• d_k_bo@feddit.de
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    6 months ago

    Wayland monolith

    There seems to be misunderstanding about what Wayland is.

    Wayland is set of protocols. They are implemented by wayland servers (compositors) and wayland clients (applications) themselves. There is no single “wayland binary” like in the X11 days. Servers or clients may choose to implement or not implement a specific protocol.

    • NekkoDroid@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      I think what they meant is that there are people that think: “Wayland is too fragmented, there should be 1 ‘Wayland Compositor’ and the rest should be window managers”

      • Shareni@programming.dev
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        6 months ago

        Nope, I meant that the wayland compositors are inflexible monoliths that are so tightly integrated into a DE that they can’t be replaced. Xorg might be bloated, but it follows the UNIX philosophy closely enough that each part of the stack above xorg can be trivially replaced.

        • NekkoDroid@programming.dev
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          6 months ago

          I guess my interpretation was too charitable.

          Nothing in the protocol prevents you from splitting the server from the window manager, just everyone implementing the wayland server protocol didn’t see any benefit in splitting it out.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that Wayland compositors are forced to be inflexible monoliths that need to be so tightly integrated into a DE that they can’t be replaced.

      Edit: I’ve just learned that it’s not forced, but that every compositor used by popular DEs is an inflexible monolith by choice.

      In xorg the server, wm, and compositor all do their own thing and can be replaced trivially. It took me like 5 minutes to replace xfwm4 with i3, and that included the research.