Your future plans? (Wayland)
Trevor Cordes <[email protected]> Thu, 28 Mar 2024 02:13:33 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.window-managers.sawfish |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi all. I've been a lurker for eons, and a sawfish fan/user since it was named the name that shall not be spoken. I don't really see any chatter about everyone's plans once X is gone. The head in the sand approach has suited me well, but now Fedora is rumbling that it'll ditch X for GNOME, whatever that means starting with 40 or 41? That's 2024/2025. Now, maybe they mean the GNOME desktop itself cannot run on X, but the GTK apps still can. If that is the case then maybe I have until Fedora 42 or 43 (2025/2026?) before they just yank all X support. Clearly if GTK or the "big apps" like Firefox or LO stop compiling in X support then it officially becomes dead for all intents and purposes. And thus does sawfish, at least in my world. Only if IBM/RH "pull another CentOS" but with Fedora would I ditch it to maybe go to a straggler X-supporting distro (think: systemd holdouts, which I applaud but just couldn't care enough about to resist). But I want to keep using sawfish! (sawfish has more impact on every second of my work than systemd ever did.) Surely I'm not the only one here who dreads the day we are forced into wayland and the loss of the "wm". My sawfish config is massively customized. There are things I do with it that I've muscled-memoried since the early 90's (the wm's in SunOS were similar), as well as extensive use of all the fancy new features that have been added over the years. Ever since X programs stopped properly supporting Xresources, the only way to get similar results is via sawfish window rules. And my biggest requirement: right-click on window border = move to bottom of focus stack. The only talk I can find on the net of sawfish vis a vis wayland is that it can't be done unless someone in sawfish writes an entire compositor. And it also sounds like/seems that isn't going to happen. Surely everyone here with their extensive sawfish window rules and tweaks and settings isn't going to just pack up and accept some dumb stock GNOME or KDE compositor designed for the "one-window-maximized- always" school of computing. So I'm hoping someone has been scoping out the other wayland compositor options (I think there are a few?) and has already identified the best path forward once we're forced into downgrade-servitude? Surely there exists a "best" "most-like-sawfish" one? I want to start planning now so I can investigate the pain level I'll have to endure. Extra/aside: so the stumbling block to wayland-sawfish is not wanting to write a whole compositor? So why not steal an existing compositor as the base and tack sawfish-like things on top? Why reinvent the whole wheel? Ya, not easy (I get it, I'm a programmer by trade), but surely not as daunting as writing an entire compositor which would include many things sawfish users don't care or need to tweak or modify. Many thanks for all the great work and features and the best wm over all these years. It's really handy to have a community of like-minded souls. I'll be here until the day Fedora turns off the sawfish lights. -- Sawfish ML