Comment by simcop2387 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simcop2387 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Also with this new partitioning of responsibility is my main annoyance: The DE needs to remember window placement for all my apps, since they are not allowed to know their environment under Wayland (for good reasons).

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

This might eventually get fixed, above is what I believe is the current proposal for handling this issue and letting apps do some amount of positioning without exposing things that a program shouldn't know about. That said this has had multiple proposals over the past 5-6 years at least and none have managed to make it all the way through. If you go through the previous ones (ext-placement and i forget the others) and ignore the angry messages involved it turns out that it's a very difficult problem to deal with in a way that isn't just a free-for-all with apps either not knowing about monitor placement, or having to handle so much detail about the displays that nothing will ever act consistently.

That said, recent discussion on that latest one does look promising so maybe it'll finally happen.

That isn't really what I was hoping for. IMHO it is wasteful for every application to remember its window placement and restore it. Not only does that require additional code in every app, but if there is some kind of policy change there is no way to make it consistent. In other words, at the compositor level one could use the previous position as a default and have an option to do something different if another window is already there. It's simply not the applications job to place itself on the desktop. There are probably use case for such self positioning functionality, but restoring to the last position is not one of them.

The application side of it is more for things like the multi-window setup of things like GIMP so that windows that are "docked" next to each other will stay that way past restarts. That's one of the reasons that the newer proposals are doing things with relative positioning between a zone or main window rather than allowing applications to place themselves randomly on whatever monitor or space that they want, interrupting whatever workflow is going on (which actually allows for security issues, i.e. a window pretending to be a password prompt putting itself on top of a browser or something to confuse the user). This also allows for new windows from the application to request that they're positioned next to any others so that related things stay together. This also apparently helps in a few cases where a single "application" to the user is actually multiple separate programs that get run by a main interface. Not as common in new software today but it used to be one of the ways that a lot of older software worked and there's still a decent amount out there apparently that are maintained that way.

Keep in mind that this is also a request by the application, not a requirement of the compositor to obey it. If there's not sufficient space where the application requests things then the compositor can just ignore it and do what it believes makes sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com