4 ms·

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 difficu

by 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...

by jmclnx 1y ago

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...