alt Hacker NewsI was responding to this comment in the article and wondering about the historical context:
> Although, I do not know for sure why the original Wayland authors chose to combine the window manager and Wayland compositor, I assume it was simply the path of least resistance.
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Quekid5 • yesterday at 11:58 PM
I think wmf's comment in this thread was absolutely correct and succinct, so I won't repeat, but I think it's worth noting that many (all?) of the Wayland devs were actually Xorg devs. Make of that what you will.
already in X11 time, compositor and window manager were one unit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiz
why? because the compositor completely changed the geometry of the desktop. being 3-dimensional. now, today most wayland compositors are 2 dimensional, but they don't have to be. a window manager that works with a 2 dimensional compositor would not work with a 3 dimensional one and vice versa. the window managers listed in the article are only compatible with this particular compositor.
it seems to me that separating window managers from compositors from the start would have created the expectation that all window managers work on all compositors. that is not and will not be the case.
if all compositors start separating out the window manager then the result would be that as a user i now have to choose two components, a compositor and a window manager, and i have to make sure they are compatible.