That is the thing with Wayland, it is much harder to create a window manager for Wayland. IIRC, fvwm decided not to create a Wayland version due to the difficulty.
When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone.
As a FVWM daily driver, it's amazing to see it's has gone from "it's the niftier-than-twm baseline that's installed by default in your 2.0-kernel Slackware or RedHat distro, but you'll probably install something trendy like AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment" to "It Has Powers That Cannot Be Recreated In The New Magic."
For me, the winning feature is FvwmButtons. Long before we had system trays and notification busses, if you wanted to put a media player, a clock, some stat counters, or a full-blown xterm, in a little desktop dock, you just captured a regular window. You didn't have to invent an entirely new category of "software designed to live as an icon inside someone else's ecosystem." I'm not aware of any compositor that offers anything like it-- it seems like the best we get now are ugly bars with a limited vocabulary of "we can integrate over some signaling bus with these three specific programmes and that's it".
I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.
> I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.
On Mastodon I follow a bot that posts screenshots of old Mac Kaleidoscope schemes and the creativity on display both leaves me in awe and makes me sad that no modern windowing system can hold a candle to it. With Kaleidoscope there were no rules. You could do a hacker OS[0], or game UI[1], or titlebars on the left[2] or underneath[3], or non-rectangular and chrome[4], or made of denim[5], and those are just a few of the thousands of wildly different themes[6].
Nothing on modern Linux comes close. Even if you seek out third party themes all you find are dozens of minor permutations on popular flat themes like Material and Nord. It's so dull.
True -- but then, FvwmButtons was never meant to compete with systray stuff, the original spec came via EWMH for that. and didn't really affect FvwmButtons' raison d'être.
Yeah, I’ve long had fantasies of writing a little desktop for myself next time I get a long stretch of time off, but that became much more daunting with the advent of Wayland, even when factoring in the existence of wlroots and such. It’s like going from building a bicycle to building a modern fuel injected car with an automatic transmission.
Application toolkits will eventually drop support for X11. GTK will remove it in GTK5. Not sure what Qt's plans are, but I'd have to think X11 support is long for this world there as well.
GNOME is an outlier and not indicative of general trends. They pretty much do what they want, as a silo, ignoring the larger ecosystem. They want you to use their software stack all the way through.
It's a shame about all the political bullshit they injected into the project, which already resulted in it being removed from several package repositories. I hope someone makes another fork in the vein of xlibre, but without political bullshit.
We also got a lot of new little niche window managers. hyprland, niri, cosmic, sway, river, labwc, dwl, wayfire and vivarium which is xnomad inspired...
Even still, they are very hard to work with when compared to X11.
Fvwm people are very smart and have been developing fvwm for longer than Linux have been around. From what I understand and have read, bring fvwm or creating a fvwm clone on Wayland is near impossible. Far too much work.
So we will really end up with "pigs" like Gnome3, KDE or a slew of tiling environments. None of the cool WMs like Windowmaker, fvwm, dluxbox, twm, ctwm, vtwm ....
This isn't wayland's fault. It's the compositor implementing wayland's fault for not exposing a window manager API. Nothing about wayland prohibits the creation of a window manager API.
I’ve heard the same thing about Wayland and NVidia’s drivers. To me, it seems like Wayland was designed to push all the hard work onto everybody else. That way Wayland never gets blamed for anything!
Not having a defacto compositor was a major blunder and resulted in an enormous delay to the project, reputational damage, and numerous challenges for app developers.
What I don’t get is why they pushed the compositor onto WM developers in the first place. Compositing seems like way too low level of a task for a window manager to be concerned with.
For practical purposes, the problem with Wayland from the WM-dev's PoV is that you're either implementing a huge project or you're depending on wlroots, and wlroots still isn't where it would need to be for implementing a simple window manager to be as easy as it was with X11.
From the Wayland devs' PoV, mainstreaming Wayland successfully shifted responsibility for doing most of the heavy lifting in the graphics layer from the neglected X-Windows project to the well-established KDE and GNOME. The state of wlroots and the ecosystem of personal WM projects is unavoidable collateral damage.
For an individual developer, perhaps the thing to do is take a page out of bbLean's [1] bag of tricks and implement your WM on top of one of the big two desktop environments.
Nothing stopped the adopters from waiting until that existed before pushing Wayland into their software and breaking many people's workflow either, yet here we are
However the radically different architecture of Wayland may necessitate a rewrite well beyond what the maintainers of a window manager feel is easy.
Even accounting for wlroots, you're not exactly just running sed on a glob. And unfortunately, wayland didn't actually fix X's complexity problem. Arcan did, but we're not allowed to have nice things because Redhat has no taste.
They're suggesting that every Wayland window manager has to implement its own compositor. Because that is how Wayland works. There are no window managers, only compositors, and if you want custom window management, you write your own compositor.
What about wayback? Assuming running X by itself becomes real bad and undesirable, would wayback+Xwayland cover all those "can't Wayland" use cases? What remains (besides better stability and wider availability of wayback) to be done?
When Wayland replacing X, lots of cool window managers and mini applications will be gone.