For standalone desktops, Hyprland is undeniably your best base at the moment to write a window manager.
Well, it took him more than 2/3 of the post to mention hyprland, so I’ll give him props for that.
Says the man who made one lol. I am still using hyprland because the sad thing is i like it but im trying to switch to something that is not made by a transphobe… what do yall recommend?
river, its by far the nicest to configure and use
I have been really happy with sway. It does all that I want it to do.
Sway is my safe option. I will check out what kind of rices people cooked up with it and maybe i see somethig nice i can copy.
There is also SwayFX if you go with Sway and want (a little) more customization.
I’m a big fan of niri, which is a scrolling tiling compositor. I always had a soft spot for tiling wms/compositors, but couldn’t stick with any of them for long until I tried niri, and wholeheartedly embraced the scrolling tiling world.
Very friendly upstream & community, and written in a modern language, too.
If touchpad gestures work, I’m putting that on my macbook air. That looks so comfortable.
I dont think ill like scrolling tiling but you never know so ill try. At first i thought tiling was stupid and now look i feel like im digitally dissabled when i use a pure floating system.
Cosmic-comp is my second favorite after hyprland so far due to their tiling being quite well thought-out. The problem is, it’s part of a DE and is somewhat cumbersome to configure as a standalone compositor (can be fixed by patching libcosmic, tho), and also it’s quite bare-bones when it comes to features.
Then there’s pinnacle which looks promising, but I haven’t yet tried to daily-drive it.
Also, maybe qtile, which has a Wayland back-end.
Qtile was my first daily driver tiling WM. It was a pain in the ass to install, but it’s damn near as extensible as DWM (since the config file is literally a python program). The only thing I hate about it is that you can’t reposition windows in the tiling layout by drag-and-drop.
Ill try out your suggestions. Ive thought about using cosmic but its alpha and it will have a bunch of stuff i wont use probably.
The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don’t hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.
Ah, classic Vaxry. I’m sure he would love it if his compositor was the only one.
I lost interest after that.
Yeah, that sounds like the age old “why so many desktops (or other apps)” debate. Because we can. Because doing new things is fun. Because this isn’t all about being effective and capitalist logic.
Oh lit so you wrote up your own compositor?
I think you and the bcachefs owner would be very good friends.
What is going on here?
Linus Torvalds and Kent Overstreet (the main developer of bcachefs) often argued on the Linux mailing list over adherence to long-standing practices when submitting pull requests. In the latest confrontation, Kent dropped this absolute clown shoes response:
If you’re so convinced you know best, I invite you to start writing your own filesystem. Go for it.
Narrated by Aussie Waylandman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07XjCGQpwpw&t=869s. I recommend watching the entire video, it’s very entertaining.
Nope. Have you?
I’m not the one going around making statements that imply reliable wayland compositors can just be readily whipped up and shipped out.
You can complain about the guy’s ego if you feel like he’s talking up his product too much, but if you’re going to reject valid statements he’s making under the assumption that they’re all self-motivated and therefore incorrect, then you should be able to justify the position.
I knew that’s where you were going. I knew it.
I said nothing of the sort about the validity of his statements. I did not engage in an ad hominem (i.e. Vaxry is an asshole, therefore he’s wrong). I did not imply that it was easy to make a compositor. You were the one that read all those things into my statement and took umbrage on his behalf.
I implied it sounded like complaining, specifically about other people simply existing and having hobbies that intersect with his own. If his opening salvo is “almost all the other compositors suck beyond opening terminal windows,” on a blog post titled, “We don’t need more Wayland compositors,” I’m not required to be interested in what sounds like hyperbolic criticism.
And since that choice is based on my entirely subjective assessment, I’m not required to justify shit.
I understand your perspective but at the end of the day all you’re doing is justifying why you should be able to disregard this guy’s blog post under the premise that he comes off as someone who’s full of himself.
At the end of the day vaxray’s ability to state that “almost all the other compositors suck beyond opening terminal windows” should be tied to whether or not the statement is true/justifiable; it shouldn’t be tied to whether or not people can’t stand the optics of it.
I’m not sure if that’s how posting things to the public works. Optics will always be a part of that.
You seem to be under the impression that I’m obligated to take every claim and see if it’s backed up by evidence.
I’m not, and I don’t feel any compulsion to find out if Vaxry has made rational claims or not. That’s the beauty of using subjective reasoning; it’s not reasonable for anyone but the subject (me).
Be my guest and see if he’s justified. Tell other people. I stopped caring what he has to say here the minute I read that paragraph, and I choose not to hear him out any further either way.
They did not imply that at all
The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don’t hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.
Oh, fuck off! I can barely use Blender because dragging a spinner control does something with the cursor that makes Hyprland shit its pants. It’s been fixed and broken several times. May or may not be related: Vaxry has expressed his disdain for Blender in issue notes. (edit) found it: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3270
(edit2) I should also mention that Hyprland is the only compositor where this happens. KDE Plasma, Qtile-wayland, Sway, Wayfire are all fine.
While some of the arguments are true, this blog post mainly reads like an ad for hyperland and it propably is just that.
Dude’s shilling for his own compositor backend right after ditching wlroots. He has zero credibility in this matter.
Vaxry who got banned from Freedesktop for being an asshat? https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html
I don’t exactly consider Drew Devault a reliable or unbiased judge of character
Oh come on! First, you hate on COSMIC for taking away some of the noob user base, now you hate on other compositors for taking some of your other user base.
Why can’t you be happy that there are other projects in this space? Why can’t you just be happy that people are now more likely to find a project which works for them? Is it because your own project is losing users, now that people are no longer trapped to it, because it’s no longer the only good project in the space?
Even Brodie admitted that you’re not completely right on many of your takes, so why not focus on what you’re good at, aka writing a Wayland compositor?
Edit: It seems that I should have read the article. He talks about things from a different point of view, but if you’re looking to write a proper Wayland “window manager”, there is only one real choice and it’s not Hyprland, it’s the upcoming River 0.4.0 which will use a custom protocol, based on the layout managers that River was already made for. Basically the dev, Isaac, is moving as much of the window management into the “layout manager” protocol to turn River into a base for writing your own Window manager.
It’s one of the main project releases I’m the most excited about in the Linux space.
Lol fuck this guy
