We don't need more Wayland Compositors

Get kicked from freedesktop for fostering a toxic community.
Ditch wlroots for your own compositor.
Shit on other compositors in your spare time.
Tell people they should just be plugging into Hyprland instead of rolling their own compositor.

Man if I was concerned about sinking the time to make a configuration for the compositor with a bus factor of 1 man-child, and a toxic community; I can't imagine anybody investing the time to make a compositor is going to want to hitch themselves to that cart.

The compositor is really solid and makes for a great user experience but I'll be fucked if every word vaxry writes doesn't make me want to move to sway or niri.

You can just chose not to read his blogs. I checked the discord recently for some help defining window size for mpv and it was pretty good. No general chats, strictly topic abiding channels and nice folk that either share the wiki part or the code that helped me.
- The discord does have a general chat, as well as a memes chat.
- Exactly, politics vs. doing software.

The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don't hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.

Ah, classic Vaxry. I'm sure he would love it if his compositor was the only one.

I lost interest after that.

Yeah, that sounds like the age old "why so many desktops (or other apps)" debate. Because we can. Because doing new things is fun. Because this isn't all about being effective and capitalist logic.
Oh lit so you wrote up your own compositor?
- I think you and the bcachefs owner would be very good friends.
- Nope. Have you?

While some of the arguments are true, this blog post mainly reads like an ad for hyperland and it propably is just that.

Dude's shilling for his own compositor backend right after ditching wlroots. He has zero credibility in this matter.
- Oh no, he's shilling his own project after transitioning to a different technology.
  
  Do you even hear yourself? I think you should stick with "He's a biggot" type of comments, because this just makes you look stupid.

Vaxry who got banned from Freedesktop for being an asshat? https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.html

I don't exactly consider Drew Devault a reliable or unbiased judge of character
- Can you elaborate. I never heard about this.

Says the man who made one lol. I am still using hyprland because the sad thing is i like it but im trying to switch to something that is not made by a transphobe... what do yall recommend?

I have been really happy with sway. It does all that I want it to do.
- Sway is my safe option. I will check out what kind of rices people cooked up with it and maybe i see somethig nice i can copy.
I'm a big fan of niri, which is a scrolling tiling compositor. I always had a soft spot for tiling wms/compositors, but couldn't stick with any of them for long until I tried niri, and wholeheartedly embraced the scrolling tiling world.

Very friendly upstream & community, and written in a modern language, too.
- I dont think ill like scrolling tiling but you never know so ill try. At first i thought tiling was stupid and now look i feel like im digitally dissabled when i use a pure floating system.
- If touchpad gestures work, I'm putting that on my macbook air. That looks so comfortable.
Cosmic-comp is my second favorite after hyprland so far due to their tiling being quite well thought-out. The problem is, it's part of a DE and is somewhat cumbersome to configure as a standalone compositor (can be fixed by patching libcosmic, tho), and also it's quite bare-bones when it comes to features.

Then there's pinnacle which looks promising, but I haven't yet tried to daily-drive it.

Also, maybe qtile, which has a Wayland back-end.
- Qtile was my first daily driver tiling WM. It was a pain in the ass to install, but it's damn near as extensible as DWM (since the config file is literally a python program). The only thing I hate about it is that you can't reposition windows in the tiling layout by drag-and-drop.
- Ill try out your suggestions. Ive thought about using cosmic but its alpha and it will have a bunch of stuff i wont use probably.
Whoa - hyprland is made by a transphobe?

Edit: whoa it really is. I joined their discord and saw like, very strict anti-lgbtqphobic rules and thought that they must be good. But looking into him... Turns out the rules are there because he'd let it fester into a 4chan toxic hellhole
You've gotten good responses already, but I just live and let live with Gnome's Mutter & KDE's Kwin. It's worth mentioning that they're both highly polished offerings. But I would also understand why one wouldn't want to use either.
- I love KDE and use it as my daily driver, but talking strictly about the tilling experience, it just ain't it.
  I've tried both Polonium and a updated fork of Kröhnkite for Plasma 6, and neither them were as nice as Hyprland...

The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don’t hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.

Oh, fuck off! I can barely use Blender because dragging a spinner control does something with the cursor that makes Hyprland shit its pants. It's been fixed and broken several times. May or may not be related: Vaxry has expressed his disdain for Blender in issue notes. (edit) found it: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3270

(edit2) I should also mention that Hyprland is the only compositor where this happens. KDE Plasma, Qtile-wayland, Sway, Wayfire are all fine.

