[kelnos]

I'm building a compositor now, and I've been thinking about multi-seat from the beginning, but I know there are lots of places that assume a single seat, and so this sort of thing won't work for me. It's actually a lot more work than you'd think to support this...

[jchw]

Given that a lot of the use case is interacting with two different programs simultaneously, even just supporting it at the compositor level is pretty valuable: then it should "just work" for that use case. You can't really do a whole lot about the fact that most Wayland clients are making assumptions about seats; well, you can, but that's a lot more work...

[bch]

> It's actually a lot more work than you'd think to support this...

Like: how would one support multiple keyboards? Is there an experimental or logical model for that?

[anilgulecha]

Multiple keyboards is trivial - unless you meant multiple active cursors. (If you've used a USB keyboard attahced to your laptop - you've already experienced multiple keyboards. Both work.)

Multiple mice is esoteric.

[silon42]

Multiple mice (1 pointer) is not esoteric at all... I have a completely normal scenario with 3 (normal mouse, track pad, track point) right now.

And at home, I have a mouse on the left side of the keyboard and another one on the right.

[bch]

Of course you're correct re: laptop and aux kb - I was thinking of "seat" (and multiple seats) being: "Wayland seat refers to one 'seat' at which a user sits and operates the computer."[0]

So a keyboard being attached to a seat, whose input might be associated w one active window, while another kb is associated with a different seat and different active window. Perhaps I'm just overthinking it.

[0] https://wayland-book.com/seat.html

[globular-toast]

If you have a USB mouse then you have multiple mice too, in that sense.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

It's not a direct answer, but Nucleus Coop (Windows only) allows playing multiple instances of the same videogame with different savefiles and allow using multiple keyboards and mice (is it mice for the hardware thing?)

It's an incredible hacky piece of software that does work by putting together like 10 oss. Incredible and cool.

They have some UX around this

[jauntywundrkind]

I keep thinking of trying to see how far I get re-doing Niri in River.

The one other constraint that I'd really like to see relaxed is about displays, about being able to merge and subdivide screens as I please. Having a huge ultra-wide display really would be so much better if I could divide it up somehow. This is kind of the headline feature of stilch, which is a pretty neat compositor, https://github.com/wegel/stilch .

Niri has some tickets on it too. Merging monitors into a big display, and splitting a display (moments before the multi-pointer ticket was filed in Niri), https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/discussions/1285 https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/discussions/3160

There's been all kinds of rough incredibly hard things going on with Niri just trying to figure out how to handle some of the more interesting copy-paste scenarios, and with really weird sequencing issues across basically ephemeral inputs, that have really plagued the project and made life incredibly bad for downstream apps. This is just my opinion, man, but I think the lack of ambition about these ridiculous over the top features eventually starts hampering what turns out to be relatively prosaic asks. Better models for multi-seat, multi-cursor help scenarios like remote-desktop, and video-chat remote control, that at first don't seem needed, but are fundamentals that pay dividends if you shoot for them.

[DiggyJohnson]

It’s good to see the minimal drag to border behavior coming to all the OSs and DEs these days. I’m a weirdo and use i3 so I relate to this concern and am very comfortable with tiling for lots of applications. However there’s sometimes I wish I could just tell my display manager to treat the single WH wide monitor as two separate displays with dimensions, e.g. W(H-x) and W*(H+x).

Not sure the best level to implement this. There’s probably already solutions for this now that I think about it…

[jauntywundrkind]

Stilch does that. niri#3159 requests that. Both in my comment above. :)