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LeFantometoday at 4:08 AM2 repliesview on HN

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.


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vidarhtoday at 12:49 PM

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

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kelnostoday at 6:38 AM

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.)

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