Re: [Sawfish] Your future plans? (Wayland)

[Geoff Kuenning <geoff@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Egad, what a terrible idea on Fedora's part.

My guess is that X11 support will continue for a very long time, 
although it might not be part of primary distros.  This is similar 
to other newfangled disasters like systemd or the deprecation of 
ifconfig; there are just too many useful things out there that 
depend on the old way of doing things--and somehow the designers 
of the new version never seem to have a clue about why the old 
ways are better.

You might have to change distributions, though.

Nevertheless, I think there needs to be some kind of migration 
path to protect us against the day when Wayland is forced down our 
throats.    Thanks, Trevor, for bringing this horror to our 
attention and initiating a discussion.  I, too, have a lot of 
customizations that are needed to add convenience and fix badly 
implemented programs.  And programmability is a must in everything 
I do!

> Hi all.  I've been a lurker for eons, and a sawfish fan/user 
> since it
> was named the name that shall not be spoken.
>
> I don't really see any chatter about everyone's plans once X is 
> gone.
> The head in the sand approach has suited me well, but now Fedora 
> is
> rumbling that it'll ditch X for GNOME, whatever that means 
> starting
> with 40 or 41?  That's 2024/2025.
>
> Now, maybe they mean the GNOME desktop itself cannot run on X, 
> but the
> GTK apps still can.  If that is the case then maybe I have until 
> Fedora
> 42 or 43 (2025/2026?) before they just yank all X support.
>
> Clearly if GTK or the "big apps" like Firefox or LO stop 
> compiling in X
> support then it officially becomes dead for all intents and 
> purposes.
> And thus does sawfish, at least in my world.  Only if IBM/RH 
> "pull
> another CentOS" but with Fedora would I ditch it to maybe go to 
> a
> straggler X-supporting distro (think: systemd holdouts, which I
> applaud but just couldn't care enough about to resist).
>
> But I want to keep using sawfish!  (sawfish has more impact on 
> every
> second of my work than systemd ever did.)
>
> Surely I'm not the only one here who dreads the day we are 
> forced into
> wayland and the loss of the "wm".  My sawfish config is 
> massively
> customized.  There are things I do with it that I've 
> muscled-memoried
> since the early 90's (the wm's in SunOS were similar), as well 
> as
> extensive use of all the fancy new features that have been added 
> over
> the years. Ever since X programs stopped properly supporting
> Xresources, the only way to get similar results is via sawfish 
> window
> rules.  And my biggest requirement: right-click on window border 
> = move
> to bottom of focus stack.
>
> The only talk I can find on the net of sawfish vis a vis wayland 
> is
> that it can't be done unless someone in sawfish writes an entire
> compositor.  And it also sounds like/seems that isn't going to 
> happen.
>
> Surely everyone here with their extensive sawfish window rules 
> and
> tweaks and settings isn't going to just pack up and accept some 
> dumb
> stock GNOME or KDE compositor designed for the 
> "one-window-maximized-
> always" school of computing.
>
> So I'm hoping someone has been scoping out the other wayland 
> compositor
> options (I think there are a few?) and has already identified 
> the best
> path forward once we're forced into downgrade-servitude?  Surely 
> there
> exists a "best" "most-like-sawfish" one?  I want to start 
> planning now
> so I can investigate the pain level I'll have to endure.
>
> Extra/aside: so the stumbling block to wayland-sawfish is not 
> wanting
> to write a whole compositor?  So why not steal an existing 
> compositor
> as the base and tack sawfish-like things on top?  Why reinvent 
> the
> whole wheel?  Ya, not easy (I get it, I'm a programmer by 
> trade), but
> surely not as daunting as writing an entire compositor which 
> would
> include many things sawfish users don't care or need to tweak or
> modify.
>
> Many thanks for all the great work and features and the best wm 
> over
> all these years.  It's really handy to have a community of 
> like-minded
> souls.  I'll be here until the day Fedora turns off the sawfish 
> lights.
>
> --
> Sawfish ML

--
   Geoff Kuenning   geoff@xxxxxxxxxx 
   https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~geoff/

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the
palpably not true.  It is the chief occupation of mankind.
               -- H. L. Mencken

--
Sawfish ML