Wayfire is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots
wayfire.org
wayfire.org
I feel that as a community we want to work on impressive things but we forget the small, boring stuff that actually makes a difference. That's why then my Linux desktop has every app icon with a different style, the margins are slightly off, the fonts are clunky, and overall just doesn't look as polished as the proprietary options.
Just to hijack that a little, having a huge workspace and navigating it by panning and zooming out is quite a powerful idea.
Back in the day I had neat multidisplay setup that gave me 4960x1600 pixels, I used to remote into that from a small ibm/lenovo thinkad with 1024x768 screen resolution. The default behavior of changing the remote resolution to match the screen remoting from was a complete disaster. 30 windows being scrambled and resized was a nightmare and left a mess unlike no other.
But, with the right options you could retain the original size and just get a view onto that massive workspace. And with the little thinkpad-nub and the "third" mouse-button you can seamlessly pan through that. It was a fantastic experience and a great way to utilize that small screen.
Later I learned that there was some really old (late 80s maybe?) window-manager that actually behaved much liked that by design, and that idea is something I've kind of missed ever since.
So that was something I discovered by mistake, by using something that the designers probably didn't intend to be used that way (without the thinkpad-nub, having a workspace smaller than the remote is usually a quite painful experience). A 3d-accelerated window-manager that encourage playing around could be used to find such neat and very useful workflows.
Fun.
> I feel that as a community we want to work on impressive things but we forget the small, boring stuff that actually makes a difference.
You are commenting on a project named "fire" with windows going up in flames.... That is like commenting on scifi movies that you shouldn't be able to hear explosions in space: True, but why bring that up?
Fair enough.
> You are commenting on a project named "fire" with windows going up in flames.... That is like commenting on scifi movies that you shouldn't be able to hear explosions in space: True, but why bring that up?
Yeah, I hear you. As I wrote in another comment, this post made me think about the general issue of Linux desktops, and that feeling of "jealousy" (for lack of a better word) when looking at proprietary desktops and seeing how slick they looked. I'm talking like 15 or 20 years ago of course, then when I discovered i3 I forgot that wallpapers even existed.
Nowadays, having worked for a few years with brilliant frontend devs and designers I have a deep respect for the work they do and I feel like as a community we are missing out on that.
That's where I was coming from.
On second thought: everyone is equally competent and motivated at everything and these developers are wasting their time and should be making sure app icons are consistent.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I feel like you are downplaying the importance of the UX, and that's kind of my point. We talk about "making sure app icons are consistent" like it's a demeaning thing to do.
I don't think they should be making anything but what they want to work on. I do wonder, however, what's the use case for what they are building because, honestly, my first reaction was "wow, impressive", followed by "I remember compiz doing this 15 years ago and it didn't stick".
And finally, I was piggybacking on this post to talk about the more general issue of Linux desktops never looking as sharp as the proprietary options.
Sorry, I don't mean to criticize the devs' work, it was more of a general though about the "state of Linux on the desktop".
But I have to ask: did none of it result in anything useful? I, for one, think having the ability to zoom out can be useful. I literally cannot browse without the ability to zoom in/out a web page. I feel that we've barely scratched the service with GUI in general, not just desktop Linux.
MacOS and Windows desktop environments used to be better than what was available on *nix but that is no longer the case. I say that as someone who dislikes KDE and absolutely hates Gnome 2, including its countless derivatives.
If you're using a multi-touch table.
cool, but ultimately not very useful
From the README: "It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance."
The primary goal are features after all, and figuring out how to share code between various paradigms. If Wayfire was only about effects, we wouldn't have simple-tile (a tiling plugin), or vswipe (using laptop touchpad to switch workspaces). Of course, Wayfire is not (and will never be) very feature-rich, it is only meant as a base for a fully-featured desktop environment.
The videos demo mostly the effects, as those are the easiest to show off :) But Wayfire has enough features for daily usage, and in fact there are already quite a few people with different workflows who use it.
Nobody gives a rats ass about your opinion about its usefulness. I’m installing this tonight.
I have to bet you have released little or no open source software.
But what a boring life I would have if I only ever can have things that are fully efficient or entirely useful. "Just fun" is, imo enough reason for these silly, wobbly burning Windows to exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQYk09CHOZs
Maybe Enlightenment WM started using Xgl too, but AFAIK Compiz was the first implementation to make it usable.
It was totally fun and awesome, especially when compared to Windows 9x at the time, and everyone used it as showcase on how cool a Linux desktop is compared to Windows. But then again, to actually work with the computer, they switched back to FVWM, KDE, or whatever "boring normal" window manager they had.
Still, it's a cool showcase for what a compositor with some added shaders can do
> cool, but ultimately not very useful
You know when you put it like that you're right and it's probably the reason why many choose macOS or Windows just to get their work done rather than switching around system components or essentially doing things in order to get things done i.e play around with their OS.
This isn't 2009 and generally it is not early days for the Linux Desktop and we are still trying to find alternatives of alternatives just to get it working. Instead we have yet another compositor demo with shiny effects that are a distraction and basically gets in the way.
So yes, not at all very useful in general.
It takes a bit to configure just right, so you're welcome to have a look at my configuration: https://gist.github.com/solarkraft/f46421295b8c211b2eb56b3ac...
Wayfire is a pretty good general purpose desktop. Sadly development has died down a little recently and I have switched platforms.
It's still very extensible with many interesting plugins and it just gets some things completely right. Know how Windows, X, many Wayland desktops and even macOS sometimes do weird things when you move windows between differently scaled displays? Wayfire has 0 - absolutely no - artifacts (glitchiness, things jumping around, etc). And that's at any (floating-point) scale. It also has "finger following" touchpad desktop switching gestures, which no other compositor had for a long time. It also has blur behind windows.
So it's not really about the flashy window-flames for me that you see on the surface, it also just has a really solid core.
Ha. I'm the author of the vswipe plugin, glad you like it :)
> blur behind windows
KDE is ahead of everyone in blur tbh, they've had client-controlled blur for ages.
Isn't this true for all Wayland projects? There seems to be zero community mindshare.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar...
Most recent hack that works sometimes - using OBS as a virtual camera.
Surely 2023 will be the year of the Linux Desktop! /s