[diegocg]

Yes, the lack of an unified server is such a shame. The great selling point of Wayland originally was that it avoided extra context switches by unifying the server and the window manager, this means every window manager must reimplement the server and every protocol by itself. But in an ideal world, we could have had a single Wayland server and window managers being loaded as plugins in the server process.

[nolist_policy]

> But in an ideal world, we could have had a single Wayland server and window managers being loaded as plugins in the server process.

It is never too late to start improving things.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Ecosystem effects mean that it kind of is. Even if we made the software in question (probably on top of wlroots, maybe even just extending wayfire which IIRC kind of already has the plugin system you need?) there is zero chance GNOME or KDE will use it, and I wouldn't bet even on sway or such.

[vidarh]

Well, if people are using Gnome or KDE they've already largely chosen conformity, so why care about that?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

On the one hand, yes, I'm tempted to just ignore GNOME+KDE because they'll never play nice, and just go build something better without them.

On the other hand, this means that the ecosystem overall stays fragmented and we get an eternal state of "to do X in Windows do foo, in MacOS do bar, and on desktop Linux see this wiki page discussing your options". And while I suppose there would be value in ex. screenshot tools only needing 3 code paths, it would have been nice to only need 1.

[vidarh]

The overhead is low enough that my current wm is written in Ruby and the WM is nowhere near the hot path for anything. The notion that it's a problem or have the WM put of process is nonsense. If I ever write a Wayland compositor, I'll add an out of process WM interface, because it's far nicer to be able to restart at will without killing apps.

[Izkata]

> If I ever write a Wayland compositor, I'll add an out of process WM interface

This is something I've been wondering for a long time - how long will it take before someone writes a Wayland-based server that provides an interface for window managers, system trays, and whatever other clients running in other processes, mimicking what X does?

[vidarh]

I think the main thing stopping it is that people get "stuck" on the compositor since even writing a wlroots based compositor is far more effort than the bare minimum for an X wm.