6 ms·

Xmonad seeking help for Wayland port (2023)

95 points by clircle 1y ago

Twisol 1y ago
This is dated in October of 2023. I wonder if there's been any progress since then?
- diath 1y ago
  There's more up to date discussion about it in https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-wlroots-bindings/8426 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-wlroots-bindings/842...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- __s 1y ago
  https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-help/7812/53 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-... last post Aug 24th someone working on Haskell wlroots binding was off due to injury, but thread they link to is active
jmclnx 1y ago
That is the thing with Wayland, it is much harder to create a window manager for Wayland. IIRC, fvwm decided not to create a Wayland version due to the difficulty. When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone.
- preisschild 1y ago
  There are libraries like wlroots (C) and Smithay (Rust) to be able to more easily create your own wayland compositor
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    Are you suggesting every application should implement its own compositor?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - zeendo 1y ago
      This style of engagement is so off-putting.
      - cratermoon 1y ago
        Help me out then. What value, to a window manager developer, is there in making it easier to create your own wayland compositor?
        preisschild 1y ago
        To use wayland?
    - immibis 1y ago
      They're suggesting that every Wayland window manager has to implement its own compositor. Because that is how Wayland works. There are no window managers, only compositors, and if you want custom window management, you write your own compositor.
      - cratermoon 1y ago
        And what value to window manager developers get from being able to implement its own compositor?
  - ux266478 1y ago
    However the radically different architecture of Wayland may necessitate a rewrite well beyond what the maintainers of a window manager feel is easy. Even accounting for wlroots, you're not exactly just running sed on a glob. And unfortunately, wayland didn't actually fix X's complexity problem. Arcan did, but we're not allowed to have nice things because Redhat has no taste.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    The libraries help, but it's still a bigger job than a window manager was
- GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
  The blame could be as well on Haskell. IMO Ganeti died because of such a choice. There aren't enough programmers that are willing to invest into that niche. I have nothing against that language per se, still such a choice can easily develop into a dead end.
  - kelvinjps 1y ago
    There are multiple window managers in other languages that won't build a Wayland equivalent due to the effort so it's not only about the language
    - GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
      Fair enough, but it's not helpful either.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  This isn't wayland's fault. It's the compositor implementing wayland's fault for not exposing a window manager API. Nothing about wayland prohibits the creation of a window manager API.
  - Ferret7446 1y ago
    Nothing stopped the adopters from waiting until that existed before pushing Wayland into their software and breaking many people's workflow either, yet here we are
  - chongli 1y ago
    I’ve heard the same thing about Wayland and NVidia’s drivers. To me, it seems like Wayland was designed to push all the hard work onto everybody else. That way Wayland never gets blamed for anything!
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      Not having a defacto compositor was a major blunder and resulted in an enormous delay to the project, reputational damage, and numerous challenges for app developers.
      - chongli 1y ago
        What I don’t get is why they pushed the compositor onto WM developers in the first place. Compositing seems like way too low level of a task for a window manager to be concerned with.
      - hollerith 1y ago
        Do you mean default compositor?
        c-hendricks 1y ago
        I think they meant like a reference implementation, wlroots came a decade into Wayland
- ElectricalUnion 1y ago
  What about wayback? Assuming running X by itself becomes real bad and undesirable, would wayback+Xwayland cover all those "can't Wayland" use cases? What remains (besides better stability and wider availability of wayback) to be done?
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  Yeah, I’ve long had fantasies of writing a little desktop for myself next time I get a long stretch of time off, but that became much more daunting with the advent of Wayland, even when factoring in the existence of wlroots and such. It’s like going from building a bicycle to building a modern fuel injected car with an automatic transmission.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  We also got a lot of new little niche window managers. hyprland, niri, cosmic, sway, river, labwc, dwl, wayfire and vivarium which is xnomad inspired...
  - jmclnx 1y ago
    Even still, they are very hard to work with when compared to X11. Fvwm people are very smart and have been developing fvwm for longer than Linux have been around. From what I understand and have read, bring fvwm or creating a fvwm clone on Wayland is near impossible. Far too much work. So we will really end up with "pigs" like Gnome3, KDE or a slew of tiling environments. None of the cool WMs like Windowmaker, fvwm, dluxbox, twm, ctwm, vtwm ....
- hakfoo 1y ago
