When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone.
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.
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.
From the Wayland devs' PoV, mainstreaming Wayland successfully shifted responsibility for doing most of the heavy lifting in the graphics layer from the neglected X-Windows project to the well-established KDE and GNOME. The state of wlroots and the ecosystem of personal WM projects is unavoidable collateral damage.
For an individual developer, perhaps the thing to do is take a page out of bbLean's [1] bag of tricks and implement your WM on top of one of the big two desktop environments.
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 ....
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.
I think the closest thing that could get most of the way there is https://github.com/domferr/tilingshell/
https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...
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-L...>
(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.)
Wouldn't be lightweight or ..say.. easily GPU accelerated, but should work with some plumbing effort.
Twisol•4h ago
diath•3h ago
__s•3h ago