One of the reasons why Wayland is "simpler" than X is that it doesn't include the APIs that window managers like Xmonad need. Instead, window managers have to implement a lot of the complex low-level graphics details themselves. This is why Wayland window managers are called "compositors" -- they include a lot of the code that used to be provided by the X server.

So the game development analogy here is, like, someone has just made their first Unity game and it's pretty good, but they don't feel like they'd be able to write their own game engine that's as good as Unity.

(The article mentions wlroots, which was an attempt to write a more general-purpose helper library for Wayland compositors. In practice this didn't work out; every major compositor other than Sway writes their own implementation of the stuff wlroots does.)

Is this you volunteering to do the port? I'm guessing you're not going to learn how to do this new thing. The real irony here is that they are actually implementing your suggestion - they're potentially going to hire some random 22yo who's response to porting XMonad to Wayland is "hell yeah!". Although realistically they'll probably get someone a bit more experienced.

They don't seem to be saying they can't do this or that it is some insurmountable technical challenge. They're saying that they aren't going to do it themselves and aren't giving reasons.

You're comparing a full-time salaried employee with a "few months" to spare vs. a bunch of people spending their spare time. Obviously not the same at all. There is a difference between "able to do the task, given enough time" vs. "wanting to invest the time". In a volunteer context "I don't have the (time|skill)" usually means "I don't want to invest the time".

In addition, making a WM in libX11 is surprisingly easy, almost trivial. With Wayland: not so much. Maybe the protocol is simpler for some meaning of "simpler", but actually doing stuff with it is often more complex, certainly if you want to write a WM (or compositor in Wayland-speak). I managed to write my own X11 WM without any real experience doing this sort of thing that has served me quite well for the last ten years. I also tried duplicating that in Wayland because I've been told that's the future, but I found that a lot harder to the point where I kind of just gave up. While I'm sure I could figure it out given enough time, I also don't really want to as I have other stuff to do, and also have a perfectly working X11 WM already.

desk? Like for someone for whom its their full-time occupation/job?

Remember that many open-source contributors do it on their free time, with whatever energy they have left after their job.

Which is why game development has the work conditions that it happens to have across too many studios.

Plenty of 22 year old and younger kids willing to grind for the lottery possibility to actually be part of the team.

Do you want to port this window manager to wayland, nana? I'll expext a hell yeah.

While an X11 window manager just manages windows, a Wayland "window manager" has to also do everything an X11 server does (including X11). It doesn't just manage windows.

There are display-server-as-a-library libraries you can link with, so that you can focus on writing the window management code you actually wanted to write, but you're still responsible for everything you link with, so it's far from trivial.

Also, xmonad re-execs itself to reload its configuration. Good luck with that when it's also your display server...

GitHub Sponsors is where most of the money came from.

Qtile. It has the corresponding layouts, too.

https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...

> If I summon a desktop on screen 1 and it's currently displayed on screen 2, they should swap.

At least i3's (and I imagine sway's) config is sufficiently flexible for that. Here's a shell function that brings the workspace you specify to your current output:

  i3_bring_workspace_to_focused_output() {
    local workspace="$1"
    i3 "
      workspace $workspace 
      move workspace to output $(
        i3-msg -t get_workspaces |
        jq -r '.[]|select(.focused).output'
      )
    "
  }

You can turn that into an executable and have it be called through a keybinding.

https://discourse.haskell.org/t/xmonad-for-wayland-call-for-... last post Aug 24th someone working on Haskell wlroots binding was off due to injury, but thread they link to is active

There's more up to date discussion about it in https://discourse.haskell.org/t/haskell-wlroots-bindings/842...

You can get very close if not all the way with qtile if you accept using python instead of haskell.

https://docs.qtile.org/en/stable/manual/ref/layouts.html#mon...

I have Xmonad running well on Ubuntu 24 with Gnome Flashback

The packages I install are: xmonad libghc-xmonad-extras-dev gnome-flashback gnome-panel

(plus suckless-tools and xmobar)

That should give you a login option for "GNOME Flashback (Xmonad)"

I recall there were a couple of hacks necessary to show the Gnome Panel:

gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback root-background true

gsettings set org.gnome.gnome-flashback desktop false

and then the panels you can hide or remove per your preference

Could you elaborate?

I'm a long-time Xmonad user. Currently, I'm using Ubuntu 25.04, having upgraded to new non-LTS releases every six months, on two computers running Xmonad. I haven't run into any problems.

If you're not committed to Ubuntu, Xmonad still works great with X11 in the latest Debian Stable.

"the wayland switch broke xmonad"

That doesn't mean anything. xmonad is not broken afaik, still in use everywhere and wayland, which is just a protocol, has no power over it.

Wayback is a new Wayland compositor that implements the X11 window manager API on top of a single rootful XWayland session: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayback-X11-Wayland . XMonad should run fine inside it.

This gives you the advantage of Wayland's modern display stack and no legacy Xorg code while still running a classic X11 window manager.

The main downside is you have to run all X11-compatible apps, it's unable to manage any Wayland-native applications. But, X11 apps aren't going away any time soon, just the display server.

There are multiple window managers in other languages that won't build a Wayland equivalent due to the effort so it's not only about the language

> 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.

[0]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ [1]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac [2]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ [3]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ [4]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-tw... [5]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ [6]: https://macthemes.garden/

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.

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.

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.

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 ....

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!

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.

https://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

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.

The libraries help, but it's still a bigger job than a window manager was

Are you suggesting every application should implement its own compositor?