[Sawfish] Your future plans? (Wayland)

[Trevor Cordes <trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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