7 ms·

Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

111 points by theycallhermax 1y ago

cnity 1y ago
I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.
- mort96 1y ago
  An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3. Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    Suspect you're right, from Acknowledgements: dwl began by extending the TinyWL example provided (CC0) by the sway/wlroots developers. This was made possible in many cases by looking at how sway accomplished something, then trying to do the same in as suckless a way as possible.
  - kelvinjps10 1y ago
    Why did you get downvoted?
- woodrowbarlow 1y ago
  i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl. (i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)
  - cnity 1y ago
    > it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl. That is very nice!
  - arp242 1y ago
    It's not really a fork in any meaningful sense, because rewriting dwm (or any other X11 WM) to Wayland means re-doing almost all code. A "dmw with Wayland" would basically be "if (x11) { x11_code() } else { wayland_code() }".
    - woodrowbarlow 1y ago
      yeah, by "fork" i really just meant "separate repo". you're right.
- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.
- epr 1y ago
  I guess people downvoting this don't get the joke?
  - Philpax 1y ago
    What's the joke?
    - epr 1y ago
      dwm and the community around it tend to use patches for absolutely everything, unlike most other projects. For most projects/codebases, maintaining patch sets is done for security, customizations, etc., but rarely are users expected to configure their window manager by modifying the source code. dwm is well known for being very minimalist, with many features people would expect from other window managers not being included out of the box. To get something more fully featured, users are meant to cobble together their own version of dwm with multiple patches. I'm not saying this workflow doesn't work for dwm and other suckless software projects, it's just that it's pretty out of the ordinary. So, having some experience with the project and how different x and wayland are, when I saw this commenter had brought up the idea of making the switch from x to wayland a patch, it made me laugh out loud. The idea of leaning even further into the borderline degenerate amount of patching already done with suckless software to the point where you're practically rewriting the majority of it was very funny, and so I was confused about the downvotes.
snvzz 1y ago
hopefully with utf-8 support?
- ivanjermakov 1y ago
  What do you need Unicode for in a WM?
  - pm215 1y ago
    In an X11 window manager, the classic use case is "printing the title of the window in its titlebar". Programs like Firefox put the current tab's title in the titlebar text, which can have any random unicode in it.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      Actually, that's an interesting question - in wayland, I think it's common to just say that windows have to draw their own ("client-side window decorations"), so the compositor could just... not handle the window titles at all?
      - RGBCube 1y ago
        Server-side declarations are a thing now & are used widely (in anything other than GNOME)
  - zhengyi13 1y ago
    Window titles come immediately to mind.
xwiz 1y ago
Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
- theycallhermax 1y ago
  niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.
- Babkock 1y ago
  Niri is awesome!
- stevefolta 1y ago
  Another interesting one is Scroll, a scrolling-tiling fork of Sway: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/ https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/
- christophilus 1y ago
  Niri has been my daily driver for a while now. It’s excellent and keeps getting better.
  - aquariusDue 1y ago
    Same here (on Fedora), coupled with Kando (which recently got Niri support) for mouse gestures, shortcuts and macros it's a total powerhouse. Sadly I can't seem to find a config I like for waybar, if anyone has any tips or dotfiles please share them!
    - VTimofeenko 1y ago
      I never found a config either and decided to go without any sort of a bar. That was two years ago and seems to be working fine for me. I wrote a couple of tiny IPC watchers that send notifications on workspace change and whatnot. The rest is handled by centerpiece: https://github.com/friedow/centerpiece/issues https://github.com/friedow/centerpiece/issues
dodomodo 1y ago
[flagged]
- fruitworks 1y ago
  At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more. In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences. >The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. -Frank Herbert Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.
    - saidinesh5 1y ago
      > on largely volunteer time Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore? The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ... Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.
alex-moon 1y ago
Big big fan of dwm, but this wasn't mature when I tried it. I switched to Hyprland and I have to say it has many improvements over dwm.
- davidbanham 1y ago
  I have also been very happy with Hyprland as a past dwm user.
chiffre01 1y ago
I want to like Wayland...
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
Pretty awesome that this is a 3200 line single .c file implementation, atop wlroots and it's newer scene graph API. It is not hard to build a good Wayland impl at this point!
exiguus 1y ago
I am a big fan of dwm and have used it for years on all of my Free- and OpenBSD desktops before switching to sway. The suckless people clearly stated that they would not support Wayland on dwm. At the time, I considered sway as the successor to dwm, at least for me, because it already had an ecosystem around it, and its behavior could be configured similarly if it wasn't already. I also took a look at dwl at the time, I think it was three years ago. I am now happy to revisit it.
- IgnaciusMonk 1y ago
  RHEL and friendly clones like Alma linux do run totally without X11 already !! Only wayland. so no need to remove x11 after installing distro. (on some distros it is not even possible, distro will break.) so finally we can have "clean" distros. it can provide nicer experience.
gundamdoubleO 1y ago
Used dwm for so long it was basically the only reason I didn't switch to Wayland. Very happy with dwl since I found it, made the switch (almost) painless.
- mosquitobiten 1y ago
  You coul say the switch was suckless.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dannyobrien 1y ago
See also https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile -- a fork with Guile Scheme support.

