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Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

isaacfreund.com

21–30 of 228 posts

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#21
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

[flagged]

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#22

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.

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.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#23

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 can make it do basically anything I want

X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#24
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

[flagged]

We just read titles here

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#25
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

You can do that already with libraries such as wlroots or Smithay

Especially with LLMs, the cost here is down significantly. People also drastically over-idealize what making an X window manager entailed: sure X had it's compositor, but you had to build so so much yourself.

I'm glad River is trying to create a bigger base here; this is way cool. And it sort of proves the value of Wayland: someone can just go do that. Someone can just make a generic compositor/display-server now, with their own new architecture and plugin system, and it'll just work with existing apps.

We were so locked in to such a narrow limited system, with it's own parallel abstraction layer to what the kernel now offers (that didn't exist when X was created). It's amazing that we have a chance for innovation and improvement now. The kernel as a stable base of the pyramid, wlroots/sway as a next layer up, and now River as a higher layer still for folks to experiment and create with. This could not be going better, and there's so much more freedom and possibility; this is such a great engine for iteration and improvement.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#26
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i don't think it has a huge impact on the discussion here. but this is such a key difference versus X, that i think is hugely under-told: Wayland compositors all rely on lots of kernel facilities to do the job, where-as X is basically it's own kernel, has origins where it effectively was the device driver for the gpu, talking to it over pci, and doing just about everything. when people contrast wayland versus X as w…

The Xorg codebase still includes some of those old drivers and is structured to allow them to exist.

Yes exactly. DRM exists, but there's still what I called the X "kernel", all of it's heavyweight abstractions.

To the previous a-hole, frak you: not an AI. That's rude as frak. Also, you manage to be incredibly wrong. Even an AI wouldn't overlook such an obvious error; maybe it'd be better to have it replace you. So rude dude! Behave!

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#27

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 can make it do basically anything I want X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.

Huh ? It did in 2000.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#28
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

[flagged]

Yes, and I am praising them for tackling the idea. I don't know how you managed to misread me like that. I also read the article before commenting.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#29
post #17
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

[flagged]

Yours? Because I know that mine wasn't.

Re: Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

#30
post #3

The fact that Wayland can't just substitute out pluggable WMs without changing a bunch of other unrelated infrastructure is IMO one of the biggest user-facing losses relative to X11. Anybody who is working to improve that is doing god's work as they say.

Not only a loss but a key disabler. Having used to having the same customized window manager for decades it's impossible to change to Wayland until there's a fully equivalent interface for managing windows so that everything works as I want from mouse clicks to keyboard shortcuts. Maybe it could be an existing window manager adding support for River, or Wayback layer that reimplements an X11 desktop root on top of a minimal Wayland compositor, but none of the current Wayland compositors even scratch the surface of this.
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