Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

hyprland.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 86 posts

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#11

Post by dTal »

The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in turn affords many more opportunities to introduce bugs, missing functionality etc. I trust "weird" compositors much less than I trust "weird" X11 window managers - it's more like using an alternative Xorg than an alternative WM.

"...there is still a lot of boilerplate involved in writing a compositor, much more than for an X11 window manager, namely setting up your own rendering code, registering and storing input devices and screens in your own data structures, passing input events to windows, calculating bounds for bars and other overlays (courtesy of layer-shell) and others. X11 handles all of this for you..."

https://tudorr.ro/blog/technical/2021/01/26/the-wayland-expe...

Several people mentioning wlroots. I can't say I've ever attempted it myself, but if you take a look at the blog post above, the author is very clear on the fact that even with the benefit of wlroots (which they highly praise) writing a Wayland compositor is still a lot more work than writing an X11 window manager (which they have also done, so they are something of an authority). wlroots doesn't abstract everything away, it just gives you a bunch of useful tools.

"With Wayland, you handle everything, even with wlroots."

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#13

Post by sheepdestroyer »

Y_Y wrote: post #6

I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

I want my systems functional, efficient, snappy.

One of the first things I do on a new device is to disable animations and similar "eye candy". On Gnome it's hidden, but can be changed with gnome-tweek-tools ; on Android it's hidden too, in the developer options that you have to unlock (7 taps on build number).

In both cases, those animations easily lose frames and are distracting, without talking about the frivolous power spending on portable devices, but they are enabled by default and not easily removed.

It bugs me to jo end that wrong priorities seem to apparently be the norm.

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#14

Post by Krssst »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #13
Y_Y wrote: post #6

I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

I want my systems functional, efficient, snappy. One of the first things I do on a new device is to disable animations and similar "eye candy". On Gnome it's hidden, but can be changed with gnome-tweek-tools ; on Android it's hidden too, in the developer options that you have to unlock (7 taps on build number). In both cases, those animations easily lose frames and are distracting, without talking about the frivolous…

Note: when disabling animations on GNOME, a noticeable delay seems to remain before the alt-tab switcher appears.

I don't remember which extension I use to work around that; maybe this one: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher...

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#15

Post by 3836293648 »

dTal wrote: post #11

The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in…

Yeah, but wlroots is taking the role of Xorg there, leaving WM writers to mostly just write the WM

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#16

Post by charcircuit »

dTal wrote: post #11

The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in…

So just push all that shared logic into a library that alternative Wayland compositers can all use.

eg. wlroots

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#17

Post by eyelidlessness »

Y_Y wrote: post #6

I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

For anyone like me who uses macOS and also dislikes the genie minimize effect, you can change it[1] and/or change/turn off a huge variety of animations[2].

1: https://macos-defaults.com/dock/mineffect.html#set-to-genie-...

2: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/63477

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#18

Post by gizmo686 »

dTal wrote: post #11

The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in…

This compositor, like most Wayland compositors, uses the wlroots library, so most of that tedious work is already handled for you.

Re: Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#20

Post by giardia »

Y_Y wrote: post #6

I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

I'm not a fan of animations myself, though I think it could be somewhat useful with a tiling WM to help maintain (for lack if a better word) your orientation. Sometimes a new window will open and move the other windows around and get resized unexpectedly, or you'll move a window and lose track for a split second. Animation would show you where everything gets put so you don't have to reorient yourself. Not a very common issue, but I could see animation helping there.
Post reply on HN