Okay, Wayland is the future, blah blah.
Would it be possible/make sense to make a Wayland compositor that would emulate a X11 server so a X11 WM could talk to it and be used to manage windows?
I’m just thinking about how we could make sure that the tons of obscure but cool WMs survive the waypocalypse.
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well, isnt that just Xwayland?
There are quite a few niche window managers and desktop environments that it’d be a shame to loose. I’m quite fond of Windowmaker (and curious about Afterstep), Trinity DE, and NSCDE for example, and I’m not aware of Wayland plans for any of them.
TDE has had occasional discussion and ruminations, but no action yet. Porting it is complicated by the fact that it has its own widget set (TQT, forked from QT3), which would have to be worked on first and is currently undergoing some unrelated rewriting.
The likelihood of any wayland milestones for TDE being set before the end of 2024 is very low unless some major distro completely drops X support.
It’s possible to do but also probably not worth the amount of effort to reimplement all of those protocols only for super old WMs that don’t have a Wayland equivalent. None of them are particularly complex, so It’s probably easier to just port those to wlroots than implement the compatibility, and it’s an opportunity to make an API or library to make it easy to write WMs.
Creating a wayland compositor based in wlroots is much more work than an X11 window manager. And then there’s quite a bit of work to keep up with new Wayland protocols.
But I personally don’t think there’s a need for more compositors, since the existing compositors do support all kinds of tiling.
E.g. river has custom layout providers, which allows for creating completely custom tiling behaviour. There’s even a hyprland plugin which implements river-layout-v3.
