Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

[exiguus]

I am a big fan of dwm and have used it for years on all of my Free- and OpenBSD desktops before switching to sway. The suckless people clearly stated that they would not support Wayland on dwm. At the time, I considered sway as the successor to dwm, at least for me, because it already had an ecosystem around it, and its behavior could be configured similarly if it wasn't already. I also took a look at dwl at the time, I think it was three years ago. I am now happy to revisit it.

[IgnaciusMonk]

RHEL and friendly clones like Alma linux do run totally without X11 already !! Only wayland. so no need to remove x11 after installing distro. (on some distros it is not even possible, distro will break.) so finally we can have "clean" distros. it can provide nicer experience.

[xwiz]

Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

[stevefolta]

Another interesting one is Scroll, a scrolling-tiling fork of Sway: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/

[christophilus]

Niri has been my daily driver for a while now. It’s excellent and keeps getting better.

[lll-o-lll]

Niri is pretty, but I find sway to be faster. Hotkeys and instant switch is just better (for me). I will continue to experiment, but sway feels more productive currently.

[Babkock]

Niri is awesome!

[theycallhermax]

niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.

[jauntywundrkind]

Pretty awesome that this is a 3200 line single .c file implementation, atop wlroots and it's newer scene graph API. It is not hard to build a good Wayland impl at this point!

[alex-moon]

Big big fan of dwm, but this wasn't mature when I tried it. I switched to Hyprland and I have to say it has many improvements over dwm.

[davidbanham]

I have also been very happy with Hyprland as a past dwm user.

[cnity]

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

[mort96]

An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3.

Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.

[woodrowbarlow]

i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.

(i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)

[ivanjermakov]

Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.

[epr]

I guess people downvoting this don't get the joke?

[gundamdoubleO]

Used dwm for so long it was basically the only reason I didn't switch to Wayland. Very happy with dwl since I found it, made the switch (almost) painless.

[mosquitobiten]

You coul say the switch was suckless.

[snvzz]

hopefully with utf-8 support?

[ivanjermakov]

What do you need Unicode for in a WM?

[chiffre01]

I want to like Wayland...

[dannyobrien]

See also https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile -- a fork with Guile Scheme support.

[dodomodo]

[flagged]

[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[temp0826]

Wayland has been around for 15+ years now and I've been using it daily for probably 10. At this point I have to assume comments like this are unserious.

[yyyk]

X withering away was inevitable once you consider the 'economic' situation - very few people worked on it once the commercial Unix vendors went down. There was little practical enthusiasm for a common layer. Even before Wayland, its role was reduced more and more. Wayland is natural evolution of this where most of the work is offloaded to more resourced Desktop environments and the org mostly sets standards.

[fruitworks]

At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more.

In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences.

>The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

-Frank Herbert

Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!

[ongy]

The core devs were all paid to work on it when I was still active.

Not sure how many of the gnome (mutter) people are paid. Last I checked, the nvidia support was donated by nvidia (paid) for both KDE and Gnome.

I think KDE got some work sponsored by valve (before gamescope), though I'm not quite sure on that.

Overall, outside the sway/wlroots group I was a part of at the time, people generally worked adjacent or directly on wayland for day jobs.