4 ms·
Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.
by sho_hn 10mo ago
Fair! Though I'm actually not sure I understand what you mean with simplicity. X11 is so vastly more complicated than Wayland.
- vidarh 10mo agoFor the server/compositor. Not for the client, or if you want to write a wm and is forced to write a compositor. And actually I'm not even even convinced about the server if talking about a minimal server like this that insists on DRI/GBM, and ditches all the old rendering cruft.
- dismalaf 10mo agoSo build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...
- ggdG 10mo agoCurrent status: > 2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES. https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
- dismalaf 10mo agoI said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. And I only brought it up as an example of a small Wayland compositor/window manager because the poster I was replying to wants to build their own anyway. DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.
- badsectoracula 10mo agoThe -IMO- important part of that quote is "NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES". X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes. wlroots seemingly isn't. This is a significant issue when it comes to relying on most 3rd party libraries.
- mackeye 10mo ago(i worked a _little bit_ on dwl) each wlroots upgrade is a pretty small diff on the dwl source. the annoying part is, as dwl is configured with patches, every patch author has to update their patch to the new 0.x, as dwl is quite minimal, and thus has no stable api. that being said, obviously, dwm doesn't have this problem :) also, for dwl, the issue is that the initial author (not the guy that wrote that notice) is sorta mia, and he has control of the repo on codeberg, so we'd probably need to fork to be safe, and he may not want to take on project lead. (he checks every patch for merge conflicts with one another and upgrade breakages, god bless him lol)
- gf000 10mo ago> X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes. That's certainly one way to say "no longer developed".
- int_19h 10mo agoThat was also true back when it was actively developed though. X apps compiled a long time ago still run fine today.
- badsectoracula 10mo agoXorg is still being under development, there is another fork in development too (XLibre) and you're in the comment thread for a project about a brand new X server written from scratch. Usually things which are "no longer developed" do not have (at least) three implementations in development.
- michaelmrose 10mo agoMature projects often don't change much or quickly even when actively maintained or improved.
- account42 10mo agoWhen things work further development is not always a positive.
- ggdG 10mo ago> I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. Turns out, the wlroots API is so volatile atm that even the developer of the super small compositor DWL has to throw in the towel for now. > DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use. The same is said about DWM, its xorg counterpart, but I, for one, am a happy user of DWM.
- dismalaf 10mo agoNearly every Wayland compositor is built on wlroots. Somehow they manage. But yeah, of course it's going to change more than X11, which is older than I am and more or less abandoned...
- michaelmrose 10mo agoIt's actively maintained by projects like RHEL which still have versions which are supported which in turn support X11. Others are looking to run X11 wm under wayland with wayback, xlibre wants to keep it moving forward, and phoenix wants to replace it with a modern version. This isn't what abandoned means.
- vidarh 10mo agoNo, I do not. I pointed out that with Wayland I'd be forced to. And DWL is an illustration of how much work that is relative to an X11 wm.
- vidarh 10mo agoWhy would I? And DWL is not super small. It's hundreds of times larger than a minimal X wm, and couple of times as big as the wm I used. And it's C. And it'd mean I would lose my session if I want to make changes and restart it. What you're suggesting would be to put significant effort into replacing something that works with something that in terms of features I care about is strictly inferior.
- LeFantome 10mo agoWell, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you. Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.
- kelnos 10mo agowlroots and smithay (I'm not familiar with louvre) do a lot of the difficult work for you, that most compositors will do without much variation but there's still a lot that compositor writers still have to do. It's still a significantly larger task than, for example, writing an X11 WM. (Well, writing an X11 WM that also includes a built-in compositor is a bit more than just the WM, but I'd say still less than writing a Wayland compositor using wlroots or smithay. For example, xfwm4's compositor is around 5300 lines of C, which is... not nothing, but not crazy either.)
- LeFantome 10mo agohttps://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre https://github.com/CuarzoSoftware/Louvre
- vidarh 10mo agoYeah, no I have my own wm in Ruby that is fewer lines of code than a typical Wayland Hello World, and that does what I want. I have no reason to want to throw that away for something that doesn't offer me any features I care about, and removes features I do. Such as the ability to just restart my wm if I make a change to it without affecting my current session at all. Unless you can show me a solution that lets me replace my tiling and floating wm in ca 1500 lines of Ruby, what you're offering me is inferior to what I have with X
- gf000 10mo agoIt's called an extension. What's the point of mandating a (bad) IPC API?
- mikkupikku 10mo agoWhat's the simple way for a bash script to get the title of the currently focused window? In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. It shouldn't be hard, all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, but "Oohh noo that's a security flaw!" say the patronizing Wayland developers who care more about making their own lives as developers simple than supporting basic desktop functionality.
- imtringued 10mo ago> In X this is easy and the bash script will work with every DE. In Wayland you have to write a different solution for each compositor/DE.. Prove me wrong, please. I don't know what you expect people to prove other than that X and Wayland both have the same problem but since X is so complicated there is only one implementation to begin with, which makes it look like X has solved the problem even though it suffers from exactly the same problem.
- mikkupikku 10mo agoThere are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them. Typical Wayland advocate, doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about while telling people to just ignore the problems they have with Wayland, probaby because you don't even understand the problem in the first place. Why did you even respond to me? To insult me? To waste my time?
- yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago> There are in fact multiple implementations of X and xdotool works with all of them Are there non-Xorg X servers for Linux that are usable? Asking because I'd like to try them if they exist
- saint_yossarian 10mo ago> all I want to do is fuzzy match window titles to named audio streams in pipewire, > basic desktop functionality I feel your pain, but find your idea of "basic" functionality amusing. That said, `pw-dump` / `pactl` will give you client names, which often match the window titles.
- torginus 10mo agoAfaik Xorg is 'only' like ~500k lines of code, which is not huge by the standards of large porjects. In fact, one of the major counter arguments against Wayland, is that the compositor + a few core libs, like wlroots necessary to provide a similar set of functionalities, is already larger that the equivalent X11 code (which has a ton of unused cruft).