Wayland... Again !?
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I swear this time it is for real !

My last attempt to use Wayland was 5 years ago [0].

I tried using wio [1] by contributing to it, and even made a successful 
attempt at writing a compositor using wlroots ! [2]

But at the time, wlroots (~v0.8) was far from being ready. The project 
was moving way too fast, and I couldn't keep my lovely compositor up to 
pave with the project. And I don't even talk about the ecosystem ! So I 
gave up after a few weeks...

... Up to this day !


This year's FOSDEM was dope. People are doing really cool stuff, and 
Wayland had much more traction. Big props to Isaac who presented his 
upcoming 0.4 release of river [3]. It turns the compositor into a 
display server, offloading the window management part to simpler 
programs !

I still want to switch over to Wayland, and I want to ride my own 
compositor ! So here I am, writing a library to abstract all the boring 
and hard stuff from wlroots to something simpler. It's like libwm [4], 
but for Wayland.

So far it's going great, and I'm having a blast implementing stuff that 
was a pain in the ass on X11 (animations, zooms, etc...).

The library's called libowl [5], and I strongly recommend you to NOT 
use it !

It was difficult to get to a semi working state, but now my 
understanding of Wayland internals is slowly building up, and I can 
integrate more complex features much faster.

Wayland's still a hot mess, but I'll keep the ranting for another post 
;)

Keep hacking 🤘
--  
~wgs

[0]: 
gopher://phlog.z3bra.org:70/0/my-love-hate-relationship-with-wayland.txt
[1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wio
[2]: gopher://z3bra.org:70/1/scm/spkp/log.gph
[3]: https://isaacfreund.com/blog/river-window-management/
[4]: gopher://z3bra.org:70/1/scm/libwm/log.gph
[5]: gopher://z3bra.org:70/1/scm/libowl/log.gph

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