hello-wayland VS tinywm

I first saw the trick at https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland

hello-wayland and tinywl are simple wayland client and server respectively. Also wayland-book

You think this is bad? Just look at a native Wayland "Hello World" client [1]. This doesn't even print hello world. You have to do the text rendering yourself. And you need at least 500 more lines to implement the equivalent to a simple XGetImage() call.

1.: https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland/blob/master/main.c

> Nobody's requiring Wayland.

Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever.

I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code.

> contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time

These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me.

> Wayland is the way forward

It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say).

I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible.

But that’s what it needs to be.

Hah. I didn't think this was quite HN worthy at this point - the code is still a mess, and has plenty of bugs. It was however the wm I actually use since I got frustrated with bspwm and did a very minimalist rewrite of TinyWM [1] in Ruby [2] and expanded it from there. It was painful the first few days until I'd had time to add multiple desktops and the start of a tiling mode. But at this point, it's "almost" pleasant for me.

The warnings are real, though, apart from the initial hyperbole - this is likely to break for you in all kinds of horrible ways still. I use very few applications beyond (my own) terminal, (my own) polybar replacement, (my own) file manager, and a browser, and so once Chrome and my own apps mostly started working ok I've had very little incentive to make sure it behaves nicely with anything else and I know the distinction between different EWMH window types is incomplete and broken - just not in ways that usually affect my own use.

[1] https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c

[2] https://gist.github.com/vidarh/1cdbfcdf3cfd8d25a247243963e55...

picking a random bare bones wm tinywm

Or Check out TinyWM. Its just a few lines of code.

TinyWM