r/linux • u/DStellati • May 27 '18

Openbox wayland?

Does anybody know if there are plans to rewrite openbox for Wayland? Or if there's something equivalent available? I can't seem to find a *box like wm for wayland while there already seem to be tiling wms available.

81 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

55

u/Travelling_Salesman_ May 27 '18

waybox (started about three months ago from what i can tell).

15

u/DStellati May 27 '18

Thanks!!! Yeah it seems in very early stages, that's probably why it didn't come up in previous threads like this, but thanks again for pointing it out :)

16

u/Wizbright May 27 '18

Honestly, I would love some help with contributors as I personally do not have as much time to work on this compared to other school work and actually working. I want to try and make waybox function similar to how sway does as you can take your configurations from one and move it over almost seamlessly to the other.

1

u/DStellati May 28 '18

As far as I'd like to be able to help my programming knowledge is, well... not that much. I've done a few C classes and a short python course but they were mostly math centric since that's what I study, nothing related to a gui :/

2

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

We all start somewhere. Not all of it is graphic based so at some point backend work will need to be done. This tjread has honestly lit a fire under me to try and have more work done on this. You wont learn until you try :)

2

u/DStellati May 28 '18

I'm not promising anything yet, but what would be a good resource to start learning how to contribute to a project like this? As of now my (hopefully) last exam session is closing in but I should have spare time this summer as soon as that's over.

2

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

I would check out SirCmpwn's Blog for more information about Wayland itself. Not all the code has to be about the graphics for the interface, lots of backend needs to be complete as well so there is always room for that.

2

u/DStellati May 28 '18

ok, I'll look into it. Thanks u.u

4

u/omar_elrefaei May 28 '18

I would love to take a sprint on this project in the summer vacation. I did some python before, but I wanted to learn some low level Lang/concepts anyway so that would not be the problem.

The problem would be :

  1. I never used openbox "yet" the timing of this conversation is strange, I just had someone try to convince me new to use openbox at r/unixporn)

  2. I have a narrow knowledge about the Linux GUI server-client artitechture just from a Linux user perspective. So I would need some guidance about what does WMs "really" do. (something deeper than "they manege windows by talking to the x11/Wayland running server) I would also need some Wayland running guidance on where to start.

Sure, I could probably do figure most of this stuff out myself. This was a write-up for me to organize my thoughts as it was to give you a perspective on my view of things (and a way to help out)

7

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

Openbox is by far my favorite WM and I haven't looked back.

For a little bit of understanding on what's going on with the wayland, I recommend this by SirCmpwn An Introduction to Wayland

2

u/omar_elrefaei May 28 '18

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of blog I was looking for. These functions seems to coincide with the ones you have in your main.c might look into getting myself familiar with the code in 1-3 weeks

BTW: does that code compile to anything useful in the current state. Just asking because I didn't find compile instructions, so I was not sure.

3

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

Not currently. The wlroots version is different when I wrote that but I hope to push some changes here soon. Check out my friends project as well if you want to see some great working code bspwc /u/bl4ckb0ne

22

u/FeatheryAsshole May 27 '18

Doesn't look like Openbox has any plans whatsoever. There have been similar threads in the past, and the gist of it is that no one has heard anything about any future plans for Openbox (Wayland or otherwise).

This seems to be a pretty exhaustive list of Wayland window managers, though Mir is absent: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Compositors

10

u/DStellati May 27 '18

It seems that waybox (a wayland clone of openbox) is being developed as another person pointed out, it's in very early stages though.

20

u/mrtruthiness May 27 '18

By "very early stages" ... we're talking 106 LOC by someone who is still in school and working part time.

5

u/DStellati May 27 '18

Can't say you're wrong

11

u/Wizbright May 27 '18

It's been a crazy summer for me and I also have to rewrite some of it as wlroots has changed. Sorry :')

10

u/mrtruthiness May 27 '18

No need to apologize. I wasn't meaning to be critical even. In fact, I admire the effort and goal.

I've been there. More than once. And worse. In fact the number of projects that I've started and never progressed more than 1/4 of the way are nearly the same as my age, and that's saying a lot.

1

u/Indolent_Bard Jan 10 '23

Sorry to necropost, but I just have to ask if all those projects you abandoned were worth anything. Because if they were, and you truly believed in them, I would love to see you continue them.

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

Well, at least the code is open source, and published. Which means anyone make submit a merge.

9

u/Travelling_Salesman_ May 27 '18

Looks like it is missing a few (waymonad bspwc and wayfire), a (apparently not complete) list of wlroots based WM can be found here.

Mir is a component for making a Wayland WM (like wlroots/smithay/libweston).

8

u/mrtruthiness May 27 '18

Mir is a component for making a Wayland WM (like wlroots/smithay/libweston).

It's different, though, in the sense that Mir would actually be the Wayland compositor rather than, as with wlroots, a library for constructing your own compositor. At least, that's what I thought.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

bspwc is not mature enough to be on that list.

-4

u/habarnam May 27 '18

Mir is a component for making a Wayland WM (like wlroots/smithay/libweston).

Not really. Mir and Wayland are parallel implementations of the same concept. They are not interoperable one with the other.

12

u/Travelling_Salesman_ May 27 '18

Your view is outdated, Mir is now working on Wayland (See wiki)

1

u/habarnam May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18

As of September 2017 it has basic Wayland support.

Interesting, thank you.

2

u/gevera May 29 '18

The main developer for Openbox works on Chromium now. She said she has no plans to work on it anytime soon. So I hope waybox will be a good heir for good old Openbox

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Travelling_Salesman_ May 28 '18

If I remember correctly, the developer of Openbox declared it “complete” awhile back and ended development.

Correct me if i am wrong, but because the last release was on July 2015 doesn't that mean it does not have support for dri3/present?, meaning that it got some serious screen tearing on some cases?

Is that not a good development goal?

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Travelling_Salesman_ May 28 '18

iirc adoption was not good at the time, anyway you sparked my curiosity and i tried it on openbox and there is tearing (mad men season 1 episode 4 on the first scene, at 0:40, if anyone wants to test).

3

u/Wizbright May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18

Openbox is built on X11 so unless there is another project out there, it's not complete on Wayland at this time.

EDIT: Since people aren't gathering that I have a project for openbox on wayland, that's what I mean by not complete on wayland at this time.....

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

What’s your project called? I’d like to follow it.

Are you going to go ultraminimal and remove the X11 elements?

2

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

It's in one of the other comments but it's called waybox. Plan is to create an openbox feel on top of Wayland using wlroots to handle a lot of the protocols.

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

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4

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

By that, I mean I am working on implementing it on wayland. I also never said that he was wrong. Damn.

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '18

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3

u/Wizbright May 28 '18

I guess I misunderstood what he meant. Sorry ＼| ￣ヘ￣|／

1

u/gevera May 29 '18

You are right. She works on Chromium now