  As a FVWM daily driver, it's amazing to see it's has gone from "it's the niftier-than-twm baseline that's installed by default in your 2.0-kernel Slackware or RedHat distro, but you'll probably install something trendy like AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment" to "It Has Powers That Cannot Be Recreated In The New Magic." For me, the winning feature is FvwmButtons. Long before we had system trays and notification busses, if you wanted to put a media player, a clock, some stat counters, or a full-blown xterm, in a little desktop dock, you just captured a regular window. You didn't have to invent an entirely new category of "software designed to live as an icon inside someone else's ecosystem." I'm not aware of any compositor that offers anything like it-- it seems like the best we get now are ugly bars with a limited vocabulary of "we can integrate over some signaling bus with these three specific programmes and that's it". I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    > I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded. On Mastodon I follow a bot that posts screenshots of old Mac Kaleidoscope schemes and the creativity on display both leaves me in awe and makes me sad that no modern windowing system can hold a candle to it. With Kaleidoscope there were no rules. You could do a hacker OS[0], or game UI[1], or titlebars on the left[2] or underneath[3], or non-rectangular and chrome[4], or made of denim[5], and those are just a few of the thousands of wildly different themes[6]. Nothing on modern Linux comes close. Even if you seek out third party themes all you find are dozens of minor permutations on popular flat themes like Material and Nord. It's so dull. [0]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ [1]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac [2]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ [3]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ [4]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-twisted-downleft/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-tw... [5]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ [6]: https://macthemes.garden/ https://macthemes.garden/
- krmboya 1y ago
  > When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone. There's hope due to the recent x11 fork, xlibre. They intend to keep x11 support ongoing
  - tristan957 1y ago
    Application toolkits will eventually drop support for X11. GTK will remove it in GTK5. Not sure what Qt's plans are, but I'd have to think X11 support is long for this world there as well.
    - immibis 1y ago
      GNOME is an outlier and not indicative of general trends. They pretty much do what they want, as a silo, ignoring the larger ecosystem. They want you to use their software stack all the way through.
  - immibis 1y ago
    It's a shame about all the political bullshit they injected into the project, which already resulted in it being removed from several package repositories. I hope someone makes another fork in the vein of xlibre, but without political bullshit.
    - callmetango 1y ago
      [dead]
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  aka Wayland will never end up replacing X
- jamespo 1y ago
  But we also have wonderful new ones like niri
- fvwmuser 1y ago
  It's not the "difficulty" it's the fact that the technologies are completely different. See: https://gist.github.com/ThomasAdam/5377540b3025f7f04735d96ee64354fd https://gist.github.com/ThomasAdam/5377540b3025f7f04735d96ee...
schuyler2d 1y ago
I was so sad when I lost xmonad support on Ubuntu 24. I think the closest thing that could get most of the way there is https://github.com/domferr/tilingshell/ https://github.com/domferr/tilingshell/
- baobun 1y ago
  You can get very close if not all the way with qtile if you accept using python instead of haskell. https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#monadtall https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...
- neilv 1y ago
  If you're not committed to Ubuntu, Xmonad still works great with X11 in the latest Debian Stable.
- cxa 1y ago
  I have Xmonad running well on Ubuntu 24 with Gnome Flashback The packages I install are: xmonad libghc-xmonad-extras-dev gnome-flashback gnome-panel (plus suckless-tools and xmobar) That should give you a login option for "GNOME Flashback (Xmonad)" I recall there were a couple of hacks necessary to show the Gnome Panel: gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback root-background true gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback desktop false and then the panels you can hide or remove per your preference
- mdf 1y ago
  Could you elaborate? I'm a long-time Xmonad user. Currently, I'm using Ubuntu 25.04, having upgraded to new non-LTS releases every six months, on two computers running Xmonad. I haven't run into any problems.
thcipriani 1y ago
XMonad is an an amazing window manager (WM) made by a bunch of nerds who care a whole lot about a niche problem. Software by caring nerds is my favorite software as a user. I really hope it makes the jump to Wayland. I've used XMonad for more than a decade and it's still my favorite WM. XMonad really let me forget about managing windows---I never have to resize a window or remember where I put a window. XMonad handles the arranging and resizing and floating for me. There's a nice layout for small screens that will zoom your active window[0]. You can cobble your desktop together into whatever makes you happiest: Active corners. ScratchPads. So much in XMonad Contrib[1]. Since I'm not the right person to help with porting to Wayland, I'm giving money via the GitHub sponsorship page[2]. I check in on discourse from time to time: progress looks slow. The person/people they need are hard to come by. [0]: <https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Magnifier.html https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-L...> [1]: <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib> [2]: <https://github.com/sponsors/xmonad https://github.com/sponsors/xmonad>
colordrops 1y ago
I used to be on XMonad years ago but the community seemed to be pigheaded about NEVER porting to Wayland so I abandoned it for Sway and never looked back. Was fun learning Haskell to write config but otherwise life is way easier with other WMs.
neilv 1y ago
