Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arnavion | Hacker News Reader

>For reference I'm using sway. swayidle is an idle daemon, where the maintainer doesn't think that it matters whether its connected to power or not. You're supposed to create your own scripts around it that handles ac connect and disconnects.

>One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it.

If you're not a fan of making scripts then sway (and wlsunset I assume) is not for you. My sway install is held together by a myriad of scripts - keybindings are handled by a script, starting programs via bemenu goes through a script, sway itself is started by a script, etc. That's just how this compositor and its ecosystem are designed - they're for people who want the software itself to do the smallest possible thing with the least possible assumptions so that the user can do whatever they want to fill in the rest.

View on HN

The problem isn’t that it’s held together by individual scripts and apps that one can replace or hack at. The problem is that none of these pieces ship in place.

Ideally you’d have some sort of offering that gives you a reasonable starting place with all these composable pieces in place, and then you can hack/replace/add/remove as needed.

Everyone starting from scratch doesn’t make sense. It’s like shipping a Unix system with no app doing it’s own paging because the devs rightly expect you to use some other tool to page output for you, but there’s no less/more installed (and no back buffer in the terminal or terminal emulator to boot). Then you complain and the answer is that you’re supposed to write your own (or research, download, compile, and install something someone else might have hacked up).

afaik there are various distros that will give you a preconfigured out of the box swaywm based desktop env. Garuda linux comes to mind.

The sway wiki is pretty detailed and iirc has a helpful page full of options for various "not the compositor's job" tasks like notification daemon, app launcher, etc.

> The problem is that none of these pieces ship in place.

Sway is not a desktop environment. What you are describing is a desktop environment. I too would like a sway-based desktop environment. Let's stop complaining that sway is not what it is or that somehow this is related to wayland. This whole thing is just a consequence that writing cohesive graphical/desktop software is tedious and that tinkerers cannot rely on the myriad of Xorg desktop environment, in particular the modular ones like lxde/xfce to mix and match components.

> Then you complain and the answer is that you’re supposed to write your own

Yes, obviously. No-one is saying this would be a bad project. And if you blatantly misunderstand their project's scope it's no wonder you're getting dry responses.

I am not saying sway isn’t allowed to do what they did. But the normal approach is for the 1st party dev to also provide reference implementations of supporting/complementing utilities to smooth adoption.

No one is saying they have to be shipped as part of the compositor, obviously.

I don't see how being "just a compositor" has to do anything to "has to bundle complementing utilities", without mucking the whole thing and turning it into a desktop environment.

Thought I agree that for most people, a desktop environment, "everything integrated, just change this specific thing" instead of "let me just DIY my entire environment from those separated parts" makes more sense.

> But the normal approach...

Says who? You're getting software for free, from someone who is not beholden to you for anything. Either you accept it as it is, or you fix it; that's the nature of open source. Whining about it on the internet is rude and disrespectful.

If you can't be bothered, and want all this stuff included, or at the very least recommended or installed automatically on the side, switch to something else that does that for you.

The alternative to taking a piece of open source as-is isn't "complain to the maintainer until they fulfill your wishes". That kind of thing is why open source maintainers burn out. You are not entitled to anything from them; the alternative is that the software doesn't exist at all.

It is not the normal approach for a project author to write a whole ecosystem.

If you want the Desktop Environment experience, pick a Desktop Environment. This can be based on sway (e.g. Manjaro spins), but sway is not more a desktop Environment than the Linux kernel is an operating system.

I think gp and gggp are arguing that the diffusion of responsibility means that nothing takes responsibility for baseline functionality, and as such there are huge gaps.

With X all these things are in X or the single shared X compositor itself. Yes, it's bloated and sometimes lacks flexibility in configuration or doesn't work perfectly, but there's no gaps.

I don't think the author is saying these individual projects should do these things, but if they don't, who does? It means that everyone using wayland effectively is using dwm, and dwm isn't for everyone (or even most people?). It feels like you're saying users should suck it up and learn to love the dwm philosophy, C and all, which doesn't seem quite right to me.

In practice, Linux distributions have been the system integrators that pull these things together and handle the gaps. That's really the value of a distribution - pulls a set of components together in a way that works.

In this case, I use Fedora (Gnome). Most things are on Wayland and it works pretty well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com