Oh come on! First, you hate on COSMIC for taking away some of the noob user base, now you hate on other compositors for taking some of your other user base.

Why can't you be happy that there are other projects in this space? Why can't you just be happy that people are now more likely to find a project which works for them? Is it because your own project is losing users, now that people are no longer trapped to it, because it's no longer the only good project in the space?

Even Brodie admitted that you're not completely right on many of your takes, so why not focus on what you're good at, aka writing a Wayland compositor?

Edit: It seems that I should have read the article. He talks about things from a different point of view, but if you're looking to write a proper Wayland "window manager", there is only one real choice and it's not Hyprland, it's the upcoming River 0.4.0 which will use a custom protocol, based on the layout managers that River was already made for. Basically the dev, Isaac, is moving as much of the window management into the "layout manager" protocol to turn River into a base for writing your own Window manager.

It's one of the main project releases I'm the most excited about in the Linux space.

If this guy could focus on what he's good at and keep his damn mouth shut he wouldn't be in this situation.
- Agreed.

Lol fuck this guy

The reality is that, although there are quite a few standalone Wayland compositors, you don't hear about most of them, because almost all of them suck in one way or another if you go beyond opening terminals.

For standalone desktops, Hyprland is undeniably your best base at the moment to write a window manager.

If you don't believe it, see some amazing WM plugins for Hyprland on Github,

Your favorite tiling WM doesn't have a Wayland port? Pick up the initiative yourself and write a Hyprland plugin that makes it behave like your WM of choice.

Said the person who maintains Hyprland. This post reads like an ad for his own project.

Isn't this the toxic dev, who dislikes any other Wayland Compositors? This guy is also banned from contributing to Freedesktop here and here. And here is a post from Drew Hyprland is a toxic community.

I'm not surprised about this blog post. I argue we need more compositors. More means, more to choose from and being less reliant on the few that are available right now. What if someone does not like Hyprland in example or any of the current available compositors? Having more to choose from is a good thing, not bad. I'm so thankful that Hyprland is not the only one we have. One example is the programming language that the project is written in. Why does it matter? Maybe because people want to contribute or understand the code or want to make changes. In example Qtile is written in Python and its configuration language is in Python too.

For standalone desktops, Hyprland is undeniably your best base at the moment to write a window manager.

Well, it took him more than 2/3 of the post to mention hyprland, so I'll give him props for that.

Click baity title aside. This is actually pretty much pretty true. What the vast majority of people want when they're writing their own composers seems to be specifically the custom window management aspects.

And it is true that even with something like Wlroots or a Smithay, it is a lot of works right your own composer and have it be "competitive". And he is right. There are a lot of composers out there that are just not usable for anything more than the basics. And there are tons more which are just toys that have been abandoned that aren't really usable. That being said we saw a lot of that with window managers, But yes, writing a compositor is a lot more then writing a window manager.

I personally don't use hyperland, but I can see the point he's trying to make, and I think it's a rather good point. I think if we had more compositors that focused on having a scriptable window management, then that would be for the better.

I don't really see this as toxic either. I mean, if it's toxic to call a composite or trash in one way or another, then I would argue that 90% of the Linux community is far more toxic than he is. It's just a matter of truth. Wayland is a big complicated thing with a lot of protocols and some of it is poorly documented.

And of course, this is him shilling his own composter. It's his own composter, and this is the blog about him making his own composter. Of course he's gonna put a post on it, shilling his own compositor.

That being said, As I said earlier, I would like to see a more scriptable take for things like window management. I don't think hyprland has to be unique in this aspect, but as it stands, it most definitely is.

pardon my weird language, its hard to use STT.

I don't think Hyprland has to be unique.... but as it stands, it most definitely is.

It isn't. River 0.4.0 will be turning River into a base to build your own window manager, taking it much further than Hyprland ever could, with a custom protocol, etc.
- I'll try it out for sure. Last time what tried river it was fairly basic. So if it's come a long way that's quite exciting.

Vaxry is a fascist asshat, and this is just them plugging their own work.

I didn't read it yet but just from the title I'ma disagree. I loved all the creative me for xorg over the years and hope to see it in Wayland even more.

Will update after I read it

Btw, is there one for touchscreen notebooks/tablets yet?
There was one, paper-something, but i think it's abandoned now?