I'm surprised that the Xmonad project is/was willing to pay someone. Does anyone know whether there was a single benefactor, or where the money was coming from, and why? (Incidentally, I love the way that my Xmonad setup works, even though I don't know Haskell. I tried using an i3wm setup at work for maybe a year, but every evening coming back to Xmonad on my personal laptop felt like a boost of agility. I guess, if I were wealthy and wanted to move to Wayland, I would seriously consider either doing the work myself or paying someone to.)
- Liskni_si 1y ago
  GitHub Sponsors is where most of the money came from.
sohrob 1y ago
I know the gentleman who runs the Distrotube channel on YouTube is/was an Xmonad user and it would be great if he made the call for help on his show to reach a wider audience.
fooker 1y ago
Why not run a virtual x session and run Xmonad inside it? Wouldn't be lightweight or ..say.. easily GPU accelerated, but should work with some plumbing effort.
- mappu 1y ago
  Wayback is a new Wayland compositor that implements the X11 window manager API on top of a single rootful XWayland session: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland . XMonad should run fine inside it. This gives you the advantage of Wayland's modern display stack and no legacy Xorg code while still running a classic X11 window manager. The main downside is you have to run all X11-compatible apps, it's unable to manage any Wayland-native applications. But, X11 apps aren't going away any time soon, just the display server.
  - bsder 1y ago
    The Wayback stuff is super cool. How has it not hit the front page? I see the previous submissions, but there's just crickets in the comments.
  - Liskni_si 1y ago
    > no legacy Xorg code This is not accurate. It runs quite a lot of legacy Xorg code actually, just without the input and video drivers.
zem 1y ago
I tried a few tiling WMs over the years, but xmonad was the only one that seemed to take desktop environment support seriously. thankfully by the time the wayland switch broke xmonad I had cosmic available to move to.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  "the wayland switch broke xmonad" That doesn't mean anything. xmonad is not broken afaik, still in use everywhere and wayland, which is just a protocol, has no power over it.
  - zem 1y ago
    i would have thought it was pretty understandable shorthand for "once i switched to wayland my personal xmonad setup stopped working". wasn't accusing xmonad of being broken!
    - prmoustache 1y ago
      It is like saying that kde or gnome is broken since you switched to MacOs.
phs2501 1y ago
Does anyone know of a Wayland WM/compositor that does multi-screen like XMonad? Preferably out of the box but I'll take configurable. For those unaware, though I doubt you're reading this thread if so, I want n desktops that are shared between all screens, not desktops _assigned_ to particular screens. If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap. Ideally also does layouts kind of like xmonad too, not "here's a tiling tree structure and a bunch of commands to manually manage it".
- jolmg 1y ago
  > If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap. At least i3's (and I imagine sway's) config is sufficiently flexible for that. Here's a shell function that brings the workspace you specify to your current output: i3_bring_workspace_to_focused_output() { local workspace="$1" i3 " workspace $workspace move workspace to output $( i3-msg -t get_workspaces | jq -r '.[]|select(.focused).output' ) " } You can turn that into an executable and have it be called through a keybinding.
- baobun 1y ago
  Qtile. It has the corresponding layouts, too. https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#monadtall https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...
- rlpb 1y ago
  Sway can more or less do it, and I've switched from XMonad to Sway but configured similar to XMonad's default method of operation. I haven't managed to get it quite right though. For example Sway doesn't seem to be willing to move a workspace to a different monitor if it is empty.
  - thraxil 1y ago
    Yeah, I switched from XMonad (which I used for over a decade) to Sway a few years back. Spent some time trying to duplicate the XMonad behaviour but eventually just realized that spending a few hours getting used to the Sway approach and slightly changing my workflow was a lot easier.
nananana9 1y ago
> paying someone to work on a port of XMonad to Wayland, since none of us is up to the task This is such a crazy mentality to me, coming from game development, where you can just go to a random 22yo kid's desk, ask them "do you want to port this game to the Nintendo Switch?" and they'll go "hell yeah" and do it in a few months, despite never having programmed for the device before. You can just learn to do new things. By all accounts the Wayland protocol is simpler than X11, and you've already done the majority of the work. It's just a matter of adding a new backend. People do that all the time when they port a program to the web, a game to a new platform, or when they add a new architecture to a compiler.
- AceJohnny2 1y ago
  desk? Like for someone for whom its their full-time occupation/job? Remember that many open-source contributors do it on their free time, with whatever energy they have left after their job.
- roenxi 1y ago
  Is this you volunteering to do the port? I'm guessing you're not going to learn how to do this new thing. The real irony here is that they are actually implementing your suggestion - they're potentially going to hire some random 22yo who's response to porting XMonad to Wayland is "hell yeah!". Although realistically they'll probably get someone a bit more experienced. They don't seem to be saying they can't do this or that it is some insurmountable technical challenge. They're saying that they aren't going to do it themselves and aren't giving reasons.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Which is why game development has the work conditions that it happens to have across too many studios. Plenty of 22 year old and younger kids willing to grind for the lottery possibility to actually be part of the team.
- 1y ago