cnity 1y ago

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

mort96 1y ago
An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3. Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.
- bravetraveler 1y ago
  Suspect you're right, from Acknowledgements: dwl began by extending the TinyWL example provided (CC0) by the sway/wlroots developers. This was made possible in many cases by looking at how sway accomplished something, then trying to do the same in as suckless a way as possible.
- kelvinjps10 1y ago
  Why did you get downvoted?
woodrowbarlow 1y ago
i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl. (i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)
- cnity 1y ago
  > it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl. That is very nice!
- arp242 1y ago
  It's not really a fork in any meaningful sense, because rewriting dwm (or any other X11 WM) to Wayland means re-doing almost all code. A "dmw with Wayland" would basically be "if (x11) { x11_code() } else { wayland_code() }".
  - woodrowbarlow 1y ago
    yeah, by "fork" i really just meant "separate repo". you're right.
ivanjermakov 1y ago
Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.
epr 1y ago
I guess people downvoting this don't get the joke?
- Philpax 1y ago
  What's the joke?
  - epr 1y ago
    dwm and the community around it tend to use patches for absolutely everything, unlike most other projects. For most projects/codebases, maintaining patch sets is done for security, customizations, etc., but rarely are users expected to configure their window manager by modifying the source code. dwm is well known for being very minimalist, with many features people would expect from other window managers not being included out of the box. To get something more fully featured, users are meant to cobble together their own version of dwm with multiple patches. I'm not saying this workflow doesn't work for dwm and other suckless software projects, it's just that it's pretty out of the ordinary. So, having some experience with the project and how different x and wayland are, when I saw this commenter had brought up the idea of making the switch from x to wayland a patch, it made me laugh out loud. The idea of leaning even further into the borderline degenerate amount of patching already done with suckless software to the point where you're practically rewriting the majority of it was very funny, and so I was confused about the downvotes.

snvzz 1y ago

hopefully with utf-8 support?

ivanjermakov 1y ago
What do you need Unicode for in a WM?
- pm215 1y ago
  In an X11 window manager, the classic use case is "printing the title of the window in its titlebar". Programs like Firefox put the current tab's title in the titlebar text, which can have any random unicode in it.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    Actually, that's an interesting question - in wayland, I think it's common to just say that windows have to draw their own ("client-side window decorations"), so the compositor could just... not handle the window titles at all?
    - RGBCube 1y ago
      Server-side declarations are a thing now & are used widely (in anything other than GNOME)
- zhengyi13 1y ago
  Window titles come immediately to mind.

xwiz 1y ago

Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

theycallhermax 1y ago
niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.
Babkock 1y ago
Niri is awesome!
stevefolta 1y ago
Another interesting one is Scroll, a scrolling-tiling fork of Sway: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/ https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/
christophilus 1y ago
Niri has been my daily driver for a while now. It’s excellent and keeps getting better.
- aquariusDue 1y ago
  Same here (on Fedora), coupled with Kando (which recently got Niri support) for mouse gestures, shortcuts and macros it's a total powerhouse. Sadly I can't seem to find a config I like for waybar, if anyone has any tips or dotfiles please share them!
  - VTimofeenko 1y ago
    I never found a config either and decided to go without any sort of a bar. That was two years ago and seems to be working fine for me. I wrote a couple of tiny IPC watchers that send notifications on workspace change and whatnot. The rest is handled by centerpiece: https://github.com/friedow/centerpiece/issues https://github.com/friedow/centerpiece/issues

dodomodo 1y ago

[flagged]

fruitworks 1y ago
At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more. In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences. >The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. -Frank Herbert Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!
- vlovich123 1y ago
  In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.
  - saidinesh5 1y ago
    > on largely volunteer time Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore? The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ... Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.

alex-moon 1y ago

Big big fan of dwm, but this wasn't mature when I tried it. I switched to Hyprland and I have to say it has many improvements over dwm.

davidbanham 1y ago
I have also been very happy with Hyprland as a past dwm user.

chiffre01 1y ago

I want to like Wayland...

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

Pretty awesome that this is a 3200 line single .c file implementation, atop wlroots and it's newer scene graph API. It is not hard to build a good Wayland impl at this point!

exiguus 1y ago

I am a big fan of dwm and have used it for years on all of my Free- and OpenBSD desktops before switching to sway. The suckless people clearly stated that they would not support Wayland on dwm. At the time, I considered sway as the successor to dwm, at least for me, because it already had an ecosystem around it, and its behavior could be configured similarly if it wasn't already. I also took a look at dwl at the time, I think it was three years ago. I am now happy to revisit it.

IgnaciusMonk 1y ago
RHEL and friendly clones like Alma linux do run totally without X11 already !! Only wayland. so no need to remove x11 after installing distro. (on some distros it is not even possible, distro will break.) so finally we can have "clean" distros. it can provide nicer experience.

gundamdoubleO 1y ago

Used dwm for so long it was basically the only reason I didn't switch to Wayland. Very happy with dwl since I found it, made the switch (almost) painless.

mosquitobiten 1y ago
You coul say the switch was suckless.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dannyobrien 1y ago

See also https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile -- a fork with Guile Scheme support.