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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

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Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#121

Post by deterministic »

wild_egg wrote: post #19

I've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So many hoops to jump through for things that should be simple. Sure, X11 has warts but I can make it do basically anything I want. Wayland seems like it will always have too much friction to ever consider switching.

I completely agree. This feels like the typical “open-source developers rewriting something that already works well, then forcing it on people who never asked for it” kind of project.

It will take years to reach the feature set of X11. And for what? From my perspective as both a developer and a user, I see no tangible benefits.

On top of that, it breaks software I rely on professionally. Code that worked perfectly fine under X11.

Meanwhile, I can still build and run Windows programs I wrote 30 years ago on Windows 11.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#123

Post by messe »

gzread wrote: post #12
mikkupikku wrote: post #9

If Wayland doesn't get this solved then I'll just use X11 forever, with coding agents to keep it running if I have to.

You could use xlibre, although some people say it's a joke

The reactionary fork started by an anti vax nutcase? Yeah. It's a joke at best. At worst it'll foster an utterly toxic community.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#124

Post by hedora »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #115
em-bee wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are looking for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz note that compiz is also a windowmanager, so already then compositor and window manager were one unit.

The compositor and window manager could be one unit. But you can also just slap picom on with any other window manager and that's fine.

I guess this kind misses the point. I was an early compiz user (wobbly windows, fire effect and all), but, at this point I just don’t miss it (literally: I thought I was running a compositor for the last ~5 years, and just… wasn’t.)

The X windows paradigm was fine, and still works great with modern hardware.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#125

Post by Gigachad »

wild_egg wrote: post #19

I've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So many hoops to jump through for things that should be simple. Sure, X11 has warts but I can make it do basically anything I want. Wayland seems like it will always have too much friction to ever consider switching.

From a user perspective it just works, the online issues are all hypotheticals or very specific scenarios. On wayland my computer just works, my displays can have different dpi scales, my video doesn't tear, and programs don't have full access to record the screen and keylog without asking permission.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#126

Post by Gigachad »

bandrami wrote: post #104
badgersnake wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sway is basically i3 on Wayland. You pretty much keep your config file (with a few modifications), there really isn’t much friction. That’s not a reason to do it of course, for me the driver was support for multiple monitors with different scaling requirements.

Sort of. If your software wants to do something like "know where the pointer is" it won't work on sway.

Why would I want software to know where my pointer is other than when the pointer is over the software's window?

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#127

Post by bandrami »

Gigachad wrote: post #126
bandrami wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. If your software wants to do something like "know where the pointer is" it won't work on sway.

Why would I want software to know where my pointer is other than when the pointer is over the software's window?

Well, in my case, because the VCF on my synth sets its cutoff frequency based on the pointer's Y position and its resonance based on the pointer's X position

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#128

Post by baobun »

hedora wrote: post #84

Traditionally, X11 didn’t have compositors, and didn’t need the extra round trip wayland exists to remove. I wonder if there’s space for a project like xlibre (or x.org, if it were revived) to update the x11 protocol to fill whatever gap compositors were meant to fill. For what it’s worth, I’ve been moving all my machines to lxde. Apparently, I accidentally switched back to a compositor free desktop without noticing.…

> For what it’s worth, I’ve been moving all my machines to lxde.

Any gotchas or regrets?

Haven't used it in many years and now considering going all in on making it (scaffolding of) next DE. So looking at the same move.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#129

Post by rendaw »

_flux wrote: post #44

To me, this is the first time Wayland feels like it's not a waste of time. The display server does not need to have the complexity of window managing on top the surface management. I certainly share the author's sentiment: > Although, I do not know for sure why the original Wayland authors chose to combine the window manager and Wayland compositor, I assume it was simply the path of least resistance. Although I'm not…

I think most smaller Wayland compositors are using a library (wlroots, smithay) for most (?) of the compositing. If using a library provides a few extra options, while still allowing sharing code, it feel like the API boundary was put in the right place.

When there was the 90deg off bug, was that a bug in the compositor or in wlroots?

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#130

Post by angus-g »

twiclo wrote: post #120
kyorochan wrote: post #61

River was really great even before this split, so I'm very excited to see what happens in the space in the future. I switched to Niri while waiting for it to happen, and I'll probably switch back at some point. If you were an Xmonad user I feel pretty confident in saying River is the Wayland WM for you.

I'm still on Xmonad mainly because I've only tried hyprland and it couldn't handle the master/slave stack the way xmonad does. On River, when I create a new window will it be inserted above the current selected window even if the current window is the master? Also, when it was split up what did he call his window manager? Looks like the River repo is just for his display server/compositor

It has become river-classic: https://codeberg.org/river/river-classic
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