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Comment by readingnews | Hacker News Reader

Time marches on, but I wonder how many new linux users will never see so many cool old programs as they just do not know about them.

Does that thing everyone keeps trying to get us all to move to (I am a hardcore ICEwm / *boxwm user) support all of the old X stuff like xsnow, xscreensaver, etc?

I was sad to realize that xroach is no longer in Debian (or Gentoo, there is a bug report from 2009), however, others still exist: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/204241/x-windows-sp...

As SE says, do not forget the "santa" option to xsnow. I forgot about it.

This always reminds me, anyone remember Koules? https://www.ucw.cz/~hubicka/koules/English/koules.html

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Yes, I remember koules, played that a lot.

That is the saddest thing about Wayland, a lot of cool little X applications will stop working and be forgotten about.

There is xfishtank, I posted this screen to remind people about it years ago. I kick that off every so often for fun.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/m9gk2l/ctwm_on_sl...

There are many many more of these little clients that will disappear once Linux disables X. Never mind other cool things, a couple I remember: lavaclock, bubblefishymon, catclock, xplanet.

I think only the parts of X that talk directly to the graphics hardware are being abandoned and that many of the things you mention will continue to work.

Some may, but xfishtank, xplanet and xscreensaver on root window will not.

You can do this to get a matrix wallpaper, this will work with many xscreensaver "utilities"

/usr/libexec/xscreensaver/xmatrix --root

where this is on your distro may be different.

On wayland, I have an animated wallpaper of a forest: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/11w3zzj/hyprland_...

Why can't we bring the apps you mention to wayland as a background?

For the foreground, the compositor could even use the alpha channel to draw see through snowflakes: I have foot in quaketerm mode showing what's behind. Replace foot by a smaller snowflake, make more than one of them, and it should be the same!

Or am I missing something?

There is xwayland, yes.

How does xwayland help here? In order to see what xsnow is about look here [1]. From my understanding such a program is fundamentally against wayland design philosophy. I feed it will be just impossible with Wayland unless you implement it as part of the display server.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Mzg2i6t0I

> From my understanding such a program is fundamentally against wayland design philosophy

Against the philosophy but, I think, not completely impossible. Wayland is “just a protocol”, so somebody could write a Wayland server that runs in a Wayland window. Then, you could draw anywhere in the outer window, including outside of the inner one(s).

Make the outer window not have a title bar, etc. and run in full screen, and you’re done.

Isn’t that what XWayland does, except for the fact that it runs X Windows windows inside a full screen Wayland window?

> Isn’t that what XWayland does, except for the fact that it runs X Windows windows inside a full screen Wayland window?

I don't know. But if it does so, how does it integrate wayland windows with X windows? How does it stop X programs from observing the window contents of wayland programs?

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