#1 2025-12-24 16:09:27

awagon

New Member

Registered: 2025-12-24

Posts: 1

Thoughts on a possible experimental Wayland edition for BunsenLabs

I don't understand English at all, so I translated from Japanese. I hope you'll overlook any rudeness.
Hello BunsenLabs team,
First of all, thank you for maintaining BunsenLabs.
I really appreciate the clarity of its philosophy and the fact that it never pretends to be a full desktop environment.
I might be completely wrong, but I’ve noticed that on Reddit and Mastodon there seems to be a growing number of users looking for a “sane, lightweight Wayland desktop” — something that is not a full DE like GNOME/KDE, and not a highly opinionated tiling WM either.
In those discussions, BunsenLabs often comes up as the project that would make sense in that space, mainly because of its CrunchBang heritage and documentation culture. I understand very well that the project has limited resources, and I’m not suggesting a full transition or a polished product.
I was simply wondering whether an experimental or unofficial Wayland edition (for example based on labwc or Wayfire) has ever been discussed internally, even as a long-term idea.
If such an experiment ever existed, I believe it could attract contributors who currently don’t know where to put their energy in the Wayland ecosystem. I’d personally be happy to help with testing, documentation, or feedback if that was useful.
Thanks for reading, and thanks again for keeping BunsenLabs alive.

PackRat

jgmenu user Numero Uno

Registered: 2015-10-02

Posts: 2,748

Re: Thoughts on a possible experimental Wayland edition for BunsenLabs

It's actively discussed.

Getting labwc up and running isn't difficult - https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=9571

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You must unlearn what you have learned.
    -- yoda

hhh

Gaucho

From: High in the Custerdome

Registered: 2015-09-17

Posts: 16,580

Website

Re: Thoughts on a possible experimental Wayland edition for BunsenLabs

^ Also, @johnraff, our main developer, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese fluently. Maybe they criticize his pronuciantion once in awhile still, I don't know. What does British Japanese sound like? No "L"s and no "H"es? It's OK if you post in Japanese, we can use Google Translate on this end as well. Some words might be wrong, better than nothing.

Nice first post, welcome!

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I don't care what you do at home. Would you care to explain?

johnraff

nullglob

From: Nagoya, Japan

Registered: 2015-09-09

Posts: 12,962

Website

Re: Thoughts on a possible experimental Wayland edition for BunsenLabs

Hi @awagon ブンゼンラボへようこそ！
Welcome to the BunsenLabs community!

Yes, we've been thinking about Wayland support for some time now, and some of our developers are regularly using labwc and other Wayland compositors. The main labwc developer @malm is also a BunsenLabs team member.

While we intend to go on supporting X11 as long as possible, we do also plan to release a Wayland "plug-in" package that can be installed on top of a Carbon system to provide an optional basic Wayland session via the usual LightDM login.

Serious work will start on this as soon as Carbon X11 has been released, although a lot of the preparation has already been done.

I’d personally be happy to help with testing, documentation, or feedback if that was useful.

Yes, that would be welcome, thank you.

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...elevator in the Brain Hotel, broken down but just as well...
( a boring Japan blog (currently paused), now on Bluesky, there's also some GitStuff )

Introduction to the Bunsenlabs Boron Desktop

malm

jgmenu developer

Registered: 2016-10-13

Posts: 751

Website

Re: Thoughts on a possible experimental Wayland edition for BunsenLabs

Hi @awakon. Welcome. Yes, I'm the original author and current maintainer of labwc.

Depending on your interests and potential areas of influence / contribution, see also:

https://github.com/labwc/labwc-tweaks/
https://labwc.github.io/
https://teallach-desktop.github.io/

I believe that one of the labwc maintainers speaks Japanese too. Can sign-post if helpful depending on what you want to get involved with.

Can help get input-method stuff setup for Japanese input.

In my opinion, the best way to started is to just install labwc and take the first few steps to get a working environment setup. You can run this nested (i.e. under another Window Manager of Wayland Compositor). There are lots of people "out there" with strong opinions - often without much substance from my perspective. There is a lot more to this that first meets the eye