this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time were fair. It was primarily born out some frustrations I had with the entire ecosystem, and it was not like I was the only sole voice. There are other people out there you can find that encountered their own unique Wayland problems and wrote about it.

With that post, I probably cast myself as some anti-Wayland guy which is my own doing, but I promise you that is not the case. You can check my mpv commits, and it's businesses as usual. Lots of Wayland fixes, features, and all that good stuff. Quite some time has passed since then, and it is really overdue look at the situation again with all the new developments in mind. To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done. So in comparison to 3 years ago, I have a much more positive outlook now.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not abandoning my Awesome WM setup anytime soon personally. But I thought it's worth sharing this perspective from someone who knows this stuff much better than me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, same boat.

Tried riverwm few months ago but couldn't fit my Awm workflow into it, river seems to think about tags as just tags for where you want windows (even on multiple of them) but I just want workspaces, where each ws also has its own tiling mode. Also, seems there is no standard on how to read/show the current tiling mode by something like waybar, also essential for me when toggling through them.


Also I don't understand Xwayland - I've searched hours for ways to tell the compositor to "tell" Xwayland to not scale the content dpi or something along these lines - there seems to be no standard and every compositor handles xwayland in their own way?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

What X11-only apps/programs did you need xwayland for?

I actually always disabled xwayland whenever I experimented with wayland (weston and sway), because everything I use is supported natively, and I wanted to make sure the native support was forced.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I used Awesome about 5 years ago, and was extremely happy with it, unfortunately an upgrade of Awesome broke my scripts so nothing worked, and I didn't have the time to be distracted and fix it. So I switched to XFCE.
Pretty annoying to have many hours of work destroyed like that. If they have a promise now to not break compatibility with upgrades, I might consider trying it again. But I don't care for a user environment that breaks completely because of changes in an upgrade.