Honestly anything that doesn’t get ported to wayland is probably old enough that it doesn’t really make sense to use as your primary desktop anyway. The most niche DE I regularly use is NsCDE, but it’s entirely FVWM scripts and FVWM is planning on adding wayland support. It’ll be a little sad to lose things like Trinity, WindowMaker, and Afterstep, but they were never amazing anyway and either way I doubt X will actually be unusable for a long time still.
I miss bspwm, none of the Wayland compositors work quite the same. Hyprland is close, but it’s just not quite as good. I moved to Wayland for the security benefits, but I miss X11/bspwm.
The worst part is there’s no standardization around screenshots/screen sharing/etc. so every DE/WM in Wayland has to be supported separately, or implement wlroots; which restricts how the software can be written.
“reduces fragmentation” wtf lol. If it wasn’t for flatpak making it easy to run proprietary / obscure apps on my weirdo little distro (Void Linux, one of the few remaining non-systemd distros) I would have switched to something mainstream like Debian long ago. People are gonna go with the distro that supports (i.e. has non-broken packages for) the apps they use. Having a cross-platform package manager makes it easier for small independent distros to exist and be useful, not harder.
EDIT: And while it’s true that Wayland adoption kills obscure X11 window managers, Wayland adoption also spawns a wide range of obscure Wayland compositors. Think hyprland, wayfire… It’s by far not all Gnome and KDE! If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
I use flatpak because I enjoy the sandbox as well. Nice to know that a zeroday in some obscure internet-enabled program won’t automatically grant the hacker access to my entire home directory. And as for xbps-src, I might as well submit my package to the official repos while I’m at it. Don’t get me wrong, I do want to eventually contribute to Void’s repos in some way, but when I have time for that. And right now, I don’t have time to essentially become a package maintainer just to be able to use the apps that I need to use.
Yeah, but not everything gets accepted. Like, for example, I use Viber and they won’t accept it because it doesn’t do version numbering when doing releases… and you have no idea when they will update. Basically, short of unpacking the deb and checking the version in the ELF binary, there is no way to know which version you’re running. So, I just post those obscure or out of date software templates on GH and other places.
I’ve also submitted a few times in the official repo… for things I know that I use reglarly and can maintain. Basically, most of them don’t have that many updates, like once or twice a year, so that’s why I opted to submit and maintain them, lol 😂.
If anything, we can expect more people making Wayland compositors as hobby projects, if Waylands claims about a simpler codebase are to be believed.
They are not. Wayland compositors have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to. So many in fact that their whole central design idea has to be corrected for by everyone using wlroots to implement those common parts to get anywhere anyway which means wayland compositors in other languages without wlroots bindings are less likely.
have to do a lot more of the same thing in every compositor than window managers ever had to
Yes, but is that not entirely expected? As far as I understand, compositors are complete implementations of Wayland’s display server specification, whereas window managers are just a helper program that, well, manages windows, while Xorg does the heavy lifting required to fully implement the X Window System protocol. So the only real difference that I see is that, in the X world, the “common parts” are managed by a separate process (Xorg), whereas in the Wayland world, they are managed by a separate library (wlroots). So a hobbyist developer trying to make a window manager in some obscure language would need to figure out how to communicate with Xorg in that language, whereas a developer trying to make a compositor in some obscure language would need to write wlroots bindings for that language. Maybe I am just ignorant, but those seem like comparable efforts to me.
And lastly, in the X world, the only (widespread) implementation of the X Window System protocol is Xorg, but, in the Wayland world, there are compositors that use wlroots, and those that don’t. So wouldn’t that alone indicate more fragmentation / diversity? Sure, there are more X window managers than Wayland compositors out there, but X11 has also existed for longer. In short, I don’t see how the Wayland system is more adverse to diversity of implementations than X
Linux’es diversity has never been found in the large fundamental pieces of software. Instead it’s typically been found in the nooks and crannies between them. We’ve typically had one or several of those and most have used those. It’s the kind of diversity you find between evolutionary differences between the same species, not revolutionary differences.
There’s an increasing amount of wayland compositors, so I don’t think diversity goes away.
Additionally, hyprland supports plugins which can do most things an X.org window manager could do. E.g. there’s a plugin to support river’s window layout protocol, which allows for creating custom window layout generator.
Diversity doesn’t just vanish, it’s replaced by new possibilities, created by solid protocol specifications with multiple implementations.
Similarily, nixpkgs and other repos continue to grow, just like flathub does too. These projects aren’t killing diversity, they’re enabling it.
I would argue they are all the same since most are based on wlroots and if wlroots doesn’t support something neither does the “increasing amount of Wayland compositors”.
I like the way standardisation is going, everything is going to be on the bee standard and that that isnt being updated too well too bad. What seperates us from the windows users is we can evolve if ya look at the distro tree it looks a lot like natrual selection to me
Niche X11 projects die, niche wayland projects emerge… Nothing’s really gonna change here. And packages SHOULD be unified. There is no response reason to package chromium in 15 different ways for every distro.
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