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> AwesomeWM just works I use AwesomeWM since forever, with about 12 virtual desktops/workspaces. Nice thing is: it's a tiling WM but I can still put some of t

> AwesomeWM just works I use AwesomeWM since forever, with about 12 virtual desktops/workspaces. Nice thing is: it's a tiling WM but I can still put some of the workspace in "floating" mode and they then behave not unlike windows on a regular desktop (which makes some programs happy). FWIW I'm also a big Emacs user.

markstos 3y ago
Sway allows toggling floating and tiled as well.
- sweettea 3y ago
  But Sway makes you use Wayland instead of the eminently stable and usable X11.
  - dngray 3y ago
    > eminently stable and usable X11 FUD. Wayland works fine. I have been using Sway for years now without issue. It is also more secure[1], maintained[2] and even works with NVIDIA's proprietary driver. [3][4]. It also isn't the antiquated piece of crap that X11[5] is, which has trouble with things like mixed DPI, and other modern features that Windows and macOS do completely fine without "tweaking" [6]. If Wayland did not exist I would not be using Linux on a desktop. The "screen tearing" with X11 when using a compositor was painful. [1] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway [4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c [6] https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-with-xrandr.html https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-wi...
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      > FUD. One can say the same about your post being FUD against Xorg. For example that first Phoronix post is about RedHat's official stance on Xorg support not about everyone else, other developers still work on it. In fact just a couple of months ago someone implemented tear-free mode in the modesetting driver which would address your issue with "screen tearing".
      - kaba0 3y ago
        > other developers still work on it Who? I’m sure you could easily prove it instead of relying on hearsay.
        badsectoracula 3y ago
        You can easily check that by looking the xserver commits, it isn't like they are hidden. The TearFree stuff was added by Sultan Alsawaf who doesn't work at RedHat (though note that above i wrote that this is the official RedHat position, that doesn't mean people from RedHat cant still contribute to the xserver).
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      Mixed dpi works fine under X and tearing is trivial to avoid. Meanwhile under every other Wayland compositor other than KDE apps using XWayland are at best an unusable blurry mess. Kde alone actually handles high and low dpi monitors plus xwayland acceptably and at least under void it's Wayland session is buggy affair still. As far as sway in addition to being useless for mixed DPI plus XWayland it silently fails to start with Nvidia hardware unless you pass special arguments and modify the kernel command line which just looks to normal people like totally broken. We are talking about the party with >80% of the discrete GPU market. Then there is zoom screen sharing the fix to make it work with Wayland theoretically came out 4 days ago and is probably still a crap experience. You will probably suggest getting rid of all XWayland using apps,Nvidia, and zoom but this isn't how people actually use platforms. If something is supported and available it becomes part of people's expected workflow and people who get a frozen back screen don't throw away their workflow,convince their employers to drop zoom, or go shopping for a GPU they don't use the thing that makes their screen turn black. Zero fucks are given regarding whose job it is to fix it or whose "fault" it is because nobody cares about plumbing they care about apps and hardware support. The alternative is like picking an author based on his choice of word processor instead of his work. People have been calling criticism of Wayland FUD for a decade. For most of that period the actual experience using existing hardware and apps has been pretty bad. The gap between proponents vision and users actual experience is especially large when user uses old stable software and proponents use very recent versions. This means proponents have taught users they are full of shit and Wayland sucks. This will persist even when all issues are well addressed on versions of software actually used by the majority of people.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
you can do this in stumpWM as well
natrys 3y ago
The feature that keeps me is that same client can be tagged in multiple workspaces, and it just exists in different layouts. It's a little buggy in the 4.3 tree, but fixing focus issue in my config was easy enough, that's the cool thing about hackable software. This feature is the one of the biggest reasons I haven't tried something like EXWM or StumpWM yet. I really like AwesomeWM but can't say the same about Lua.
- Elv13 3y ago
  > It's a little buggy in the 4.3 tree I was working on fixing some of those bugs last weekend. Can you clarify which annoys you the most so I can add unit test later this evening? tl;dr; The main problem is that the z-index stack and client ordering list are global and this cause changes to one tag to affect another. I am moving those structure into per-tag trees rather than global stacks.
  - natrys 3y ago
    > client ordering list are global and this cause changes to one tag to affect another. I am moving those structure into per-tag trees rather than global stacks. Yup that was exactly the problem and how I solved it too. If I remember correctly if workspace1 has client A and B, and workspace2 has client B and C (B is common), global stack means if I switch from 1 to 2 while focus was on A, while in 2 if I ever switch focus to B, then I when I come back to 1 I would find that focus moved from A to B, which can be annoying. While I have you here, do you think 4.4 is still years away? Is there an ongoing documentation of API changes?
    - Elv13 3y ago
      > While I have you here, do you think 4.4 is still years away? I/we were never very fond of releases to be honest. All it does is to fragment the number of version in the various LTS distribution, which makes support a pain (vs "the official version" and "git-master"). Also, I don't have that much time these days, so getting a release out is impractical. I am aiming for the Ubuntu 24.04 cutoff for packages. > Is there an ongoing documentation of API changes? `git log` ;). But also, just compare the official release doc with the development one. There's over 1k changes. The largest one being the documentation itself. Then a rewrite of the notification and wallpaper APIs are also rather large improvements. Everything is backward compatible, so there should not be any nasty surprises. > Yup that was exactly the problem and how I solved it too. If I remember correctly if workspace1 has client A and B, and workspace2 has client B and C (B is common), global stack means if I switch from 1 to 2 while focus was on A, while in 2 if I ever switch focus to B, then I when I come back to 1 I would find that focus moved from A to B, which can be annoying. Annoying, but also like >10k lines of code/tests/doc to "fix". It will take a lot of effort to get this PR merged without behavior changes or regressions... That global stack goes back 15 years and everything depends on it's exact behavior. It's as ossified as it gets.
xedrac 3y ago
Even though I still use X11, my concern with AwesomeWM is there seems to be no path forward to Wayland, which will eventually eclipse X to the point that distros stop supporting it.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Distros (especially those based on Debian and Arch/AUR) package all sorts of weird obscure stuff, the chances of not packaging Xorg are kinda low. And if some do drop it and you don't want to switch to a distro that still has it, you can always compile and install it from source, it isn't that much of an issue. If said distro has XWayland (which is much less likely to be removed) it'll already have most of the libraries available.

