There are multiple window managers in other languages that won't build a Wayland equivalent due to the effort so it's not only about the language

> I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.

On Mastodon I follow a bot that posts screenshots of old Mac Kaleidoscope schemes and the creativity on display both leaves me in awe and makes me sad that no modern windowing system can hold a candle to it. With Kaleidoscope there were no rules. You could do a hacker OS[0], or game UI[1], or titlebars on the left[2] or underneath[3], or non-rectangular and chrome[4], or made of denim[5], and those are just a few of the thousands of wildly different themes[6].

Nothing on modern Linux comes close. Even if you seek out third party themes all you find are dozens of minor permutations on popular flat themes like Material and Nord. It's so dull.

[0]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ [1]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac [2]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ [3]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ [4]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-tw... [5]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ [6]: https://macthemes.garden/

Application toolkits will eventually drop support for X11. GTK will remove it in GTK5. Not sure what Qt's plans are, but I'd have to think X11 support is long for this world there as well.

It's a shame about all the political bullshit they injected into the project, which already resulted in it being removed from several package repositories. I hope someone makes another fork in the vein of xlibre, but without political bullshit.

Even still, they are very hard to work with when compared to X11.

Fvwm people are very smart and have been developing fvwm for longer than Linux have been around. From what I understand and have read, bring fvwm or creating a fvwm clone on Wayland is near impossible. Far too much work.

So we will really end up with "pigs" like Gnome3, KDE or a slew of tiling environments. None of the cool WMs like Windowmaker, fvwm, dluxbox, twm, ctwm, vtwm ....

I’ve heard the same thing about Wayland and NVidia’s drivers. To me, it seems like Wayland was designed to push all the hard work onto everybody else. That way Wayland never gets blamed for anything!

For practical purposes, the problem with Wayland from the WM-dev's PoV is that you're either implementing a huge project or you're depending on wlroots, and wlroots still isn't where it would need to be for implementing a simple window manager to be as easy as it was with X11.

From the Wayland devs' PoV, mainstreaming Wayland successfully shifted responsibility for doing most of the heavy lifting in the graphics layer from the neglected X-Windows project to the well-established KDE and GNOME. The state of wlroots and the ecosystem of personal WM projects is unavoidable collateral damage.

For an individual developer, perhaps the thing to do is take a page out of bbLean's [1] bag of tricks and implement your WM on top of one of the big two desktop environments.

https://bb4win.sourceforge.net/bblean/

Nothing stopped the adopters from waiting until that existed before pushing Wayland into their software and breaking many people's workflow either, yet here we are

However the radically different architecture of Wayland may necessitate a rewrite well beyond what the maintainers of a window manager feel is easy.

Even accounting for wlroots, you're not exactly just running sed on a glob. And unfortunately, wayland didn't actually fix X's complexity problem. Arcan did, but we're not allowed to have nice things because Redhat has no taste.

The libraries help, but it's still a bigger job than a window manager was

Are you suggesting every application should implement its own compositor?