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River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

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Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#21

Post by smoldesu »

dheera wrote: post #8

I really wish there was a window manager that (a) looks good and modern (b) can tile well but also allows for free floating windows (c) has simple commands, not multi stroke Emacs-style commands (d) can allow tiling with the mouse with snapping

i3wm and Sway cover pretty much every base except for (a), if you configure it properly. I'm not a huge fan of the default i3 bindings (feels a little too "Emacs-style" like you suggested), but Regolith Linux[0] has really great default shortcuts that replace stock i3. I heavily recommend checking it out in a VM or Liveboot environment if it's something that interests you.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#22

Post by cp9 »

Veuxdo wrote: post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

It’s much much much more secure. Unfortunately that broke screenshotting/screen sharing programs. So, each compositor has to have their own now. But in general better performance and ideally you won’t even notice anything is different

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#23

Post by mrweasel »

Why does it seem like all new Wayland compositors are tiling? Sure there's Gnome and kWin which are classic stacking/floating windows, but there aren't many minimal light weight non-tiling compositors showing up. Are tiling just easier to write?

A Windows 3.11 or Mac Classic like compositor would be fun.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#24

Post by IiydAbITMvJkqKf »

mrweasel wrote: post #23

Why does it seem like all new Wayland compositors are tiling? Sure there's Gnome and kWin which are classic stacking/floating windows, but there aren't many minimal light weight non-tiling compositors showing up. Are tiling just easier to write? A Windows 3.11 or Mac Classic like compositor would be fun.

The situation on x11 isn't too different - there's basically only metacity, kwin, and openbox in the stacking WM world, plus a thousand tiling WMs.

In wayland there's additionally KWinFT, hikari, and wayfire. Although neither of them are comparable to the classic Windows/Mac WMs.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#25

Post by slowbdotro »

yewenjie wrote: post #17

I wish I could have a highly customizable Wayland WM like AwesomeWM or XMonad. I like Sway but it lacks some very important features that I loved in AwesomeWM.

What features are you missing? You could submit your feature request on the swaywm git tracker

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#26

Post by mrweasel »

IiydAbITMvJkqKf wrote: post #24
mrweasel wrote: post #23

Why does it seem like all new Wayland compositors are tiling? Sure there's Gnome and kWin which are classic stacking/floating windows, but there aren't many minimal light weight non-tiling compositors showing up. Are tiling just easier to write? A Windows 3.11 or Mac Classic like compositor would be fun.

The situation on x11 isn't too different - there's basically only metacity, kwin, and openbox in the stacking WM world, plus a thousand tiling WMs. In wayland there's additionally KWinFT, hikari, and wayfire. Although neither of them are comparable to the classic Windows/Mac WMs.

There are a ton of small stacking X11 window manager, sure many of them are old, but they're still maintained.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#27

Post by Seirdy »

sprash wrote: post #13
sandreas wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wayland is a protocol - not an implementation. It tries to minify latency by merging together some of the components X11 had and tries to do this in a slim and faster way eliminating "design flaws". The implementation of the protocol may differ, but I know for example MUTTER, that is used in GNOME ( https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter ) This article has nice and not too complex visualisations and explanations: http…

> It tries to minify latency Quiet the opposite. Tearfree rendering, forced vsync and the completely opaque way of interacting with graphics memory in order to fulfill the "every frame is perfect" philosophy means Wayland is optimized for all kinds of things (mainly to give involved consulting firms some lucrative gigs) but certainly not latency.

It's more nuanced than that. If your goal is to have a desktop without screen tearing, you will beed a compositor. Wayland will do better at minifying latency than an X11 compositor due to having better frame scheduling. This is especially pronounced on very low-end ARM devices like the Pinebook that experience lag on DWM but are incredibly snappy under Sway.

If you are fine with visual glitches like screen tearing due to e.g. a lack of vsync then X might have less latency.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#28

Post by jrm4 »

sprash wrote: post #16
Veuxdo wrote: post #4

So what's Wayland? I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.

It is a failed attempt to replace X11. The fact that it is more than 10 years in development and Screenshot tools designed for kWin or GNOME won't work on this compositor because there is no standardized API to do such an essential thing should show you how much of a utterly massive failure it is.

Hear Hear. I ask this like every Wayland thread, but what is the point?

I keep hearing all these theoretical answers of things that are broken or could be improved -- but I'm a 20 plus year Linux user who has zero trouble doing work, playing games, including using a setup that uses a 4K monitor; with little or no modifications to standard installs of popular distros.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#29

Post by pkulak »

inclemnet wrote: post #19
pkulak wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a DWM port to Wayland, essentially. I assume that's why this was posted.

It isn't dwm "port", rather it's an independent window manager with some inspiration from dwm but also from other places. Notably it doesn't share the minimalist design philosophy, it's designed with a powerful configuration and interaction api rather than relying on patches. dwl[0] is closer to a port, it's explicitly trying to work the same as dwm for wayland with the same philosophy, although it's still an indepen…

Yeah, I didn't mean a port in the most literal sense of that word, so it wasn't a great word choice.

Re: River: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

#30

Post by johnny22 »

mrweasel wrote: post #23

Why does it seem like all new Wayland compositors are tiling? Sure there's Gnome and kWin which are classic stacking/floating windows, but there aren't many minimal light weight non-tiling compositors showing up. Are tiling just easier to write? A Windows 3.11 or Mac Classic like compositor would be fun.

https://github.com/labwc/labwc is one I've seen. I don't use these myself, so I can't speak for the quality or anything.
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