Yay!

I can still use my fallback minimalist window manager for another few years!

I don’t mean to root against open source developers, but every aspect of the Linux stack that’s been rewritten recently is a major regression over what I used 10 years ago, and I’m frankly tired of change for change’s sake breaking stuff I rely on to do my job.

You know I would be happy if the Linux community produced one working desktop environment instead of 2-10 different versions for each component depending on how difficult that component is to implement.

You go to a Apple, Google or Microsoft conference, GUI programming talks are about how to implement good UI/UX and take the best advantage of their tools for UI development, usually with workflow exemples from concept up to final product.

Most GUI tracks on GNU/Linux conferences are about low level details how to make certain drivers work, ongoing XWindows refactorings, or refactorings on GUI libraries.

So it is clear which tech do eventually GUI focused developers go to.

I know what you mean and my frustation goes beyond that. All my servers and many tools are all Linux based, but my desktop dev environment haven't change in years (even when I hop from LTS to LTS). It's mostly abstracted with my own GUI code so when people start fucking with the underlying and regular components I can just do a quick fix on my side. When I'm customizing my Linux desktop (CLI aside) I feel like I'm wasting my time just to make things work, not have a prehistorical workflow and minimize the GUI toolkit hell. Ironically, on Windows I feel like an actual power user when I'm making scripts and automating workflows. Not sure why, it's just how I feel.

Maybe the annoyances are from the lack of a core desktop experience/"interface" (not talking about GUI) that feels familiar (especially for new users). I bet it also scares developers from other platforms and commercial initiatives. I'm all in for freedom but a "default stack" is desperately needed.

Well, you know--people have opinions.

If not, we'd all be using OS/2 on IBM PCs instead of Windows, Macs, Linux, etc.

> Also, are you sure your WM won't be updated to work with Wayland..?

Window managers are inherently specific to the X11 ecosystem. They interact with the X server on a low level that doesn't translate over to Wayland. See also: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_11

Nothing stops the developers of--let's say--XFWM4 to create a Wayland version that is identical to Xorg's.

Read the FAQ entry I linked to. (Specifically, the "How can I replace Wayland's Window Manager?" heading; the anchor doesn't seem to work properly.)

Standalone window managers aren't a thing in the Wayland ecosystem, no more than they are under Windows or macOS. Much of the functionality which would be implemented by an X11 WM is either built into the Wayland compositor, or delegated to clients.

The only difference I notice between window managers is configuration options: is there a shortcut to send the window to another workspace..? Can you resize when maximized, etc.

What features would you personally miss?

Not the above poster, but I like tiling window managers. I'm using i3, and it's got lots of features I actually like and use.

Nothing except the fact that it would probably be a complete rewrite.

No idea. The last update was 2015, but a three year gap is a pretty normal release cadence for it:

http://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/

I’ve never had a corrupted xauthority. I’d guess there’s a bug in some component other than X. (Does X11 even create the .Xauthority? Isn’t that the display manager (like xdm)’s job?)

Have you tried i3wm? I switched to it permanently a few years ago and never looked back. Here [0] is my config. Sway [1], a port of i3wm to Wayland, is kind of stable as well.

[0] https://bitbucket.org/carun/dot-files/src/tip/.i3-config

[1] http://swaywm.org

I have been using awesome, but I often see people recommending i3. Any advantages of i3 over awesome?

> Also, are you sure your WM won't be updated to work with Wayland..?

Not the parent, but yes, in my case, my WM maintainers have stated that it won't be updated to work with wayland.

I can only hope that when (if?) wayland becomes the standard, there is a compatability layer that allows to run wayland apps from withing xorg.

I think this decision makes sense, especially from a support perspective.

I understand that Wayland is good and working for a large number of users in Fedora. however I'd be inclined to think that Canonical may choose to go Wayland in 18.10 at the earliest giving them most of the cycle to 20.04 to work out the kinks, likewise we can hope for improvements in GPU support along the way.

This should probably point to the original announcement from Canonical: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/01/26/bionic-beaver-18-04-l...