markstos 3y ago

Sway allows toggling floating and tiled as well.

sweettea 3y ago
But Sway makes you use Wayland instead of the eminently stable and usable X11.
- dngray 3y ago
  > eminently stable and usable X11 FUD. Wayland works fine. I have been using Sway for years now without issue. It is also more secure[1], maintained[2] and even works with NVIDIA's proprietary driver. [3][4]. It also isn't the antiquated piece of crap that X11[5] is, which has trouble with things like mixed DPI, and other modern features that Windows and macOS do completely fine without "tweaking" [6]. If Wayland did not exist I would not be using Linux on a desktop. The "screen tearing" with X11 when using a compositor was painful. [1] https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c... [2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Maintenance-Mode-Quickly [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-GBM-Works-With-Sway [4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sway-1.7-rc2 [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsz7Shbnb9c [6] https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-with-xrandr.html https://blog.summercat.com/configuring-mixed-dpi-monitors-wi...
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    > FUD. One can say the same about your post being FUD against Xorg. For example that first Phoronix post is about RedHat's official stance on Xorg support not about everyone else, other developers still work on it. In fact just a couple of months ago someone implemented tear-free mode in the modesetting driver which would address your issue with "screen tearing".
    - kaba0 3y ago
      > other developers still work on it Who? I’m sure you could easily prove it instead of relying on hearsay.
      - badsectoracula 3y ago
        You can easily check that by looking the xserver commits, it isn't like they are hidden. The TearFree stuff was added by Sultan Alsawaf who doesn't work at RedHat (though note that above i wrote that this is the official RedHat position, that doesn't mean people from RedHat cant still contribute to the xserver).
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Mixed dpi works fine under X and tearing is trivial to avoid. Meanwhile under every other Wayland compositor other than KDE apps using XWayland are at best an unusable blurry mess. Kde alone actually handles high and low dpi monitors plus xwayland acceptably and at least under void it's Wayland session is buggy affair still. As far as sway in addition to being useless for mixed DPI plus XWayland it silently fails to start with Nvidia hardware unless you pass special arguments and modify the kernel command line which just looks to normal people like totally broken. We are talking about the party with >80% of the discrete GPU market. Then there is zoom screen sharing the fix to make it work with Wayland theoretically came out 4 days ago and is probably still a crap experience. You will probably suggest getting rid of all XWayland using apps,Nvidia, and zoom but this isn't how people actually use platforms. If something is supported and available it becomes part of people's expected workflow and people who get a frozen back screen don't throw away their workflow,convince their employers to drop zoom, or go shopping for a GPU they don't use the thing that makes their screen turn black. Zero fucks are given regarding whose job it is to fix it or whose "fault" it is because nobody cares about plumbing they care about apps and hardware support. The alternative is like picking an author based on his choice of word processor instead of his work. People have been calling criticism of Wayland FUD for a decade. For most of that period the actual experience using existing hardware and apps has been pretty bad. The gap between proponents vision and users actual experience is especially large when user uses old stable software and proponents use very recent versions. This means proponents have taught users they are full of shit and Wayland sucks. This will persist even when all issues are well addressed on versions of software actually used by the majority of people.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