95 points by clircle 1y ago

Twisol 1y ago

This is dated in October of 2023. I wonder if there's been any progress since then?

diath 1y ago
There's more up to date discussion about it in https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-wlroots-bindings/8426 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-wlroots-bindings/842...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
__s 1y ago
https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-help/7812/53 https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-... last post Aug 24th someone working on Haskell wlroots binding was off due to injury, but thread they link to is active

jmclnx 1y ago

That is the thing with Wayland, it is much harder to create a window manager for Wayland. IIRC, fvwm decided not to create a Wayland version due to the difficulty. When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone.

preisschild 1y ago
There are libraries like wlroots (C) and Smithay (Rust) to be able to more easily create your own wayland compositor
- cratermoon 1y ago
  Are you suggesting every application should implement its own compositor?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - zeendo 1y ago
    This style of engagement is so off-putting.
    - cratermoon 1y ago
      Help me out then. What value, to a window manager developer, is there in making it easier to create your own wayland compositor?
      - preisschild 1y ago
        To use wayland?
  - immibis 1y ago
    They're suggesting that every Wayland window manager has to implement its own compositor. Because that is how Wayland works. There are no window managers, only compositors, and if you want custom window management, you write your own compositor.
    - cratermoon 1y ago
      And what value to window manager developers get from being able to implement its own compositor?
- ux266478 1y ago
  However the radically different architecture of Wayland may necessitate a rewrite well beyond what the maintainers of a window manager feel is easy. Even accounting for wlroots, you're not exactly just running sed on a glob. And unfortunately, wayland didn't actually fix X's complexity problem. Arcan did, but we're not allowed to have nice things because Redhat has no taste.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  The libraries help, but it's still a bigger job than a window manager was
GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
The blame could be as well on Haskell. IMO Ganeti died because of such a choice. There aren't enough programmers that are willing to invest into that niche. I have nothing against that language per se, still such a choice can easily develop into a dead end.
- kelvinjps 1y ago
  There are multiple window managers in other languages that won't build a Wayland equivalent due to the effort so it's not only about the language
  - GuestFAUniverse 1y ago
    Fair enough, but it's not helpful either.
charcircuit 1y ago
This isn't wayland's fault. It's the compositor implementing wayland's fault for not exposing a window manager API. Nothing about wayland prohibits the creation of a window manager API.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  Nothing stopped the adopters from waiting until that existed before pushing Wayland into their software and breaking many people's workflow either, yet here we are
- chongli 1y ago
  I’ve heard the same thing about Wayland and NVidia’s drivers. To me, it seems like Wayland was designed to push all the hard work onto everybody else. That way Wayland never gets blamed for anything!
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    Not having a defacto compositor was a major blunder and resulted in an enormous delay to the project, reputational damage, and numerous challenges for app developers.
    - chongli 1y ago
      What I don’t get is why they pushed the compositor onto WM developers in the first place. Compositing seems like way too low level of a task for a window manager to be concerned with.
    - hollerith 1y ago
      Do you mean default compositor?
      - c-hendricks 1y ago
        I think they meant like a reference implementation, wlroots came a decade into Wayland
ElectricalUnion 1y ago
What about wayback? Assuming running X by itself becomes real bad and undesirable, would wayback+Xwayland cover all those "can't Wayland" use cases? What remains (besides better stability and wider availability of wayback) to be done?
cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Yeah, I’ve long had fantasies of writing a little desktop for myself next time I get a long stretch of time off, but that became much more daunting with the advent of Wayland, even when factoring in the existence of wlroots and such. It’s like going from building a bicycle to building a modern fuel injected car with an automatic transmission.
BoredPositron 1y ago
We also got a lot of new little niche window managers. hyprland, niri, cosmic, sway, river, labwc, dwl, wayfire and vivarium which is xnomad inspired...
- jmclnx 1y ago
  Even still, they are very hard to work with when compared to X11. Fvwm people are very smart and have been developing fvwm for longer than Linux have been around. From what I understand and have read, bring fvwm or creating a fvwm clone on Wayland is near impossible. Far too much work. So we will really end up with "pigs" like Gnome3, KDE or a slew of tiling environments. None of the cool WMs like Windowmaker, fvwm, dluxbox, twm, ctwm, vtwm ....
hakfoo 1y ago
As a FVWM daily driver, it's amazing to see it's has gone from "it's the niftier-than-twm baseline that's installed by default in your 2.0-kernel Slackware or RedHat distro, but you'll probably install something trendy like AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment" to "It Has Powers That Cannot Be Recreated In The New Magic." For me, the winning feature is FvwmButtons. Long before we had system trays and notification busses, if you wanted to put a media player, a clock, some stat counters, or a full-blown xterm, in a little desktop dock, you just captured a regular window. You didn't have to invent an entirely new category of "software designed to live as an icon inside someone else's ecosystem." I'm not aware of any compositor that offers anything like it-- it seems like the best we get now are ugly bars with a limited vocabulary of "we can integrate over some signaling bus with these three specific programmes and that's it". I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  > I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded. On Mastodon I follow a bot that posts screenshots of old Mac Kaleidoscope schemes and the creativity on display both leaves me in awe and makes me sad that no modern windowing system can hold a candle to it. With Kaleidoscope there were no rules. You could do a hacker OS[0], or game UI[1], or titlebars on the left[2] or underneath[3], or non-rectangular and chrome[4], or made of denim[5], and those are just a few of the thousands of wildly different themes[6]. Nothing on modern Linux comes close. Even if you seek out third party themes all you find are dozens of minor permutations on popular flat themes like Material and Nord. It's so dull. [0]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ [1]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac [2]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ [3]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ [4]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-twisted-downleft/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-tw... [5]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ [6]: https://macthemes.garden/ https://macthemes.garden/
krmboya 1y ago
> When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone. There's hope due to the recent x11 fork, xlibre. They intend to keep x11 support ongoing
- tristan957 1y ago
  Application toolkits will eventually drop support for X11. GTK will remove it in GTK5. Not sure what Qt's plans are, but I'd have to think X11 support is long for this world there as well.
  - immibis 1y ago
    GNOME is an outlier and not indicative of general trends. They pretty much do what they want, as a silo, ignoring the larger ecosystem. They want you to use their software stack all the way through.
- immibis 1y ago
  It's a shame about all the political bullshit they injected into the project, which already resulted in it being removed from several package repositories. I hope someone makes another fork in the vein of xlibre, but without political bullshit.
  - callmetango 1y ago
    [dead]
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
aka Wayland will never end up replacing X
jamespo 1y ago
But we also have wonderful new ones like niri
fvwmuser 1y ago
It's not the "difficulty" it's the fact that the technologies are completely different. See: https://gist.github.com/ThomasAdam/5377540b3025f7f04735d96ee64354fd https://gist.github.com/ThomasAdam/5377540b3025f7f04735d96ee...

