So build on top of wlroots or something. DWL for example is super small...

Current status:

> 2025-08-16: dwl IS CURRENTLY UN-MAINTAINED. AT THE PRESENT TIME, I (@fauxmight) DO NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES.

https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl

I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL. And I only brought it up as an example of a small Wayland compositor/window manager because the poster I was replying to wants to build their own anyway. DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.

No, I do not. I pointed out that with Wayland I'd be forced to. And DWL is an illustration of how much work that is relative to an X11 wm.

The -IMO- important part of that quote is "NOT HAVE THE TIME OR CAPACITY TO KEEP UP WITH wlroots CHANGES".

X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes.

wlroots seemingly isn't. This is a significant issue when it comes to relying on most 3rd party libraries.

(i worked a _little bit_ on dwl) each wlroots upgrade is a pretty small diff on the dwl source. the annoying part is, as dwl is configured with patches, every patch author has to update their patch to the new 0.x, as dwl is quite minimal, and thus has no stable api. that being said, obviously, dwm doesn't have this problem :)

also, for dwl, the issue is that the initial author (not the guy that wrote that notice) is sorta mia, and he has control of the repo on codeberg, so we'd probably need to fork to be safe, and he may not want to take on project lead. (he checks every patch for merge conflicts with one another and upgrade breakages, god bless him lol)

> X11 is backwards compatible, you do not have to "keep up" with its changes.

That's certainly one way to say "no longer developed".

That was also true back when it was actively developed though. X apps compiled a long time ago still run fine today.

Xorg is still being under development, there is another fork in development too (XLibre) and you're in the comment thread for a project about a brand new X server written from scratch.

Usually things which are "no longer developed" do not have (at least) three implementations in development.

Mature projects often don't change much or quickly even when actively maintained or improved.

When things work further development is not always a positive.

> I said build on top of wlroots, not DWL.

Turns out, the wlroots API is so volatile atm that even the developer of the super small compositor DWL has to throw in the towel for now.

> DWL is more interesting as a learning exercise than something to use.

The same is said about DWM, its xorg counterpart, but I, for one, am a happy user of DWM.

Nearly every Wayland compositor is built on wlroots. Somehow they manage. But yeah, of course it's going to change more than X11, which is older than I am and more or less abandoned...

It's actively maintained by projects like RHEL which still have versions which are supported which in turn support X11.

Others are looking to run X11 wm under wayland with wayback, xlibre wants to keep it moving forward, and phoenix wants to replace it with a modern version.

This isn't what abandoned means.

Why would I?

And DWL is not super small. It's hundreds of times larger than a minimal X wm, and couple of times as big as the wm I used.

And it's C. And it'd mean I would lose my session if I want to make changes and restart it.

What you're suggesting would be to put significant effort into replacing something that works with something that in terms of features I care about is strictly inferior.

Well, you are not really forced to write a compositor these days as there are libraries that do all the heavy lifting for you.

Check out Louvre for example. Or Smithay if you like Rust. And if you want a bit more depth, there is wlroots of course (or the hyprland version). It is not really any harder than writing an X11 WM.

wlroots and smithay (I'm not familiar with louvre) do a lot of the difficult work for you, that most compositors will do without much variation but there's still a lot that compositor writers still have to do. It's still a significantly larger task than, for example, writing an X11 WM.

(Well, writing an X11 WM that also includes a built-in compositor is a bit more than just the WM, but I'd say still less than writing a Wayland compositor using wlroots or smithay. For example, xfwm4's compositor is around 5300 lines of C, which is... not nothing, but not crazy either.)

Yeah, no I have my own wm in Ruby that is fewer lines of code than a typical Wayland Hello World, and that does what I want. I have no reason to want to throw that away for something that doesn't offer me any features I care about, and removes features I do. Such as the ability to just restart my wm if I make a change to it without affecting my current session at all.

Unless you can show me a solution that lets me replace my tiling and floating wm in ca 1500 lines of Ruby, and will let me restart without restarting my session, what you're offering me is inferior to what I have with X

It's called an extension. What's the point of mandating a (bad) IPC API?

Th point is that with X I could start with less than 100 lines and switch to using my wm, and stepwise refine it while using it.

You might consider that a bad API, but to me any solution without it is massively inferior and not something I will ever consider.