wayland-rs VS tinywm

I was initially having some problems with kanshi and was thinking about contributing the new features I wanted. For some of the features I wanted, kanshi's internals would have to change considerably. Since kanshi consists of only ~1500 lines of C, I began writing a replacement for kanshi in Rust. After many hours of reading Wayland protocol specifications, working on shikane, some help from the Smithay project and their Rust implementation of Wayland protocols, shikane was able to replace kanshi on my machines. I have been using it for over 4 months now.

Yes, I agree. Since https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots-rs is deprecated, I'm guessing I should use https://github.com/Smithay/smithay or https://github.com/Smithay/wayland-rs. As soon as I find a library that can use the protocol, preferably without extra dependency, I'll switch it to that.

There's also https://github.com/Smithay/wayland-rs

Also there is an incomplete Wayland implementation in Rust, but that isn't very actively developed.

> 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