>That's easy to say in hindsight

That's an easy way to excuse bad design. Look at the designs of other operating systems designed by professionals and you won't see windows managers having to handle raw inputs or being in the same process as the compositor.

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the_why_of_y 4 days ago | parent [-]

Examples of other operating systems allegedly not designed by professionals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer....

The Quartz Compositor layer of Mac OS X comprises the window server and the (private) system programming interfaces (SPI) implemented by the window server. In this layer are the facilities responsible for rudimentary screen displays, window compositing and management, event routing, and cursor management.

The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in what appears on the screen. It is a lightweight server in that it does not do any rendering itself, but instead communicates with the client graphics libraries layered on top of it. It is “agnostic” in terms of a drawing model.

The window server has few dependencies on other system services and libraries. It relies on the kernel environment’s I/O Kit (specifically, device drivers built with the I/O Kit) in order to communicate with the frame buffer, the input infrastructure, and input and output devices.

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charcircuit 4 days ago | parent [-]

Window management on Windows is done by Explore which talks to DWM where the underlying windows live.

Window management on MacOS is done by Dock which talks to Quartz Compositor where the underlying windows live.

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abhinavk 4 days ago | parent [-]

You are conflating Window Manager with Task Switcher programs.

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charcircuit 4 days ago | parent [-]

No, I'm not. Explore and Dock are responsible for more than just that.

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simondotau 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sorry but you’re just wrong. Explore.exe and Dock.app are nere user interfaces and are not involved in the render pipeline of other apps.

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charcircuit 4 days ago | parent [-]

I am talking about window management. Window management is about controling windows, windows managers should not care about how windows are rendered.

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dagmx 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

1. Nobody else is talking about managing windows as a user. They’re talking about the system that manages windows for drawing and interaction.

2. You’re provably wrong even if someone followed your description because you can kill the dock or explorer process and still be able to switch between windows and move them around. Killing explorer is a little more heavy handed than killing the dock but it doesn’t take down the window manager.

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jasomill 2 days ago | parent [-]

You're not wrong about Explorer, but the parent is also partially right.

While you can move, resize, minimize, maximize, and switch between windows without Explorer running, other window management features are limited or nonfunctional without it:

1. Explorer is responsible for the taskbar, and thus the only useful way to view minimized windows.

2. Alt+Tab still switches between windows without Explorer, but the window switching UI does not appear.

3. Virtual desktops still exist without Explorer, but there's no obvious way to switch between or otherwise interact with them.

4. Snapped windows retain their positions without Explorer, but window snapping functionality is not available, and resizing snapped windows does not resize adjacent windows as it normally does.

5. Without Explorer, desktop backgrounds and desktop icons do not appear.

5. Explorer is responsible for handling many system level keyboard shortcuts, including shortcuts for features not obviously related to Explorer or missing window management functionality (e.g., game bar, snipping tool, emoji panel).

	▲	simondotau 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As a reminder, the topic is Wayland, and the great great great great grandparents post was referring to rendering/compositing systems DWM and Quartz as architectural equivalents to Wayland in the major closed source operating systems. The parent, misunderstanding the discussion on compositors, diverted to a discussion about user interfaces. It's an understandable point of confusion given that Microsoft chose to name their compositor “Desktop Window Manager”, when the term “window manager” is typically scoped to user interface.

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simondotau 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Explorer.exe and Dock.app have nothing to do with anything anyone is talking about here.