Lab Wayland Compositor 0.7 Released - Ported To wlroots 0.17

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lab Wayland Compositor 0.7 Released - Ported To wlroots 0.17

Lab Wayland Compositor (labwc) is out with a new version ahead of Christmas for this wlroots-based window-stacking compositor that is inspired by the Openbox window manager...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/labwc-0.7

[Gusar]

Also, more goodies are almost ready to be merged, namely pipe menu support - run a script or application to dynamically create a menu, and automatic/smart placement - labwc will try to find a free spot on the desktop to place a new window. Labwc is shaping up very nicely, getting closer and closer to openbox feature parity.

[reba]

Hooray! I'm a happy user and noticed the version bump at my git pull.

Congratulations and thank you

[kpedersen]

labwc: No naff graphical effects and less dependencies (i.e glib) than the original X11 WM? Is this even a Wayland compositor?

[guzz46]

I tried it maybe about 6 months ago, hoping to basically get openbox on wayland, but it lacks many features of openbox, a deal breaker for me is the lack of smart window placement, opening a window will place it in the middle of the screen, and when you open another window it gets placed directly on top of the other window, so I had to manage the windows instead of the window manager, I don't know why so many window managers these days lack smart window placement.

[spicfoo]

labwc: No naff graphical effects and less dependencies (i.e glib) than the original X11 WM? Is this even a Wayland compositor?

Minimal Wayland compositors aren't new at all and dozens of them already exist. I would not be surprised if you haven't heard of them since majority of users aren't using them regardless of whether it is X11 or Wayland and there is mostly no news to cover in most of the minimal ones. If you are curious, here is a partial list of some of them in no particular order

* https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/
* https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
* https://github.com/buffet/kiwmi
* https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak
* https://github.com/riverwm/river
* https://github.com/michaelforney/velox

[reba]

Minimal Wayland compositors aren't new at all and dozens of them already exist. I would not be surprised if you haven't heard of them since majority of users aren't using them regardless of whether it is X11 or Wayland and there is mostly no news to cover in most of the minimal ones. If you are curious, here is a partial list of some of them in no particular order

* https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/
* https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
* https://github.com/buffet/kiwmi
* https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak
* https://github.com/riverwm/river
* https://github.com/michaelforney/velox

To be fair, apart from cage, these are either tiling and/or deprecated.
The usage of cage+foot as a rescue option for non-tty systems is however not unheard of.
Sadly, cage currently does not support tap-to-click, which I prefer to true clicking.

[sharpjs]

Nice! I'm gonna try this soon. Tiling isn't for me.

[klapaucius]

I tried it maybe about 6 months ago, hoping to basically get openbox on wayland, but it lacks many features of openbox, a deal breaker for me is the lack of smart window placement, opening a window will place it in the middle of the screen, and when you open another window it gets placed directly on top of the other window, so I had to manage the windows instead of the window manager, I don't know why so many window managers these days lack smart window placement.

That's an interesting exercise to do: write an algorithm which places the next window where it least overlaps with existing open windows. Let's say each window is associated to a tuple (x, y, w, h) (top left corner & width, height), and the next window has a given size, where is it best to place it?

[guzz46]

That's an interesting exercise to do: write an algorithm which places the next window where it least overlaps with existing open windows. Let's say each window is associated to a tuple (x, y, w, h) (top left corner & width, height), and the next window has a given size, where is it best to place it?

I don't know, but kwin, xfwm4, openbox, and compiz have it, so maybe see how they do it?