Maybe sircmpwn could comment on this: Could wlroots (originally for Sway) make the transition process easier for other tiling window mangers wanting to port to Wayland?

Tremendously so, yes, but it's still going to be a lot of work.

Personally I’m waiting for a tiling Wayland WM that supports NVIDIA.

Effectively, you're waiting for NVIDIA to implement the same APIs every other Linux GPU driver uses.

You may be waiting a very long time.

Sway (Wayland equivalent of i3) works with the open source nouveau drivers, which seem to work quite well for some folks.

Wait. So I haven't used Wayland at all yet but why would the graphics driver need to have support for a tiling WM? isn't that in a whole different later and shouldn't matter at all?

Does NVIDIAs driver has any special code to make i3 work on X11 but missing code to make sway work on Wayland?

It’s the other way around: on X11, nVidia implements all the standard APIs, so window managers like i3 don’t need driver-specific code.

For Wayland, nVidia only implements the EGLStreams buffer management API, whereas other drivers implement the GBM API. Individual compositors (like sway) need to add support for EGLStreams.

See also https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Requirements

Note that Wayland doesn't have a full driver abstraction layer in userland like X does. Every Wayland compositior is expected to call into the Linux kernel drivers for the graphics card directly. GBM is just a thin wrapper that hides the fact that Linux never standardised the buffer creation interface across different hardware - it assumes that all those driver-specific interfaces wrap essentially the same shared Linux buffer management code, and it doesn't abstract stuff like modesetting at all. NVidia managed to reimplement enough of the Linux modesetting interface that existing code mostly works, but their own buffer management infrastructure is apparently different enough that they couldn't make it look like the one existing Wayland compositors are expecting to use. So they ended up creating their own slightly higher-level API instead.

Oh dear, so right from the start there is unnecessary complication hindering adoption of Wayland in yet another way. After reading your comment I assumed at least all the other drivers would implement EGLStreams too but following your link reveals no, so you couldn't even implement a simple compositor that only supports one.

Personally I avoid NVIDIA like the plague, but at work we have to support VMware running with 3d acceleration on all kinds of cards on Linux, including NVIDIA with proprietary drivers. Apart from VMware having announced no plans yet on supporting Wayland this seems like yet another small reason to stay with X11 until the end of time.

Xmonad[1] cannot be ported, but there is a Waymonad[2]. So yes, in most cases that would mean rewriting from scratch. What is worst of all this - no existing plugins/extensions/etc would work...

[1] https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad

[2] https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

I would say "very significant" is understating it. Anything that touches Xlib/XCB/etc would need to be at least modified, if not rewritten completely.

How about gtk-2.0 apps?

That’s probably not a bad thing. We have the benefit of hindsight of decades of GUI management and it probably isn’t more than a weekend project to get a baseline library worked out to build cool things (like awesomewm and i3 and dwm) off of. Which probably already exists.

> it probably isn’t more than a weekend project to get a baseline library worked out to build cool things (like awesomewm and i3 and dwm) off of

what technical justifications are you using to make this claim?

Isn't that what wlroots is? And it's taken many years of work by multiple contributors and still isn't really finished

wlroots is finished enough to build production-quality Wayland desktops out of.

Will fluxbox be deprecated/compromised by Wayland? I've been happily using it since 2001 without a hiccup...

Yeah, aside from GNOME/KDE trying to do a smooth transition, it's kind of a breaking point for everything. We now have Sway as an i3 successor, for example. There are similar projects for other popular window managers, but from what I understand none of them are in a very usable state the way Sway is. This[0] page can serve as an informal list of all the Wayland compositors succeeding old window managers. Waybox is likely relevant to your interests.

[0] https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl...