wayland and labwc

malm · 2020-10-21 19:43:28

@Packrat, @ohnonot

Continued from https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic … 29#p107129

ohnonot wrote:

^ glorious. Not my style, but amazing. Possibly the first time I feel confident about evtl. switching to wayland at some point.

PackRat wrote:

Looks good. How stable is labwc now?
May try to build it on Void if I get some time.

@ohnonot, @packrat - sorry it took a while to reply, not sure where that week went.

labwc is still very alpha and is seriously missing lots of features and finesse. I aim to keep it pretty sparse, but even so, there is a long way to go.

Having said that, I have started to use it as my daily driver - just firing it up from a tty. I suppose that doesn't mean much as I mostly just use terminals and firefox.

We're at approx 3500 lines-of-code, which is pretty small. I am mostly just refactoring and getting my head around things. Want to build a stable and correct base before anything else.

ohnonot · 2020-10-22 19:42:28

Nice, nice.
Did you actually re-use any openbox code, beyond (parts of) the theme engine?

malm · 2020-10-22 20:07:37

No

I think that on the whole, wayland/wlroots is so different to X11 that it’s easier to re-write.

Didn’t like how openbox parses xml; so took a simpler approach.
Same with parsing xbm buttons.

I think I might re-use bits of their menu implementation though. Looks tidy.

I do obviously look at how they did things and draw inspiration from it.

malm · 2021-02-27 08:24:33

Just an update on labwc

Video showing a few features (4ish minutes)

Key points:

It's lightweight alternative to Gnome/KDE's Wayland compositors
It uses libwlroots - same as sway
It now supports waybar panel, swaybg for setting background images, bemenu-run for launching apps, etc
It supports XWayland, so you can run dmenu, xterm, GTK2 apps, and so on
It supports rc.xml, menu.xml, autostart and environment - albeit with a pretty small feature set
It supports openbox themes, incl xbm icons. Again, at a level - only 10% of theme options have been implemented
Damage tracking is implemented, so CPU usage is significantly reduced

I did work on it from Lithium for a while, but it got increasingly difficult to keep packages up-to-date (I lose track of what I built to keep going, but wayland and wayland-protocols were some of them). I've moved development to Arch, but think it'll just be a matter of time before dependency on latest upstream settles down a bit. The point being that unless you have access to a 'rolling release' OS, it might be easier to just watch the video for the minute.

This file below works well with GDM. Should work with other display managers, but have not tried.

/usr/share/xsessions/labwc.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=labwc
Comment=A wlroots-based Wayland compositor
Exec=labwc
Type=Application

napcok · 2021-03-01 16:05:45

I compile labwc every now and then and test.
Progress is impressive.
Fingers crossed.

Thank you for Jgmenu too, the last version with gradients allows me to get some amazing color schemes

malm · 2021-03-01 22:04:29

^ thanks for feedback.

THX1138 · 2023-10-27 13:33:24

Sorry about reviving an old thread but I thought it would be more efficient to put my enquiry here.
I Just wondered how labwc is progressing. I have looked at the project on github
https://github.com/labwc/labwc
and am very interested in this, although I havent yet got around to making a conversion to wayland.
I am in the process of doing that. I just wondered how malm, and others who have tried it, feel it is going, as it is becoming more and more obvious to me that whether we like it or not, wayland is going to be the future and of all the openbox-like implementations I have seen labwc seems to be the most competently programmed by reading about it. Is it time to switch yet?

Last edited by THX1138 (2023-10-27 14:01:35)

hhh · 2023-10-27 14:20:11

It's not time to switch yet, but it is time to look forward.

Linux Mint just made an announcement regarding their development of Cinnamon desktop on Wayland, and in it there's this paragraph...

Clem (Lefebvre) wrote:

In terms of timing we don’t think we need Wayland support to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x).

You can read the full post here (the Wayland portion is the third sub-header)...

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4591

I think that, for Debian, the end of life for Xorg is a lot longer than that. Xorg is present in trixie ATM and trixie is likely to be supported until late in 2030...

https://endoflife.date/debian

I haven't seen malm around the boards in awhile. He's extremly active on github, last time I reached out to him was there and he got back to me immediately...

https://github.com/johanmalm/

As an aside, I recently tried the latest siduction Xorg release that runs fluxbox and they used jgmenu OOTB. jgmenu started here, folks!

PackRat · 2023-10-27 14:28:11

THX1138 wrote:

Sorry about reviving an old thread but I thought it would be more efficient to put my enquiry here.
I Just wondered how labwc is progressing. I have looked at the project on github
https://github.com/labwc/labwc
and am very interested in this, although I havent yet got around to making a conversion to wayland.
I am in the process of doing that. I just wondered how malm, and others who have tried it, feel it is going, as it is becoming more and more obvious to me that whether we like it or not, wayland is going to be the future and of all the openbox-like implementations I have seen labwc seems to be the most competently programmed by reading about it. Is it time to switch yet?

Labwc is stable and a nice option for Wayland if you want to stay with the openbox-style window manager. Their wiki on getting it configured is pretty good. I've used/tested it on Arch, Void, and Debian - ran well on all 3.

malm & Co. do good work.

hhh · 2023-10-27 15:52:28

^ User title checks out!

He's online now, must be subscribed to this thread. Hi @malm!

malm · 2023-10-27 16:32:05

Hi @hhh. Hope you're keeping good.
And hi everyone else.
Yes, I'm a bit more responsive on GH, but had a "subscribe" on this thread

I Just wondered how labwc is progressing.

It's going great. We've made steady progress over four years and it's feature complete in terms of what I originally set out to do.

https://github.com/labwc/labwc-loc-grap … /graph.png
https://github.com/labwc/labwc-scope/bl … B-items.md

labwc seems to be the most competently programmed by reading about it

Well, I couldn't possibly comment The great news is that there are a number of pretty active developers and at least four are extremely competent which makes for a good team with peer-review, etc. (not including myself in that verdict btw). Also, the wlroots crowd are very competent including people who contribute to the Linux kernel.

Is it time to switch yet?

It depends on what you want. If you want a carefully crafted distribution-derivative that just looks good and works (like BunsenLabs) then no. However, if you're happy to setup your own environment + use a rolling distro + accept a few rough edges then yes.

By rough edges I mean things like:

It doesn't support old nvidia setups (older than v495 IIRC)
We've implemented everything that I personally need, but there are a few features still missing which you might find important, for example (a) <theme><titleLayout>; (b) <menu><submenuShowDelay>; (c) pipemenus; and (d) hover-buttons
We only support official wayland and wlroots protocols. That covers most things, but for example workspace and keyboard layout IPC are not yet supported. So if you want to switch workspace from a panel or see what the active keyboard layout is from a panel, you will have to wait. And just for context, technically it wouldn't actually be that hard to implement those things, but we're trying to follow the eco-system and do it the native way (for a number of reasons that I'm happy to discuss).
There isn't yet a mainstream wayland backend for Java, so if you use a lot of those NetBeans type applications you may experience a few annoying focus bugs with popups and so on.
There are lots of GTK3 clients (e.g. panels and launchers) using the layer-shell protocol. However, GTK4 does not support it, nor has Qt until very recently, so clients using those stacks do not exist for Desktop Environment type clients. Obviously, 'normal' applications work fine.
xfce4-panel support layer-shell protocol and works reasonably well - but not all features are supported (panels can be complicated things!)
LXQt desktop works with window rules (but not natively until Qt support layer-shell). I use it on my daily driver and it works fine with a simple setup, but if you use many screens, there will be some annoying short-comings
X11 clients are supported to like 99% but if you use bespoke, non-GTK/Qt clients you may get some odd behaviour. Don't try xeyes and tint2. If you use clients that have been designed for Wayland (like waybar), then everything works great.

https://github.com/stefonarch/LXQt-Wayland-files
https://github.com/lxqt/lxqt/issues/10# … 1759317897

THX1138 · 2023-10-27 19:06:53

Thank you all, for the excellent replies. Malm, that was a very comprehensive reply, thank you for that. I think i will wait a while, but at some point in the near future I will switch to wayland to be ahead of the game, so to speak. Great replies and good advice too hhh and packrat. Thank you very much

johnraff · 2023-10-28 03:00:32

Hi @malm, thanks for dropping in and leaving that overview! It answers a lot of the questions I had about the future and what it might hold for BunsenLabs.

And it's great to see all the activity on labwc - grounds for optimism!

PackRat · 2023-12-10 17:29:39

Been using labwc for a couple days now. Nice and stable (on Void Linux) and compatible with openbox so I could copy over rc.xml key binds etc ....

@malm - labwc does not suport the workspace module for waybar? Set up 4 workspaces no problem, but the module for waybar doesn't recognise them.

manyroads · 2023-12-10 18:31:19

I'm using labwc on Sid and also find it to be 'pretty good', the major issue I'm wrestling with is to build a decent pager/alt-tab type function. I found a piece of software that might do it, but the docs are beyond my understanding (or missing or beyond my intellect). Here's that link:

https://github.com/LBCrion/sfwbar/blob/ … sfwbar.rst

Here's a festive image of my labwc install.... proof-of-life image.

Last edited by manyroads (2023-12-10 18:35:38)

hhh · 2024-02-01 02:59:50

I've just been looking at some opinions on Wayland vs. X11 and it seems it might be quite a while before there will be a total switch. The crux of it is, besides all of the apps that still are exclusively X11... KDE and Xfce.

Both of these DEs are traditionally heavily tied to X11, and are even now just kind of supporting Wayland (KDE more than Xfce).

Then there's WINE. That's not migrating to Wayland anytime soon, WINE on Wayland is in the experimental phase at this point.

Steam, is that compatible with Wayland? Yeah, not so much so far.

Awesome that @malm and other developers (sway) are working on Wayland compatibility, but nobody needs to panic about switching for several years yet. It's still "kicking the tires", "not feature complete". Meaning "not ready".

Sway GitHub issues...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues

labwc issues...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues

There really isn't a link for X11 issues, maybe these?

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo … ist=stable
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo … t=unstable

Anyway, we have some time to deal with Wayland, I think there will be several years, still, of crossover. This is not like systemd, where the advantages we're fairly obvious and the transition was fairly easy, though controversial.

johnraff · 2024-02-01 07:22:31

@malm, if you're watching this thread and have a moment, could you take a look at the discussion I started about BL possibly(???) having a basic Wayland version using labwc? https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=8843

unklar · 2024-02-01 09:10:58

https://forum.siduction.org/index.php?t … 9#msg73519
Changed the theme to 'bunsen-themes-beryllium-yeti' the day before yesterday.
Result:
Editing files as root in thunar/foot does not work .

My conclusion from this experiment so far is that it is wrong to set up labwc on a sid system (Beardog), which already has 'next door' configurations of openbox.

#1 2020-10-21 19:43:28

wayland and labwc

#2 2020-10-22 19:42:28

Re: wayland and labwc

#3 2020-10-22 20:07:37

Re: wayland and labwc

#4 2021-02-27 08:24:33

Re: wayland and labwc

#5 2021-03-01 16:05:45

Re: wayland and labwc

#6 2021-03-01 22:04:29

Re: wayland and labwc

#7 2023-10-27 13:33:24

Re: wayland and labwc

#8 2023-10-27 14:20:11

Re: wayland and labwc

#9 2023-10-27 14:28:11

Re: wayland and labwc

#10 2023-10-27 15:52:28

Re: wayland and labwc

#11 2023-10-27 16:32:05

Re: wayland and labwc

#12 2023-10-27 19:06:53

Re: wayland and labwc

#13 2023-10-28 03:00:32

Re: wayland and labwc

#14 2023-12-10 17:29:39

Re: wayland and labwc

#15 2023-12-10 18:31:19

Re: wayland and labwc

#16 2024-02-01 02:59:50

Re: wayland and labwc

#17 2024-02-01 07:22:31

Re: wayland and labwc

#18 2024-02-01 09:10:58

Re: wayland and labwc

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