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Comment by yoavm | Hacker News Reader

Many Wayland compositors provide an API to list the windows. I don't know about Plasma 6, but in Wayland it's up to the compositor to provide such API as far as I know.

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> Many Wayland compositors provide an API to list the windows.

KWin does as well (workspace.activeWindow, workspace.windowList).

I found no way of calling KWin functions other than piping javascript into dbus and parsing the reply via journalctl, which... lol?

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/706477/is-there-a-w...

Yeah, I think the way you're supposed to do that is you install the kwin script which gives you the option to "connect" to various signals and then communicate the results via dbus to your service / listener (I don't think the script itself can host a dbus service which would be much simpler). One thing I got from looking at this is that KDE's documentation about scripting is either absolutely terrible, insufficient, or non existing.

So you need a separate implementation for each compositor? Count me out.

Most compositors use a common framework like wlroots. Those that don't, like kwin, provide their own API support which their own tools consume.

Yep. The only compositors of any significance that do not use wlroots are Gnome/Mutter and KWin. I guess Weston is also an independent compositor, but I don't think anyone actually uses that.

Weston is mostly used for car entertainment systems, as a replacement for Windows CE.

It, along with the more modern wlroots-based alternative Cage, have become the de-facto Wayland window manager for when you don't actually want to display framed windows, and just want to fork the codebase and display some fullscreen GLES-based graphics in a kiosk instead. These IoT use cases were part of the original motivation for Wayland in the first place.

I'm on proprietary NVIDIA, so haven't actually quite joined the Glorious Wayland Master Race yet. I use Weston on X11 to host Waydroid for my Android game development. Works rather well. I hope Weston development doesn't end up moribund because a few folks like me actually use it.

It's not dead, but it's gotten way more patches upstreamed from the automobile industry than anything desktop related. So any sort of Linux desktop testing is likely very minimal.

There should be plenty of alternatives you can run in windowed mode if Weston stops working: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors

Additionally, there is an (experimental) effort by a KDE developer to further generalize KWin's functionality by ripping out most of what it does into a separate wlroots-compatible library - https://github.com/winft/theseus-ship

So you need a separate CSS engine for each browser? Count me out.

Wayland is like if every single CSS property needed to be written with both "-moz-" and "-webkit-" prefixes forever, instead of the different CSS engines having any standard properties.

But many Wayland protocols are actually becoming shared. For example, Plasma 6 replaced a "-kde-shell" protocol with the standardized "layer-shell" protocol.

Can you recommend one?

It really depends on your preferences. I use Sway. getting a list of windows is as easy as running `swaymsg -t get_tree`.

Are there non-tiling window managers that do this? Sway is like, the gold standard and everyone knows about it. But it's also for people who like tiles.

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