[Elv13]

(AwesomeWM co-maintainer here)

From the point of view of tiling, Sway is an i3 clone for wayland.

For AwesomeWM as a programming sandbox WM, it is much tougher to get something identical. A lot of AwesomeWM work goes into APIs, CI and documentation. Making a scriptable WM using wlroot isn't the end of the world. Making one with mature APIs, backward compatibility, high test coverage, an active userbase large enough to sustain a plugin ecosystem and extensive documentation is much harder.

Making AwesomeWM 100% wayland compatible has been attempted a bunch of time, getting 80% working has been done a few time too, but the last 20% is like 95% of the effort or something and those projects keep stalling. From my side, I put the little free time I have for this into actually realistic features and maintenance work, at least until there's an actual reason to move away from X11. Most users at this point have been using it for years or even over a decade. They want their setup to keep working the next morning over #newshiny.

[ssivark]

Thanks for the response, and thanks for all the effort towards an awesome WM :-) I can totally appreciate your priorities.

My use of Wayland (and for a lot of users , I suspect) is mostly just flowing with all the upstream distribution defaults. Do you expect the number of awesome-on-X users to dwindle or continue for the foreseeable future? My main concern with regards to switching to AwesomeWM would be whether I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on.

Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts?

[Elv13]

> I’ll be left stranded if the rest of the Linux ecosystem moves on.

There is no such things. Unless they remove xorg from the repository, then it's just an entry in the session login screen as it always was.

> Also, any pointers to the 80% attempts?

Waycooler rewrite 2 and rewrite 3 are close enough. There's some private implementations that are more recent and more complete, but not released and probably wont ever be. Being a FLOSS maintainer these days isn't very enjoyable (disclaimer: opinions are my own), I can relate to their reticence to open the floodgates. There's one based on wlroot FFI floating around on Discord.

Then there's a bunch of doomed attempts by people who just made the same mistakes as the ones before them, but had too much ego/enthusiasm to acknowledge how it was going to end. The problem with Wayland is that it's hype-y. People who fall into the hype tend to fall into all the hyped techs at the same time. Which means shiny Rust frameworks and edgy code generators. Then all those things are dead a couple months later and whatever depends on them also die. The only way a working AwesomeWM Wayland port can be made is using boring old glib event loops and boring old service-client architecture of xorg. Anything else will not be compatible, so the plugins and existing configs wont work, thus nobody will use it even if it was somehow internally usable. People with a lot of time and grand ideas don't tend to like boring/mature/old techs and backward compatibility. I can't blame them either, why would they.