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Veuxdo
tdfirth
It's an alternative to the X window system:
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Appreciate where you're coming from re the detail. It can be hard to know where to draw the line when explaining projects and it depends on the target audience etc.
In this case, I would say it's ok that they don't explain what Wayland is on the project page. Wayland has pretty widespread adoption now and I reckon the vast majority of people that might be interested in projects like tiling window managers for linux will have heard of it (and that has probably been true for quite some time now, Wayland has been around for over a decade).
If you're keen to dig into it more, another popular project in the space is sway https://swaywm.org/.
sandreas
Wayland is a protocol - not an implementation. It tries to minify latency by merging together some of the components X11 had and tries to do this in a slim and faster way eliminating "design flaws".
The implementation of the protocol may differ, but I know for example MUTTER, that is used in GNOME (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter)
This article has nice and not too complex visualisations and explanations: https://www.secjuice.com/wayland-vs-xorg/
sprash
> It tries to minify latency
Quiet the opposite. Tearfree rendering, forced vsync and the completely opaque way of interacting with graphics memory in order to fulfill the "every frame is perfect" philosophy means Wayland is optimized for all kinds of things (mainly to give involved consulting firms some lucrative gigs) but certainly not latency.
Seirdy
It's more nuanced than that. If your goal is to have a desktop without screen tearing, you will beed a compositor. Wayland will do better at minifying latency than an X11 compositor due to having better frame scheduling. This is especially pronounced on very low-end ARM devices like the Pinebook that experience lag on DWM but are incredibly snappy under Sway.
If you are fine with visual glitches like screen tearing due to e.g. a lack of vsync then X might have less latency.
sandreas
Could you give more details on that? This sounds like Wayland is not your favourite...
nixpulvis
Basically X11 2.0 in effect. Though I'm sure someone can point out substantial ways they are different, e.g. the new compositor model.
Things are supposed to be a bit more secure and extensible, and it's mature enough now that I've been using it for my daily life with little to no problems for a couple years.
Read this for a better description: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
cp9
It’s much much much more secure. Unfortunately that broke screenshotting/screen sharing programs. So, each compositor has to have their own now. But in general better performance and ideally you won’t even notice anything is different
seba_dos1
> So, each compositor has to have their own now.
Not really. There are common APIs called XDG Portals, so all you need is a compositor-specific portal implementation which is transparent for applications.
oauea
Scroll down past the files to the readme. It's not unusual for github links to be posted on HN.
sprash
It is a failed attempt to replace X11. The fact that it is more than 10 years in development and Screenshot tools designed for kWin or GNOME won't work on this compositor because there is no standardized API to do such an essential thing should show you how much of a utterly massive failure it is.
jrm4
Hear Hear. I ask this like every Wayland thread, but what is the point?
I keep hearing all these theoretical answers of things that are broken or could be improved -- but I'm a 20 plus year Linux user who has zero trouble doing work, playing games, including using a setup that uses a 4K monitor; with little or no modifications to standard installs of popular distros.
stjo
How am I supposed to judge a window manager (excuse me, compositor is the term used in the brave new world of wayland) without a video / screenshot of it running? I get the "tiling" part, but how is this different than sway with a python script telling it to do something on the background?
pkulak
It's a DWM port to Wayland, essentially. I assume that's why this was posted.
inclemnet
It isn't dwm "port", rather it's an independent window manager with some inspiration from dwm but also from other places. Notably it doesn't share the minimalist design philosophy, it's designed with a powerful configuration and interaction api rather than relying on patches.
dwl[0] is closer to a port, it's explicitly trying to work the same as dwm for wayland with the same philosophy, although it's still an independent project written from scratch.
pkulak
Yeah, I didn't mean a port in the most literal sense of that word, so it wasn't a great word choice.
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mrweasel
Why does it seem like all new Wayland compositors are tiling? Sure there's Gnome and kWin which are classic stacking/floating windows, but there aren't many minimal light weight non-tiling compositors showing up. Are tiling just easier to write?
A Windows 3.11 or Mac Classic like compositor would be fun.
IiydAbITMvJkqKf
The situation on x11 isn't too different - there's basically only metacity, kwin, and openbox in the stacking WM world, plus a thousand tiling WMs.
In wayland there's additionally KWinFT, hikari, and wayfire. Although neither of them are comparable to the classic Windows/Mac WMs.
mrweasel
There are a ton of small stacking X11 window manager, sure many of them are old, but they're still maintained.
ijlx
The arch linux wiki has a good list: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#Stacking_win.... Haven't looked into how many of them are maintained.
johnny22
https://github.com/labwc/labwc is one I've seen. I don't use these myself, so I can't speak for the quality or anything.
yewenjie
I wish I could have a highly customizable Wayland WM like AwesomeWM or XMonad. I like Sway but it lacks some very important features that I loved in AwesomeWM.
slowbdotro
What features are you missing? You could submit your feature request on the swaywm git tracker
ghostpepper
Spent a few hours getting this working today. It's still rough around the edges (multi monitor support through a usb-c dock seems a bit finnicky, but that's true of Sway as well), but I definitely see the power of the tagging system over something like i3 or Sway, where windows can only be assigned to one workspace at a time.
dheera
I really wish there was a window manager that
(a) looks good and modern (b) can tile well but also allows for free floating windows (c) has simple commands, not multi stroke Emacs-style commands (d) can allow tiling with the mouse with snapping
dkersten
I used to love GOOMWWM[1] and used it for the longest time. I miss a lot of things about it, still. It doesn't quite meet your requirements, looks-wise its very minimal and it doesn't have snapping, but I really liked the idea behind it: make a keyboard-centric stacking/floating window manager that gives you enough control that it can be used as if it were a (manual[2]) tiling window manager. It really feels like a tiling window manager and its fantastic!
[1] https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm
[2] I personally use sway these days, but I still prefer manual tiling where I move and size windows myself, rather than having the WM try to do it for me, as long as the WM makes it very easy to do, as goomwwm did (and its predecessor, musca: https://github.com/enticeing/musca)
cycomanic
Enlightenment might be what you're looking for (not the old e16 which is still maintained but the successor which was called e17). It has quite a bit of eyecandy, looks good and there is a tiling module.
lostmsu
I developed one for Windows: https://losttech.software/stack.html
smoldesu
i3wm and Sway cover pretty much every base except for (a), if you configure it properly. I'm not a huge fan of the default i3 bindings (feels a little too "Emacs-style" like you suggested), but Regolith Linux[0] has really great default shortcuts that replace stock i3. I heavily recommend checking it out in a VM or Liveboot environment if it's something that interests you.
rainingmonkey
Have you considered kWin? Sounds like it meets all your requirements.
If you're worried about 'bloat', it's surprisingly lightweight and you don't need to pull in a full KDE desktop environment.
dheera
Not super worried about bloat, but I do want it to have a Wayland future since X11/Xorg has massive screen tearing on my machine ...
And KDE doesn't wake up properly from suspend on my machine.
:-/
I actually like Cinnamon a lot since you can hit Windows+LEFT/UP/RIGHT/DOWN and at least tile in 4 regions (though I wish it could split more fine grained, and I wish they supported Wayland.
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So what's Wayland?
I can't be the only one who is frustrated when they click on a HN link hoping to learn more about something, and instead I'm presented with a list of folders and files.