland is a mountain of work. Just look at wlroots to get a sense of how much code one has to write (or embrace in the form of wlroots) that an X11 WM largely doesn't need concern itself with.
- michaelmrose 4y agoWhat's hard is rewriting from scratch starting at a lower level.
- NoGravitas 4y agoI think anyone trying to write a Wayland compositor at this point, especially if they are rewriting an X window manager, should be using WLRoots. I don't /think/ writing a compositor with WLRoots is lower level that writing an X wm in, say, XCB.
- hulitu 4y agoX has since ages the Xt and Xaw toolkits.
- bitwize 4y agoOne does not simply write a window manager in Wayland. In Wayland the display server and window manager are one program, called the compositor, which means the X11 architecture of having a separate window manager is now deprecated. (Insert Daniel Stone talk here about how this is the superior choice and the go-forward solution because people who know a lot more about the graphics architecture than you said so, that's why.) Wayland's architecture in general is completely different, so you don't so much port a WM as you do rewrite it as a Wayland compositor. There are libraries like wlroots that help with this task but it is not straightforward.
- kaba0 4y agoI do know that, but I don’t see how exposing the same functionality as the X11 bindings do for AwesomeWM as too hard of a problem, especially that I believe the majority of the work is done on wlroots already. Perhaps I just don’t know enough about Awesome.
- michaelmrose 4y agoMore to the point the choice isn't between writing one or the other it's between doing 1 unit of work to maintain/fix bugs and doing 1000 units of work to start over potentially for little perceptible benefits.
- woodrowbarlow 4y agoawesomewm is a fork of dwm with a lua interpreter and a config loader bolted on. almost all of awesomewm's additional features are implemented in lua. someone has already made dwl, a wayland (wlroots) port of dwm: https://github.com/djpohly/dwl https://github.com/djpohly/dwl the dwl codebase is very similar to dwm. some dwm patches can even be applied directly. i currently use dwl, it's part of my custom pure-wayland desktop environment built from suckless ports. i think the 'difficult' work has already been done.