[djur]

> I was excited about using alacritty as a wayland-native terminal, but it does not yet work with sway.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but: do you mean it's possible for a Wayland app to be incompatible with a particular Wayland window manager (or compositor)? That seems like a huge regression from the X11 status quo.

[jpgrayson]

From what I can tell, there are issues both with sway and alacritty that lead to the current incompatibility.

https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/97 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1390 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1054

From what I gather, alacritty and its window system abstraction layers (glutin & winit) are still somewhat immature w.r.t. their wayland support and that sway, due to the limited nature of its wlc layer, do not quite meet in the middle. As stated in TFA, sway is moving toward a more capable wlroots foundation. And the rust-based alacritty ecosystem is also moving forward with tremendous pace. I have little doubt that class of incompatibility will not exist much longer.

Given the newness of not just wayland, but also alacritty, glutin/winit, rust, and sway, I remain astonished that they work as well as they do. But make no mistake, wayland is new tech and thus has some sharp corners where X11 is a well-established quantity after 30 years of existence.

[djur]

So it does sound like there's a potentially incompatible layer of libraries between application and WM to a degree that isn't really the case with X11, by design. Well, I hope standardization happens quickly. One of the things I like about X11 is how agnostic applications and WMs are to each other, as well as how applications written years and years ago are still compatible with modern X servers.

[renox]

Yes, this is quite possible.. Wayland is much lower level than X11 so each compositor has to add its own additional protocols which could 'in theory' be incompatible but note that 1) these additional protocols are most of the time a port of the existings protocols 2) the real reason that a Gnome app can run on top of KDE and vice versa is not just because of X11, it's because the developers of the applications and the DE worked together to make it happen so as long as the will is still here the inter-operability will be here eventually. Eventually is important here because I expect a long instability period..