[ahlCVA]

While this leaves a lot to be desired as a window manager, it illustrates one of my main gripes about the Wayland ecosystem: By effectively bundling the window manager and X server, it makes it much harder for more niche/experimental window managers to come about and stay alive. Even with things like wlroots, you have to invest a lot more work to get even the basics working that X11 will give you for free.

[tadfisher]

True; but a counterargument is that the _display protocol_ is not the right abstraction layer for decoupling window management from the display server. There is nothing stopping someone from writing a batteries-included wlroots-like library where the only piece you need to write is the window management and input handling, or even an entire Wayland compositor that farms these pieces out to an embedded scripting runtime.

But even then, I think we have rose-tinted glasses on when it comes to writing an X11 WM that actually works, because X11 does not actually give much for free. ICCCM is the glue that makes window management work, and it is a complete inversion of "mechanism, not policy" that defines the X11 protocol. It also comes in at 60-odd pages in PDF form: https://www.x.org/docs/ICCCM/icccm.pdf

For an example, X11 does not specify how copy-and-paste should work between applications; that's all ICCCM.

[fmbb]

Copy&paste between apps should work just fine using this window manager.

I have not tried mwm but use my own 100 line C window manager and I can copy and paste without issue.

Wayland will take 20 more years before it can dethrone X11. And even then we will mostly run X11 apps on XWayland.

[tadfisher]

I'm sorry for not making it more clear, but that was just an example of something left unspecified by the X11 core protocol but instead defined in a standard convention.

An example that matters for window managers would be complex window reparenting policies or input grabs, but that's a little less descriptive of the core concept I was trying to get across.

[DonHopkins]

We may not always have Paris, but we will always have XRotateBuffers.

https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/utilities/XRotateBuffers.html

[theodric]

> Wayland will take 20 more years before it can dethrone X11. And even then we will mostly run X11 apps on XWayland.

And yet RedHat/Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as GNOME, are leading the charge to drop X support in the next release; KDE as of V7. It may take 20 years for Wayland to match X's capabilities, but it looks like the guillotine has already been rolled out.

A more conspiratorial person than I could be led to think that RedHat is actively working against the viability of a free software desktop, but of course that's nonsense, because they're helping the cause by forcing all resources to be focused on one target at the expense of near-term usability. And the XLibre crowd also aren't controlled opposition intended to weaponize the culture war and make people associate X with fascism, that's just nonsense some idiot cooked up to stir shit.

[blueflow]

> because they're helping the cause by forcing all resources to be focused on one target

This might work for company-backed projects but not for OSS enthusiasts and power users - they will leave for greener pastures. For example, Linux Mint lives off the manpower that GNOME 3 drove away, Void and Alpine Linux live off the manpower that systemd drove away. There will be some ecosystem that will live off the manpower that Wayland drives away.

[DonHopkins]

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...

Window Manager Flames, by Don Hopkins

The ICCCM Sucks

The ICCCM, abbreviated I39L, sucks. I39L is a hash for the acronymic expansion of ICCCM for "Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual". Please read it if you don't believe me that it sucks! It really does. However, we must live with it. But how???

[...]

[zenolijo]

> Even with things like wlroots, you have to invest a lot more work to get even the basics working that X11 will give you for free.

Like what?

A few years ago I copied the wlroots example, simplified it to less than 1000 LoC and then did some of my own modifications and additions like workspaces. And this side-project was done in less than a week on my spare time.

[bitwize]

YAGN more experimental/niche window managers. Windows and macOS get by fine on one apiece, in fact their desktop story is better because their WM and toolkit is standardized.

The developers of Wayland (who are identical to the developers of Xorg) aspire to more of a Windows/Mac-like ecosystem for Linux, in which standardization, performance, and support for modern graphics hardware without hacks or workarounds are prioritized over proliferation of niche window managers and toolkits

[l72]

Terrible window management is a huge reason I will not use Mac OS or Windows. I immediately lose so much productivity. I am coming up on my 30th year of using Linux, and I can't imagine moving to an OS with such limited window capabilities. No sloppy mouse focus? No always on top? No sticky windows? No marking windows as utility windows to skip alt-tab?

I watch my colleagues on Mac OS and Windows during peer programming, and am flabbergasted as they fumble around trying to find the right window.

I am interacting with my computers interface for 10+ hours every single day. I do not stare at a single application, but am constantly jumping between windows and tasks. The one size fits all approach is the same as the lowest common denominator approach, and it hinders people who need to do real work.

[tines]

I have to use BetterTouchTool to make OSX usable. With BTT, OSX is awesome though. Much better than Windows.

Modern OSX does have always-on-top natively now btw.

[dmytrish]

Linux already has GNOME and KDE as solid mainstream platforms (which is already twice as good as MacOS/Windows), and it also already has Sway, Hyprland, Niri. If an idea is worth implementing, it gets implemented even with Wayland.

[spauldo]

Windows is the epitome of bad window management. It's actually gotten worse as they've removed functionality over the years and broken other functionality. "Oh, you've got a modal window open? Now you can't even move the window that spawned it!" "Oh, you want to move this window to the top of the screen? Let me maximize that for you! Of course we're not going to let you disable that behavior..."

Microsoft got the Start Button/taskbar bit right in 1998 with the addition of the quicklaunch bar, although they keep trying to screw it up. But their window management has been abysmal since the beginning. If you use a large monitor (so you don't need to maximize everything) it's really painful.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> The developers of Wayland (who are identical to the developers of Xorg) aspire to more of a Windows/Mac-like ecosystem for Linux, in which standardization, performance, and support for modern graphics hardware without hacks or workarounds are prioritized over proliferation of niche window managers and toolkits

Is that why they arranged things to ensure that the Wayland world would always be split into GNOME, KDE, and everything else (in practice, wlroots)?

[p_l]

That issue is more naivety than anything else.

At least some ideas that were floated early on are deader than dead, like copy-paste as DBus Service

[vidarh]

The few times I've had to use Windows and OS X for work has been sheer misery because of the poor window management.

More of a Windows/Mac-like ecosystem for Linux sounds like an awful threat.