Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

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Here's my problem: I don't want tiling windows. I want title bars. I don't want to run KDE or GNOME. I want desktop computing like it was in 1994.

In the X11 universe, there's a galaxy of decent full featured window managers that fit my needs. Yes, some of them are archaic, but they work.

On Wayland, I don't have that option. There are:

* Experimental projects which went inactive several years ago. Since the compositor has so many more moving parts than an X11 Window Manager, I'm not sure how viable these are.

* Weston, which is extremely limited in features, so I'm not sure all Wayland tools are happy with it

* In-process wlroots projects like labwc and wayfire that sort of work, but often feel surprisingly incomplete. (labwc's theming is weak, Wayfire doesn't know what window shading is)

If there was something that felt complete and workable-- a FVWM or a WindowMaker, I wouldn't feel like I'm giving up quality-of-experience for the sake of Waylandness.

But then it's not fundamentally Wayland, right? Like there is still a chance that Wayland will end up having what you prefer (assuming that the people who like it on X11 port it to Wayland).

I am not an expert, but it feels like X11 has fundamental security issues that Wayland addresses. So to me it makes sense that Wayland exists. Then I would happily contribute to whatever I need in Wayland, but honestly it all exists already: I used i3wm, I'm now on Sway, and all the tools I need do exist.

It feels like the particular corner of the universe I reside on did not migrate to Wayland well. Perhaps it would less bother me if I didn't feel like I was being forced to accept KDE or GNOME or deal with a second-best experience.

Having just set up a new machine the last few days (Debian Sid on a new Thinkpad L13) and spending a little while in a KDE/Wayland session, I remembered what I don't like about the big desktops: since they don't completely own the distribution underneath, there's always going to be a control panel that doesn't work as expected, or some incompatible software in there. The illusion isn't quite strong enough.

My best theory is that the lack of compositor options is a timing issue: Wayland arrived at a time when most desktop Linux was moving towards the big desktops, and away from the classic standalone window managers. I suspect they were more or less a solved problem; FVWM in 2024 looks and works very much like FVWM in 2004, so there simply was less interest in them in general, let alone to bankroll a huge production number like making a Wayland-compatible rewrite. Tiling window management seems like a newish trend that acquired its own fanbase late enough that there was momentum to build things like sway.

I'm surprised there isn't a "reverse xwayland" -- a paper-thin compositor that exposes Wayland top-level windows in a manner that twm and friends know how to wrangle. I know I can launch a Wayland compositor with its own captured desktop but that defeats the purpose of wanting something else to own the frames, decoration, and movement.

> FVWM in 2024 looks and works very much like FVWM in 2004

Hopefully there will be a community effort to rewrite FVWM in Wayland at some point! It doesn't seem like sway (or i3wm for that matter) required years of development by a big team.

I couldn't contribute to that effort because I am very much into tiling windows managers. I actually wish I could contribute to Sway, but it just seems to do everything I need. I thought I had found something I needed and implemented it only to realize that it already existed in a better way :-).

Have been running labwc with waybar for a few months now and it's been a good replacement for my old xfce.

Theming seemed fine? I picked up someone's stylesheet off GitHub and that was it.

Sway? Hyprland? dwl?

Aren't all three of those tiling compositors?

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