• penquin@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 months ago

    Can someone please eli5? Why do I never hear anything about the window manager in windows and macos? Why is all the fuss on our side on Linux? I’m genuinely asking.

    • edinbruh@feddit.it
      3·
      2 months ago

      In addition to what the others have said, windows has already had its big paradigm change (“similar” to the change from x11 to Wayland that is happening) in the past. It was around 2007 with windows Vista. They also didn’t get it quite right on the first try, but because Microsoft can do whatever they want, and in Linux you must convince the community that something is better, it was easier for them to just change everything under everyone’s nose.

    • giloronfoo@beehaw.org
      1·
      2 months ago

      It is being discussed because we’re in the middle of the transition from X to Wayland. Before there wasn’t much discussion. In a few years when it settles out there probably won’t be much discussion.

      Windows and Mac have never had a choice. There might have been significant changes to a window manager layer, but it would have been part of a larger version upgrade. Like between windows 3.1 and 95 or OS 9 to OS X. The visible changes would be closer to desktop environment like KDE and Gnome in Linux.

      • penquin@lemm.ee
        0·
        2 months ago

        Thank you so much. One more question, why do we have so many issues with scaling, font rendering and all stuff and windows and macos just do it? Why aren’t we doing similar?

    • Marmaduke@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      A compositor is a program responsible for displaying program windows and things like the desktop on your PC. On Linux, the compositor is just a program that starts when the system starts. There are multiple desktop environments available, like Plasma or Gnome, each comes with their own compositor, you can choose which you want to use.

      Wayland is a protocol that the programs use to communicate with the compositor. Everyone decided to use Wayland, because if each compositor had their own protocol it would be silly, eg some programs would work only on Plasma or Gnome.

      It’s a replacement for a much older X11, which could no longer keep up with requirements of modern apps.

      You never hear anything about compositors on Windows or Mac because there’s only one available, you can’t choose.

    • tuna@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      2 months ago

      XWayland normally runs x11 apps seamlessly (more or less) in Wayland

      XWayland rootful spawns a window which is like a virtual monitor running a full x11 session inside it. You spawn apps inside of the window using the DISPLAY variable

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Still, the Xwayland window is missing a title bar that would allow for moving the window around.

        This is because Wayland does not decorate its surfaces, this is left to the Wayland client themselves to add window decorations (also known as client side decorations, or CSD for short).

        This however would add a lot of complexity to Xwayland (which is primarily an Xserver, not a full fledged Wayland application). Thankfully, there is libdecor which can fence Xwayland from that complexity and provide window decorations for us.

        This seems… ridiculous. Windows and MacOS developers don’t worry about creating decorations. And they don’t worry about that “adding a lot of complexity”. Even with X11 you get decorations from the WM without any work. I know I don’t understand the glory that is the Wayland architecture and that a bunch of folks will now angrily tell me all the numerous ways in which I’m not only wrong but but also stupid but… It just seems weird is all.

        • Confetti Camouflage@pawb.socialEnglish
          4·
          2 months ago

          iirc mandatory Client Side Decorations is only a Gnome on Wayland thing and everyone else has support for both Client and Server Side Decorations.

        • Semperverus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I think that the reason for all the weirdness in wayland is because they are considering more usecases than just desktop with taskbar and window title bars with _ [ ] X buttons. Think signage, mobile interfaces, kiosks, and other weird non-traditional interfaces. Its why absolute window positioning is dumb the way it is too.

        • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 months ago

          Honestly I feel like it doesn’t really matter either way, it adds a little complexity for the people maintaining qt and gtk and things like that, but most actual application developers aren’t interacting directly with the display server so it doesn’t make much difference for them

        • callyral [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I though only GNOME cared about having client-side decorations? Probably why any GNOME app I have has an annoying toolbar when I’m using a tiling window manager.

          • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Indeed, but GNOME is big enough to veto against anything they dislike getting into Wayland. And indeed, TWMs were brought up as a big reason why CSD sucks; window decorations primarily contain controls for the window manager and the form these controls should take depends entirely on the nature of the window manager, therefore the window manager should draw the controls. But GNOME doesn’t want to perform the oh so difficult task of providing window controls to apps that don’t provide their own under Wayland, so too bad.

      • Cwilliams@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 month ago

        Its confusing that we also use ‘rootful’ to refer to a process running as the root user