schuyler2d 1y ago

I was so sad when I lost xmonad support on Ubuntu 24. I think the closest thing that could get most of the way there is https://github.com/domferr/tilingshell/ https://github.com/domferr/tilingshell/

baobun 1y ago
You can get very close if not all the way with qtile if you accept using python instead of haskell. https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#monadtall https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...
neilv 1y ago
If you're not committed to Ubuntu, Xmonad still works great with X11 in the latest Debian Stable.
cxa 1y ago
I have Xmonad running well on Ubuntu 24 with Gnome Flashback The packages I install are: xmonad libghc-xmonad-extras-dev gnome-flashback gnome-panel (plus suckless-tools and xmobar) That should give you a login option for "GNOME Flashback (Xmonad)" I recall there were a couple of hacks necessary to show the Gnome Panel: gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback root-background true gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback desktop false and then the panels you can hide or remove per your preference
mdf 1y ago
Could you elaborate? I'm a long-time Xmonad user. Currently, I'm using Ubuntu 25.04, having upgraded to new non-LTS releases every six months, on two computers running Xmonad. I haven't run into any problems.

thcipriani 1y ago

XMonad is an an amazing window manager (WM) made by a bunch of nerds who care a whole lot about a niche problem. Software by caring nerds is my favorite software as a user. I really hope it makes the jump to Wayland. I've used XMonad for more than a decade and it's still my favorite WM. XMonad really let me forget about managing windows---I never have to resize a window or remember where I put a window. XMonad handles the arranging and resizing and floating for me. There's a nice layout for small screens that will zoom your active window[0]. You can cobble your desktop together into whatever makes you happiest: Active corners. ScratchPads. So much in XMonad Contrib[1]. Since I'm not the right person to help with porting to Wayland, I'm giving money via the GitHub sponsorship page[2]. I check in on discourse from time to time: progress looks slow. The person/people they need are hard to come by. [0]: <https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Layout-Magnifier.html https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-L...> [1]: <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib> [2]: <https://github.com/sponsors/xmonad https://github.com/sponsors/xmonad>

colordrops 1y ago

I used to be on XMonad years ago but the community seemed to be pigheaded about NEVER porting to Wayland so I abandoned it for Sway and never looked back. Was fun learning Haskell to write config but otherwise life is way easier with other WMs.

neilv 1y ago

I'm surprised that the Xmonad project is/was willing to pay someone. Does anyone know whether there was a single benefactor, or where the money was coming from, and why? (Incidentally, I love the way that my Xmonad setup works, even though I don't know Haskell. I tried using an i3wm setup at work for maybe a year, but every evening coming back to Xmonad on my personal laptop felt like a boost of agility. I guess, if I were wealthy and wanted to move to Wayland, I would seriously consider either doing the work myself or paying someone to.)

