I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is.
Some of your issues are solved:
CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu
Some of your issues are solved:
CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu
I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11 apps generally work across window managers, although the weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some interesting things you have to work around.
If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be adapted for each and every composer.
If the world can agree on Wayland then desktops can agree on some dbus interfaces for doing stuff like screenshots, screencasts, and automation.
Wayland is a shiny new thing and lots of people are writing compositors since it's suddenly possible for people to write them in a way that you simply couldn't with X11. The ecosystem will eventually mature but I think it would be a mistake to recreate the Xorg monoculture with wlroots. People seem to see the value of multiple browser implementations agreeing on standard but not display servers.
Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated" protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter applications that don't play very nicely with alternative paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want for instance). Still, overall with a few hacks here and there it works mostly very well. Basically I know that we're 2nd class citizens within the unix desktop world but at least the X11 model gives us enough of preemption to get things working mostly correctly.
From what I see of Wayland I'm very concerned in the long run. Not being able to just beat a window into submission X-style seems like it would create a world of troubles.
And because tiling environment are fairly niche I don't expect the ecosystem to organically evolve solutions to all of these problems.
And if you think "well just stop using tiling WMs and use whatever else is using you weirdo" please do note that these issues are also often the same that are encountered by people with disabilities who need to rig their UIs in certain ways to make them usable. Also you'll have to pry my tiling WM from my cold dead hands, you heathen.
>[...] a modular basis for Sway and other Wayland compositors to build upon
I was curious to see what that looked like so I went on the github and the first sentence on the README is:
>Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor; or about 50,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway.
My jaw literally dropped when I read this. It seemed so wild that I actually cloned the repository and ran sloccount myself to check if there was a catch (there isn't, master is at 53k lines). My DWM is 3k lines and it's fully featured as far as I'm concerned.
I realize that it just pushes a lot of that functionality (and code) into X but at least it separates the concerns, my WM doesn't ship with half of the X11 source code as a hard dependency. Also X11 has been battle tested for literally decades by now, it's not a fast moving project (well, arguably it's quite the opposite, hence the very existence of this discussion).
I haven't looked very deeply at Wayland so I won't say that they're doing it wrong, maybe I'm just missing an important aspect, but the more I learn about it the more it feels like they've thrown the baby out with the bath water.
X11 can be hugely hacky at times and some of it is seriously outdated at the conceptual level, but it also does many things amazingly well, arguably better than any other mainstream desktop environment out there. It's an incredibly flexible, if a bit idiosyncratic system. Wayland seems to fix some of its flaws by introducing a brand new system that comes with its own set of drawbacks.
Then the compositors could just use this library instead of every one of them duplicating effort and coming up with their own mutually incompatible ways of doing things.
In fact, this library could even be protocol-agnostic, and be able to talk to both Wayland and X.
>Then the compositors could just use this library instead of every one of them duplicating effort and coming up with their own mutually incompatible ways of doing things.
That's what wlroots is, except for...
>In fact, this library could even be protocol-agnostic, and be able to talk to both Wayland and X.
... because that's outside its scope. The point of the middleware is to interface with the wayland protocol. It's not "protocol-agnostic".
> dwl.c, 2000 LOC
https://github.com/djpohly/dwl
wlroots should be compared with X.Org Server, 370000 LOC
For fairness, you should count the hundreds of thousands of LOC in Xorg as well. From that PoV, 50k might actually be pretty lean.
I think in the long run you’ll actually be quite happy with Wayland for your use-case since Wayland removes a lot of the weird things that Windows can do without the help of the (tiling) compositor. A tiling compositor actually has far far more power to beat windows into submission than an Xorg based WM ever could. Surfaces can’t move, steal focus, put popups anywhere without the compositor having a say and, potentially, just saying no.
And GNOME has removed support for xembed tray icons in favor AppIndicator which is just a generic dbus interface which a tiling WM can actually sanely implement.
It's 12 years old
Since I have no desire to lose functionality or work around issues I will revisit the situation either when every major issue is resolved or within 1 year of major apps like Firefox not working on X even with a a user contributed build.
I would be shocked if this was before 2030.
except when they aren't - I had a firefox bug for a couple years where the browser showing a notification would completely hang it for at least 15-20 seconds
This is the common refrain I tend to see. I know I was certainly in the "Can't believe it" category, since I'd tried wayland about 4 years ago and ended up moving back to X.
That said, I had exactly the same reaction 2 years ago when I gave it a shot on my new machine.
It was fast, didn't show any tearing or flickering, handled automatic configuration of most monitors correctly, and made my touchpad genuinely nice to use.
Just the touchpad support alone won me over pretty much immediately.
I went from "Eh, Wayland isn't ready" to "Holy shit, I'm never going back!"
The former is nearly unwatchable if the scene has lots of darkness punctuated by light, such as a fire.
What does "less support" mean? At least on my system, Sway is running with adaptive sync enabled.