you can do this in stumpWM as well

natrys 3y ago

The feature that keeps me is that same client can be tagged in multiple workspaces, and it just exists in different layouts. It's a little buggy in the 4.3 tree, but fixing focus issue in my config was easy enough, that's the cool thing about hackable software. This feature is the one of the biggest reasons I haven't tried something like EXWM or StumpWM yet. I really like AwesomeWM but can't say the same about Lua.

Elv13 3y ago
> It's a little buggy in the 4.3 tree I was working on fixing some of those bugs last weekend. Can you clarify which annoys you the most so I can add unit test later this evening? tl;dr; The main problem is that the z-index stack and client ordering list are global and this cause changes to one tag to affect another. I am moving those structure into per-tag trees rather than global stacks.
- natrys 3y ago
  > client ordering list are global and this cause changes to one tag to affect another. I am moving those structure into per-tag trees rather than global stacks. Yup that was exactly the problem and how I solved it too. If I remember correctly if workspace1 has client A and B, and workspace2 has client B and C (B is common), global stack means if I switch from 1 to 2 while focus was on A, while in 2 if I ever switch focus to B, then I when I come back to 1 I would find that focus moved from A to B, which can be annoying. While I have you here, do you think 4.4 is still years away? Is there an ongoing documentation of API changes?
  - Elv13 3y ago
    > While I have you here, do you think 4.4 is still years away? I/we were never very fond of releases to be honest. All it does is to fragment the number of version in the various LTS distribution, which makes support a pain (vs "the official version" and "git-master"). Also, I don't have that much time these days, so getting a release out is impractical. I am aiming for the Ubuntu 24.04 cutoff for packages. > Is there an ongoing documentation of API changes? `git log` ;). But also, just compare the official release doc with the development one. There's over 1k changes. The largest one being the documentation itself. Then a rewrite of the notification and wallpaper APIs are also rather large improvements. Everything is backward compatible, so there should not be any nasty surprises. > Yup that was exactly the problem and how I solved it too. If I remember correctly if workspace1 has client A and B, and workspace2 has client B and C (B is common), global stack means if I switch from 1 to 2 while focus was on A, while in 2 if I ever switch focus to B, then I when I come back to 1 I would find that focus moved from A to B, which can be annoying. Annoying, but also like >10k lines of code/tests/doc to "fix". It will take a lot of effort to get this PR merged without behavior changes or regressions... That global stack goes back 15 years and everything depends on it's exact behavior. It's as ossified as it gets.

xedrac 3y ago

Even though I still use X11, my concern with AwesomeWM is there seems to be no path forward to Wayland, which will eventually eclipse X to the point that distros stop supporting it.

badsectoracula 3y ago
Distros (especially those based on Debian and Arch/AUR) package all sorts of weird obscure stuff, the chances of not packaging Xorg are kinda low. And if some do drop it and you don't want to switch to a distro that still has it, you can always compile and install it from source, it isn't that much of an issue. If said distro has XWayland (which is much less likely to be removed) it'll already have most of the libraries available.