Liskni_si 1y ago
GitHub Sponsors is where most of the money came from.

sohrob 1y ago

I know the gentleman who runs the Distrotube channel on YouTube is/was an Xmonad user and it would be great if he made the call for help on his show to reach a wider audience.

fooker 1y ago

Why not run a virtual x session and run Xmonad inside it? Wouldn't be lightweight or ..say.. easily GPU accelerated, but should work with some plumbing effort.

mappu 1y ago
Wayback is a new Wayland compositor that implements the X11 window manager API on top of a single rootful XWayland session: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland . XMonad should run fine inside it. This gives you the advantage of Wayland's modern display stack and no legacy Xorg code while still running a classic X11 window manager. The main downside is you have to run all X11-compatible apps, it's unable to manage any Wayland-native applications. But, X11 apps aren't going away any time soon, just the display server.
- bsder 1y ago
  The Wayback stuff is super cool. How has it not hit the front page? I see the previous submissions, but there's just crickets in the comments.
- Liskni_si 1y ago
  > no legacy Xorg code This is not accurate. It runs quite a lot of legacy Xorg code actually, just without the input and video drivers.

zem 1y ago

I tried a few tiling WMs over the years, but xmonad was the only one that seemed to take desktop environment support seriously. thankfully by the time the wayland switch broke xmonad I had cosmic available to move to.

prmoustache 1y ago
"the wayland switch broke xmonad" That doesn't mean anything. xmonad is not broken afaik, still in use everywhere and wayland, which is just a protocol, has no power over it.
- zem 1y ago
  i would have thought it was pretty understandable shorthand for "once i switched to wayland my personal xmonad setup stopped working". wasn't accusing xmonad of being broken!
  - prmoustache 1y ago
    It is like saying that kde or gnome is broken since you switched to MacOs.

phs2501 1y ago

Does anyone know of a Wayland WM/compositor that does multi-screen like XMonad? Preferably out of the box but I'll take configurable. For those unaware, though I doubt you're reading this thread if so, I want n desktops that are shared between all screens, not desktops _assigned_ to particular screens. If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap. Ideally also does layouts kind of like xmonad too, not "here's a tiling tree structure and a bunch of commands to manually manage it".

jolmg 1y ago
> If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap. At least i3's (and I imagine sway's) config is sufficiently flexible for that. Here's a shell function that brings the workspace you specify to your current output: i3_bring_workspace_to_focused_output() { local workspace="$1" i3 " workspace $workspace move workspace to output $( i3-msg -t get_workspaces | jq -r '.[]|select(.focused).output' ) " } You can turn that into an executable and have it be called through a keybinding.
baobun 1y ago
Qtile. It has the corresponding layouts, too. https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#monadtall https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...
rlpb 1y ago
Sway can more or less do it, and I've switched from XMonad to Sway but configured similar to XMonad's default method of operation. I haven't managed to get it quite right though. For example Sway doesn't seem to be willing to move a workspace to a different monitor if it is empty.
- thraxil 1y ago
  Yeah, I switched from XMonad (which I used for over a decade) to Sway a few years back. Spent some time trying to duplicate the XMonad behaviour but eventually just realized that spending a few hours getting used to the Sway approach and slightly changing my workflow was a lot easier.

nananana9 1y ago

> paying someone to work on a port of XMonad to Wayland, since none of us is up to the task This is such a crazy mentality to me, coming from game development, where you can just go to a random 22yo kid's desk, ask them "do you want to port this game to the Nintendo Switch?" and they'll go "hell yeah" and do it in a few months, despite never having programmed for the device before. You can just learn to do new things. By all accounts the Wayland protocol is simpler than X11, and you've already done the majority of the work. It's just a matter of adding a new backend. People do that all the time when they port a program to the web, a game to a new platform, or when they add a new architecture to a compiler.

AceJohnny2 1y ago
desk? Like for someone for whom its their full-time occupation/job? Remember that many open-source contributors do it on their free time, with whatever energy they have left after their job.
roenxi 1y ago
Is this you volunteering to do the port? I'm guessing you're not going to learn how to do this new thing. The real irony here is that they are actually implementing your suggestion - they're potentially going to hire some random 22yo who's response to porting XMonad to Wayland is "hell yeah!". Although realistically they'll probably get someone a bit more experienced. They don't seem to be saying they can't do this or that it is some insurmountable technical challenge. They're saying that they aren't going to do it themselves and aren't giving reasons.
- deleted 1y ago
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pjmlp 1y ago
Which is why game development has the work conditions that it happens to have across too many studios. Plenty of 22 year old and younger kids willing to grind for the lottery possibility to actually be part of the team.
1y ago